Even in Death, Navalny Still Threatens the Putin Regime
The opposition leader’s posthumous memoir is a chronicle of a death foretold.
Patriot
A Memoir
by Alexei Navalny
Knopf, 496 pp., $35
THE DEATH OF RUSSIAN ANTI-CORRUPTION ACTIVIST and opposition leader Alexei Navalny in an Arctic prison camp last February was one of the most shattering events of 2024. Navalny’s return from Germany to Russia in January 2021, after nearly dying from poisoning with a chemical nerve agent—and helping uncover an assassination plot by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB)—had been a fearless act; many also saw it as reckless, since he faced certain arrest and very possible death at the hands of his captors. As Vladimir Putin’s tyranny grew more nakedly ruthless after the renewed war in Ukraine in February 2022, Navalny’s predicament grew more dire. A sentence of nine years in a “strict regime” penal colony, imposed in March 2022, later had another nineteen years stacked on; frequent punishments for petty infractions were compounded by psychological torture such as being given a severely disturbed cellmate who almost constantly screamed or growled. The news of Navalny’s death at the age of 47, likely from another poisoning, was a terrible but almost expected shock.
Navalny’s new memoir, Patriot, is a voice from beyond the grave in a particularly eerie way. Navalny started working on the manuscript in Germany while recuperating from the poisoning that was meant to kill him. The book begins with a matter-of-fact but terrifying description of his near-death in August 2020 (“Then I died. Spoiler alert: Actually, I didn’t”) and ends with an epilogue, written in 2022 right after he received the nine-year sentence, in which he just as matter-of-factly acknowledges and accepts that he may be going to his death. A passage written several months earlier, in pretrial detention, discusses that possibility in a flippant-but-dead-serious way: “If they do finally whack me, the book will be my memorial,” muses Navalny, wryly adding that it would do wonders for sales: “The book’s author has been murdered by a villainous president; what more could the marketing department ask for?” In that sense, Patriot sometimes reads like a thriller in which the narrative opens with If you’re reading this, I’m already dead.
First and foremost, Patriot is a self-portrait of a remarkable man. Navalny tells the story of his childhood in the moribund Soviet Union with humor and affection, particularly for his Ukrainian grandmother with whom he often spent summers in his early years. (The grandmother was religious and quietly anti-Soviet; Navalny recalls a notable incident in which she responded to a relative’s boast of having seen the mummified Lenin in Moscow with, “Well, why didn’t you spit in his face?” Young Alexei, taught in school to see Lenin as sacrosanct, was horrified.)
But the memoir is also a trenchant account of the ugly realities of a country in which shortages of food and consumer goods are endemic, and so are the lies—especially blatant and brazen in the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster. Navalny’s grandmother and other relatives had to be evacuated from the contaminated zone, and even as a child he was struck by the contrast between what he knew of their experience and cheery tales of a “well-coordinated operation” told on television. From this, there is a direct link to the post-Soviet future:
Many years later, when I was a grown man, as I watched the newly appointed acting president of Russia, forty-seven-year-old Vladimir Putin, on television, far from sharing any enthusiasm about the country’s new “energetic leader,” I kept thinking, He never stops lying, just as it was in my childhood.
But first, there is the unraveling of the Soviet system, the failed coup that attempted to depose Mikhail Gorbachev and scuttle the liberal reforms, the ensuing collapse of the USSR, and the turmoil of Boris Yeltsin’s Russia—far more liberal and democratic than any period in Russian history before or since, but also corrupt, chaotic, and miserable.
Navalny’s moment of utter disillusionment came in 1996, during a personal brush with rampant corruption at the customs office—made worse by its work grinding to a halt because Yeltsin’s powerful press secretary arrived for a visit. Navalny realized “something [he] had been obstinately refusing to admit”: Yeltsin was no visionary reformer but “a sick old alcoholic with a bunch of cynical fraudsters around him going about their usual business of lining their pockets.” At that point, 20-year-old Navalny lost interest in politics—until Putin came along.
Patriot chronicles Navalny’s involvement in opposition politics and anti-corruption activism in the 2000s; his videos exposing the ill-gotten wealth of high-level officials and Putin cronies; his emergence as a leader in the 2011–12 street protests after a blatantly rigged election solidified Putin’s stranglehold on the Russian political system; and his doomed but impressive run for mayor of Moscow in 2013. For a while, Navalny seemed to get away with his defiance, even leading some to suspect he had protection in high places. Even the made-up fraud charges used to prosecute him seemed intended less to destroy than to intimidate and neutralize him as a possible presidential contender.
Nonetheless, the physical danger was clear and present long before the 2020 poisoning, even if Navalny often treats his harassment by the regime with admirable humor. A 2017 incident in which a green dye was thrown in his face—posing the risk of permanent eye damage—is laughed off as a comical stunt whose only effect is to make him look like Shrek for a while, basically no different from the invasion of his anti-corruption foundation’s Moscow office by strippers for the purpose of creating embarrassing videos. Navalny’s nonchalance in recounting these episodes is especially remarkable considering that he wrote this book when he already knew how far the regime was willing to go. Even the story of his near-murder, his tragi-farcical trials, and his ordeal in the penal colony is told with humor—and humanity.
Our knowledge of how the story ends makes this narrative all the more poignant, especially the later part, which is mostly stitched together from Navalny’s prison diaries and increasingly rare blog posts. On January 17, 2023, the second anniversary of his arrest upon returning to Russia, Navalny ponders “how many more such anniversary posts” he’ll have to write. His very last post was his next anniversary post on January 17, 2024. On February 16, he was dead.
NAVALNY IS AN ENGAGING NARRATOR, and he emerges from the book as a genuinely likable person. He has kind words for nearly everyone except for the “crooks and thieves.” His memoir is not only political but deeply personal: It is, in part, a love letter to his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, with whom he says he fell in love at first sight when they smiled at each other on a bus tour in Turkey in 1998. “It all worked purely by chance,” he writes in a July 2023 post from the penal colony (included in the book) on her birthday:
I might have looked in the wrong direction; you might have turned to look the other way. The instant that has defined my life might have passed differently, and then everything would have been different.
I would surely then have been the unluckiest person on earth.
How great it is that then we did look at each other. . . ! I have you, and no matter what happens, just thinking about that makes me very happy.
In a society with strongly traditional gender norms, Navalny’s account of his marriage is remarkably feminist, always treating Yulia as a full and equal partner. Notably, some of Navalny’s key associates mentioned in Patriot are also women, most prominently investigative journalist Maria Pevchikh, who played a key role in uncovering his poisoning and eventually took over as head of his Anti-Corruption Foundation. In a diary entry on his last International Women’s Day—a Soviet holdover still celebrated in Russia—he credits women with being “the best and most fearless, hardworking, and principled members” of the Russian opposition and he voices hope for female leadership in a future free Russia. His feminism is never heavy-handed, but it is naturally woven into his story. Thus, a passage discussing his prison readings includes a comment expressing shock at the misogyny of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew; while the play has been given more benign readings, it’s not hard to see why a comedy in which a woman is obedience-trained through food and sleep deprivation until she agrees to deny the reality before her eyes would be particularly jarring and personal for Navalny.
Navalny’s treatment of his religious faith, which he says he discovered after becoming a father, is similarly unintrusive: It is mentioned only rarely, but at the very end of the book he describes it as a principal source of his courage. You do your best, he writes, and leave the rest to “good old Jesus and his family”: “As they say in prison here, they will take my punches for me.”
THIS POWERFUL BOOK is not without its blind spots. Notably, Navalny’s narrative glosses over the most controversial aspect of his public career: his links to Russian far-right nationalism in the late 2000s. He acknowledges that these flirtations got him expelled from the liberal opposition party Yabloko in 2007, but he claims that the accusations were unjust and that he backed the “Russian march”—an annual nationalist rally dominated by far-right extremists—solely because of illiberal attempts to suppress it. That’s not the entire story.
Around that time, Navalny himself trafficked in some nasty rhetoric about migrant workers from the Caucasus and Central Asia (including an infamous video clip that compared migrant criminals to flies and cockroaches); in 2008, he not only supported Russia’s war against Georgia but used an anti-Georgian slur on his blog and called for the expulsion of ethnic Georgians living in Russia. In the 2010s, Navalny moved decisively toward non-identitarian liberalism and built a genuinely multiethnic activist network. Nonetheless, it was only in interviews in 2022 and 2023 that he offered an apology for the earlier ugly moments. Patriot, written before that, takes a more evasive approach—which is sure to give ammunition to critics, primarily from Ukraine but also from other former Soviet republics and Soviet-bloc countries, who have continued to regard Navalny as merely a kinder, gentler Russian chauvinist imperialist.
There are other reasons Patriot may rankle Ukrainian patriots and their supporters. While Navalny professes equal childhood love for Ukraine and Russia, Ukraine basically vanishes from his narrative between the childhood memories and the material written in 2022–23. There is only a brief mention of the Ukrainian role in the dissolution of the Soviet Union and no mention at all of the 2004–05 Orange Revolution, or the 2013–14 Euromaidan, which many Russian liberals saw as inspirational models. The chronicle of 2014 makes only passing reference to Russia’s war in Eastern Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea. It’s an odd and regrettable omission—considering that at the time, Navalny not only urged sanctions against Russia in response to Putin’s “little war” in Ukraine but suggested that Putin was spooked by Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity because it was an example of “rebellious masses chas[ing] out the crooks.” It seems clear that the situation in Ukraine simply wasn’t on Navalny’s radar very much when he was writing the main body of the memoir in 2020. The unfinished manuscript was prepared for publication by Yulia; it would have been a good choice for her to include some material on Ukraine in the section dealing with events from 2014.
That said, Navalny’s blog post from the penal colony on February 20, 2023—in which he not only plainly states that “Putin has unleashed an unjust war of aggression against Ukraine on ridiculous pretexts” and condemns the war crimes committed by Russian troops but calls for the restoration of Ukraine’s 1991 borders and endorses postwar reparations from Russia to Ukraine—should conclusively exonerate him of charges of covert imperialism. Nor is this a simple political posture. In March 2022, thinking about the prospect of dying or being killed in the penal colony that awaits him, Navalny tells himself that “worse things happen”—and are happening right now to countless Ukrainians who were simply living normal lives:
Then one fine evening a vengeful runt on television, the president of a neighboring country, announces that you are all “Nazis” and have to die because Ukraine was invented by Lenin. The next day a shell comes flying in your window and you no longer have a wife, a husband, or children—and maybe you yourself are no longer alive.
WHILE NAVALNY CAN HARDLY be accused of indifference to Ukraine or Ukrainian suffering, his unabashed love for Russia itself remains controversial after nearly three years of the war in Ukraine. (Even the question of whether the war is “Russia’s” or “Putin’s” is contentious: Navalny consistently maintained the latter.) The last section of the manuscript written in Germany, before Navalny’s fateful return, includes a moving valentine to Russia, her language and “melancholic landscapes,” her culture with its mix of existential anguish and edgy humor, and yes, her people:
The biggest mistake people in the West make about Russia is that they equate the Russian state with the Russian people. In reality, the two have nothing in common, and the greatest misfortune in our country is that out of all the millions who live here, time and again power ends up in the hands of the most cynical and the biggest liars.
This is naïve: If this pattern happens over and over, the people surely have something to do with it. The truth probably lies somewhere between Navalny’s sunny view and the opinion, expressed by some Ukrainians, that Russia is innately a “slave nation” craving a brutal master. Even so, it’s hard to disagree with Navalny’s assessment in 2020 that “Putin . . . has stolen the last twenty years from Russia.” By now, it’s twenty-five, and in the last three years he may have stolen more than in the previous twenty-two.
When Navalny speaks unironically about the “Beautiful Russia of the Future”—not a utopia but a “normal country, a rich one, governed by the rule of law”—many will roll their eyes. But again, it must be remembered that these words were written in 2020. In his post on the Ukraine war in February 2023, Navalny warned that “for Russia, the legacy of this war will be a whole tangle of complex and, at first glance, almost unsolvable problems.” Whether the problems only seem that way at first glance is the big question, and one can, of course, debate the responsibility of the Russian people for what the state is doing—if only by virtue of a passivity that some attribute to learned helplessness. That problem, too, has gotten much worse: The war has not only escalated the terror but fostered a terrifying moral and cultural degradation, evinced, for instance, by songs that openly celebrate the slaughter of Ukrainians.
Navalny insisted on taking responsibility for what the Russian state was doing, and paid for it with his freedom and then his life. It’s not clear how much of a legacy he leaves behind: Less than a year after his death, the Russian opposition abroad is in more disarray than ever, with his Anti-Corruption Foundation at the center of brutal infighting. Yulia Navalnaya, despite her remarkable strength and grace under unthinkable pressure, has not been able to fill his shoes.
If and when change comes to Russia, it won’t be because of the opposition but because of some combination of military failure and economic collapse—or because of Putin’s death. Here, Navalny is no wild-eyed optimist: He notes that “we underestimate just how resilient autocracies are in the modern world.” And yet his January 17, 2024 post—the last thing he ever wrote, as far as we know—ends with the prediction that someday the regime will crumble:
The Putinist state is not sustainable.
One day, we will look at it, and it won’t be there.
Victory is inevitable.
But for now, we must not give up, and we must stand by our beliefs.
Given how quickly the Soviet Union crumbled—and the Russian Empire before it—this is hardly impossible. And if, once the Putin regime totters and falls, the opposition gets a chance to help steer Russia in a better direction, what one commentator for the dissident Novaya Gazeta has termed “the Navalny effect” will have played a key role in making that possible.
No wonder the Putin regime still regards Navalny as dangerous. Last week, Yulia Navalnaya revealed that a Russian federal agency has rejected a request to remove her dead husband’s name from the official list of “terrorists and extremists.” As exiled Russian writer and dissident Dmitry Bykov put it last week in an interview about Navalny’s memoir and his legacy, “He has not ceased to be their enemy.”
ONE COULD FINALLY ASK what lessons Patriot has for American patriots in an age when liberal democracy is not faring all that well here at home. One may look for parallels, of course. “The Party of Crooks and Thieves” would not be a bad nickname for Donald Trump’s reinvention of the Republican party. The “scab” of endless lies covering the body politic (here, Navalny quotes Soviet-era Russian writer Vasily Shukshin) is also a metaphor that has a strong resonance in the age of Trump. And, let’s face it, Navalny’s mordant description of Yeltsin’s inner circle covering up his diminished capacity hits close to home after the recent revelations about similar efforts by Joe Biden’s staffers.
But the parallels only go so far. For all of Trump’s contempt for the rule of law, the law—even with weakened guardrails—constrains him in a way undreamed of in Putin’s Russia. The lies and coverups get exposed in the United States, with no reporters murdered as a result.
In his interview, Bykov said that some of the students he teaches as a visiting professor at the University of Rochester see Navalny as a valuable model of “resistance to the system.” One could see such assertions as overly melodramatic, since they will not be facing the same dangers. But the point isn’t to pat ourselves on the back because we have it better. It’s to remember that if people like Navalny are willing to risk imprisonment, torture, and death to resist an evil empire, there is no excuse for us to back down from standing up for truth and principle.