“Alexei Navalny did not set out to write a posthumous memoir,” said David Kortava in The New York Times. The anti-corruption campaigner began this book in 2020, while recovering in Berlin from being poisoned with Novichok on a domestic flight in Russia. He envisaged it as a conventional autobiography that would culminate in an “intriguing thriller about uncovering an assassination attempt”. But he never finished the manuscript.
Months later, upon returning to Russia, Navalny was arrested – and spent the remaining three years of his life in jail. The first half of “Patriot” is made up of this unfinished memoir; the rest consists of a diary from his time in prison, much of which he managed to smuggle out. Such a book could easily have been a “righteous diatribe”; in fact, it’s a harrowing, meticulous account of Navalny’s horrific treatment by the Russian authorities.
Remarkable as his commitment to his political principles was, what emerge even more forcefully are “his fundamental decency, his wry sense of humour and his (mostly) cheery stoicism under conditions that would flatten a lesser person”. Born in a town outside Moscow in 1976, the son of a Soviet army officer, Navalny trained as a lawyer before becoming a “transparency activist”, said Luke Harding in The Guardian. He would buy shares in notoriously corrupt oil and gas companies before asking “awkward questions at shareholder meetings”.
Over time, his online exposés became more focused on the government, and on President Putin and his inner circle in particular. They attracted “millions of views”, and turned Navalny into a figurehead for Russia’s opposition. The Kremlin’s response was “vicious”: by the mid-2010s, Navalny says his life had become an “endless cycle” of rallies, arrests and spells in custody.
“Patriot” is as “compelling as it is painful”, said Carole Cadwalladr in The Observer. “Here, on the page, is the voice of the charismatic, funny, adept communicator who for a time conjured a vision of another Russia.”
The most moving sections are those documenting the “cruel minutiae” of life in prison, said Owen Matthews in The Times. Navalny reports being woken up – and filmed – hourly throughout the night, after being deemed, absurdly, an escape risk. “As long as you can see the funny side of things, it’s not too bad,” he says. He was finally “murdered in jail” in February this year, when talks were under way for him to be freed in a prisoner swap. Perhaps the idea of his release was always unrealistic: “Navalny had got too deep under Putin’s skin”.