Alexei Navalny, one of the most courageous political leaders of our times, knew returning to Russia could cost him his life, but he did it anyway. His memoir, entitled Patriot, partly written while imprisoned, explains his decades-long opposition to Vladimir Putin’s autocracy and corruption.
Poisoning, survival, and the birth of a dissident
The book is divided into four parts. Part one describes Navalny’s experience of being poisoned in 2020 while campaigning in the northern Russian city of Tomsk. As revealed in a widely viewed documentary , he was poisoned by agents from the FSB (the Russian secret service). He would have died, but his strong-willed wife, Yulia, managed to get him flown to Germany where medical specialists were able to cure him. In his four months recovering, Navalny drafted an account of his childhood, his student days, and what led him to start campaigning against corruption in Russia.
Two decades of political resistance and Navalny’s tragic death
Part three, entitled ‘The Work’, describes Navalny’s campaigning from 2002 (with the Yabloko Party, against Putin’s United Russia Party), then setting up the anti-corruption movement, becoming a candidate in the Moscow mayoral elections in 2011, and then trying to stand as a rival to Putin in the 2018 presidential elections. Part four is his prison diary, covering the period from January 2021 until his death in February 2024. This writing, in the original Russian, was collated posthumously by his colleagues, and has been translated into at least 11 languages.
I was very upset by his death. Alarmed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I had been reading up on Russian history and the views of those who had been exiled . I had thought that Alexei Navalny’s imprisonment would turn out like Nelson Mandela’s: after some grim years of incarceration, this brave leader would emerge again into the spotlight to lead his country into a new era. But it was not to be.
Remembering Navalny’s sacrifice in Brussels
On a rainy day in April 2024 in Brussels’ EU quarter, I visited the pavement where there are memorial plaques to great leaders of our times. I paused to read the one laid down for Navalny.
It was engraved to commemorate the awarding of the Sakharov Prize in 2021, just after he had returned to Russia and been imprisoned on trumped up charges. There were a few withered flowers tossed thereabout, by others who had been moved to pay tribute here in the aftermath of his funeral, held with difficulty in Moscow a few weeks earlier.
Was this how his courageous campaign was to end? A few scattered flowers? Was his return to Russia a futile heroic self-sacrifice?
Navalny’s early years: a window into Soviet life
I found the part of this book about his family and student life in the 1980s and 1990s very revealing about the social history of Russia in those decades. Navalny actually had a fairly happy childhood. As his father worked for the military, they lived in settlements restricted to military families. A contrast to this was every summer when he went to the Ukraine countryside to stay with his father’s family. They were farmers and there, locally produced food was plentiful – until the fatal accident at the nearby Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 forced the family away from their lands.
One chore he hated during his school days was having to stop on the way home to buy fresh milk for the family. This entailed joining queues for about 40 minutes every day. I can relate to this, as during my brief visit to Russia in the 1970s, I was foolish enough to go on impulse into a local shop to buy lunch: an apple, bread and sausage slice. I found one had to queue for each item, take the paper chit to the cashier to pay and get it stamped, and then return to the counter with the receipts to claim the items, queuing in each place. That was Soviet retail.
The seeds of Navalny’s anti-corruption activism
In spite of his admitted tendency to disrupt classes with his jokes, Navalny did well enough in his final exams to enter university in Moscow to study law. But which university? Competition was fierce for Moscow State University, which he tried for and failed by one point. Another two of Moscow’s universities were reserved either for military families (which he eschewed) or for those with government connections. He opted for the only alternative – the People’s Friendship University (PFUR), set up in 1960 to support freedom movements in other countries. But academic corruption was widespread, including cheating and bribery of professors.
His biggest problem, though, was commuting from home, which involved a battle to get onto a crammed bus during rush hour. Eventually, he decided to try to buy a car in Germany. The rigmarole he had to go through to bring it back to Russia without paying bribes at every checkpoint was one of the experiences that pushed him into a career of fighting corruption.
Part three of the book, ‘The Work’, is written with passion and with his characteristic humour, but it is hard to follow what was happening to Russian politics between the period 2000-2020. It is helpful to have read the book Navalny-Putin’s Nemesis published in 2021. Sadly, one realises that Navalny himself did not live to oversee the final production of his book, and this part was put together posthumously from an amalgam of his writing, some of it from notebooks handwritten while he was in prison, and given to the lawyers visiting him.
Navalny’s gulag diary: hunger strike, Arctic exile and ongoing resistance
Part four of the book is a painful read. It is a gulag diary, a day-to-day account of Navalny’s life in prison while the Russian authorities slowly increased the pressure on him. They also kept increasing his sentence by fabricating new cases against him. The one they had used as an excuse to seize him on his return to Russia in 2021 was denounced by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). At the end of Navalny’s first trial, he made a speech appealing to the Russian people to rise up against the corrupt junta led by Putin that had grabbed and stolen everything it could. He concluded by saying that they may imprison him and isolate him, but someone will rise up and take his place.
He went on hunger strike in April 2021 because they had not allowed him to get the medical treatment he needed. There were growing protests, both from within Russia and the wider world, against his unjust imprisonment. Indeed, he used to receive huge postbags every week filled with thousands of letters from supporters, which he would methodically but briefly respond to. In prison, Navalny, who had tried to be elected President of Russia, was still following events. His anti-corruption organisation was still releasing powerful films and media messages about the corrupt Russian oligarchy and what they were doing with their loot, such as films about Putin’s palace. No wonder they moved to restrict him further, and eventually sent him to an Arctic prison.
Driven by faith and duty: why Navalny returned to Russia
In early 2024, it was rumoured that international diplomats were engaged in preliminary talks to get Navalny out of prison and into exile through a prisoner exchange involving Russian spies held in the West. Did this fit with what Navalny expected, or even wished for? After all, he could have stayed in exile in 2021 and never returned to Russia. He writes that people, even fellow-prisoners, constantly ask him why he returned. His response is that “I have my country and my convictions … if you have convictions, you must be prepared to stand up for them and make sacrifices if necessary.” He also points out that he travelled the length and breadth of Russia on election campaigns and promised people he would not let them down or abandon them. By coming back to Russia, he fulfilled that promise.
But there is an additional strength to his convictions as he was a committed Christian, having been baptised secretly in childhood by his Ukrainian grandmother. Although an atheist in his younger days, he returned to practising Christianity in his activist years, to the bemusement of his lawyers and colleagues in the anti-corruption movement. In prison, he observed the Lenten fast (strict in Orthodox practices), attended services with other Christian prisoners and read the Bible constantly, with a special focus on the Sermon on the Mount. He even set himself the challenge (with plenty of time in the prison cell, of course) to write out the Beatitudes in four languages: Russian, English, French and Latin. One of them reads “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be fulfilled.” The epilogue of this book concludes on this theme: “My job is to seek the Kingdom of God and his righteousness and leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of his family to deal with everything else”.
Navalny’s legacy and hopes for a democratic Russia
His family and colleagues from the anti-corruption agency are now in exile. Some have asked if his wife Yulia would take the lead, even to campaign for presidency after Putin. She is out of the media spotlight just now. News of Putin, his triumphs and atrocities, dominates. But this book, now at last in an English version in paperback, is a timely reminder of what Alexei Navalny struggled for across two decades. Russia need not be lost to corruption. Russia could be happy, and part of the European family of democratic nations.
