(Feb. 21, 2021: Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny shows a heart symbol standing in the cage during a hearing to a motion from the Russian prison service to convert the suspended sentence of Navalny from the 2014 criminal conviction into a real prison term in the Moscow City Court in Moscow, Russia.)

The title PATRIOT: A MEMOIR for Alexei Navalny’s posthumous memoir is apropos because the deceased Russian political activist was a firm believer in his country’s potential and saw himself as a nationalist.  The book itself is an indictment of the Kremlin encompassing the hope that events of 1991 fostered, the corruption of the Yeltsin years, and the authoritarianism of Putin’s continued reign. 

The turning point in the memoir is 2011 as Navalny and his supporters created the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF) which sought to educate the Russian masses as to the overt corruption and lying of the Putin regime.  Navalny organizes his memoir chronologically after beginning the book with being stuck with Novichok, the FSB’s poison of choice, and his recovery in a Berlin hospital which took months.  From then on he proceeds in an orderly fashion employing his own brand of sarcasm and humor to describe his battle with the Kremlin and Putin’s minions.  Navalny offers detailed analysis of certain figures, particularly Mikhail Gorbachev who the author feels had the opportunity to do wonderful things for the Russian people but fell short in his accomplishments.  However, Navalny thanks him for creating the environment for him to become involved in politics and trying to reform a corrupt government as he writes;   “he goofed, and that is precisely what I have to thank him for.”   He spends less time analyzing Vladimir Putin leaving that job to historians such as Steven Lee Myers THE NEW TSAR, Masha Gessen’s THE MAN WITHOUT A FACE: THE UNLIKELY RISE OF VLADIMIR PUTINN, Philip Short’s excellent biography PUTIN, Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy’s MR. PUTIN: OPERATIVE IN THE KREMLIN, in addition to the spate of books published since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

(May 8, 2012: Alexei Navalny is seen behind the bars in the police van after he was detained during protests in Moscow, on a day after Putin’s inauguration.)

The book is written in a somewhat lighter tone than one would expect from an author who has suffered the travails that Mr. Navalny has endured.  Despite the tenor of the book Navalny’s remarks are serious and deeply thoughtful.  Emotional at times, Navalny writes clearly and concisely as he tries to explain what he has experienced  during years of fighting  the Kremlin in the name of the Russian people.  From outright assassination attempts by poison to the many scenarios the Kremlin could dream up – some violent, some less so, but extremely painful and debilitating physically and emotionally, and of course prison.

After commentary about the war in Afghanistan and the nuclear accident at Chernobyl leading to the events of 1989 and 1991 due to the decision making of the “senile leadership of old men,”  Navalny relates the flaws in the Soviet/Russian system be it poor military training where soldiers are treated like convicts so when you return home it is like being released from prison (no wonder they have done so well in Ukraine!).  Navalny describes the constant surveillance of the Russian people, the shortages of food and other consumer goods, rock music seen as a pernicious western plot by the west, the selling of the countries assets to Yeltsin’s and Putin’s cronies to create a class of oligarchs which robbed the Russian people of the countries wealth and natural resources when they could have been applied to uplifting the entire population, and of course how Putin rose to power by promising to protect Yeltsin and his corrupt family.

(Sept. 8, 2013: Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, right, with his wife Yulia, daughter Daria, and son Zakhar leave a polling station in Moscow’s mayoral election. Moscow is holding its first mayoral election in a decade.)

Apart from the expected criticism of Yeltsin and Putin, Navalny points to the liberal reformers of the 1990s who he skewers for demanding freedom and all it can bring to becoming lackys of the Kremlin in return for the wealth that made them oligarchs.  Navalny argues that the 1990-2020 period was stolen from the Russian people and how the Russian per capita GDP has fallen behind so many other countries because of the avariciousness of the Kremlin, their lies, and their contempt for their own people.  Interestingly, Navalny began as a Yeltsin supporter but would realize that he was only driven by his lust for power, not the needs of his people. 

Navalny’s sense of the absurd is on full display when writing about his arrests, trials, and imprisonment.  He consistently points to the hypocrisy of post-1991 Russia where the only way to obtain or achieve one’s goals appeared to be through bribery, ripping off the state with cost overruns, limiting the civil rights of the people all in the name of the “new modern Russia.”  Navalny provides intimate details of many aspects of his life.  Two situations stand out for me.  First, his flight from Berlin to Moscow after he recuperated from the Novichok poisoning by the FSB leading to his arrest upon his arrival at the airport.  Another would be charges brought against him for actions he should have taken but could not because he was in prison resulting in further charges against him and lengthening his sentences.  It reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s “cloud cuckoo land!”

The fact that Navalny was a trained lawyer and had a degree in finance and credit contributed to his investigations of the Kremlin.  He was very conversant in how stock markets and exchanges worked, and it made it easier for him to root out corruption.  His initial success began in 2011 as he developed a blog where he could post what his ACF staff were learning.  He would file lawsuits against Gazprom and Transneft and other state corporations and picked up tens of thousands of followers.  Navalny would buy a small amount of stock in companies he was investigating, allowing him to attend stockholders meetings which would turn into a farce when he attended and asked questions.  When his blog was shut down by the Kremlin he would turn to YouTube, Instagram, Tik Tok, and Twitter to get his information pertaining to government corruption and lies to his eventual millions of followers.  For a time, the Kremlin did not have an answer for him, especially when he labeled Putin’s party, United Russia, as “the party of crooks and thieves.”  In a sense he had become the reincarnation of the Soviet dissidence of an earlier period.

(March 6, 2015: Alexei Navalny, a Russian opposition leader, walks out of a detention center in Moscow. Navalny walked out of a Moscow detention center a week after fellow opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was shot dead in what his allies say was a political killing aimed at intimidating them.)

The Kremlin’s goal in filing lawsuits against Navalny was to stop him from being active in politics – if you are convicted of corruption you cannot run for political office as Navalny did by announcing his run for the presidency in 2018 or the mayoralty of Moscow in 2013.  Further, the Kremlin resorted to character assassination to discredit Navalny, but instead of losing support, much to the Kremlin’s chagrin, just enhanced his popularity.

(March 26, 2017: Police officers detain anti-corruption campaigner and opposition figure Alexei Navalny during an opposition rally in Moscow.)

What distressed Navalny a great deal was the impact of his work on his family especially when his brother was put on trial and given a three and a half year sentence, the constant harassment of his wife Yulia, and the tactics employed against hundreds of his followers.  When he would ask if he should back off, they all stated that he “must” continue his work.

(March 27, 2017: Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny gestures while speaking, as his lawyer Olga Mikhailova listens, in court in Moscow, Russia. Navalny, who organized a wave of nationwide protests against government corruption that rattled authorities, was fined 20,000 rubles ($340) on Monday by a Moscow court.)

Navalny integrated a few of his speeches to courts at the end of his trials in his memoir.  He pulled no punches in his criticisms of Putin and his regime, the legal system, and anything else that was on his mind knowing full well this would result to his own detriment as his remarks would spread among the Russian people.  His commentary would always be logical, cogent, and demeaning to Putin’s regime and would result in further imprisonment which he describes by including a prison diary in the book.

(Jan. 28, 2018: Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, center, attends a rally in Moscow, Russia.The book is not all about corruption and lies.  The section on how he met his wife Yulia, their courtship, and their family is heart warming in light of what was to happen to him.  Yulia shared his beliefs and worked with him hand and glove.  Throughout his memoir Navalny worries about Yulia and his children because in Putin’s Russia no one knows the depths of evil that the Russian autocrat will resort to.)

(September 13, 2015: A man takes a selfie with Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, center, near the Open Russia movement office during Russian regional elections in the town of Kostroma, some 300 km outside Moscow. Russians voted September 13 in a regional election expected to yield few surprises, with the country’s liberal opposition only able to field a handful of candidates.)

PATRIOT is a poignant book, because we know according to Putin that he was close to being exchanged for another prisoner a few months after his death.  But his death follows a pattern in Russian dissident history be it Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Bukovsky, Andrei Sakharov and many others who used their stature as a megaphone against Kremlin injustice.  As Carole Cadwalladr writes in the October 27, 2024, edition of The Guardian entitled “ The Man Who Dared Defy Putin,” “Throughout, there’s the absurdity of the Putinist regime and its casual brutality. At one point, Navalny reports that he is no longer considered an escape risk and can be removed from the intensive surveillance register. “My joy was so boundless the director had to ask me to be calm and speak only when permitted to do so,” he writes. But then, immediately afterwards: “It is proposed that convict Navalny is placed on the intensive surveillance register as an extremist and terrorist.” It’s not so bad, he jokes. He doesn’t have to kiss a portrait of Putin. There’s just “a sign above my bunk saying I’m a terrorist.”

“If they finally do whack me,” he writes at one point, half joking, half deadly serious, “this book will be my memorial.” “It’s less a memorial than a handbook on how to stand up to a bully, the mission of his life. It’s not just Russians he showed how to do so with humor and grace and without fear, but the rest of us too. And there’s a surprise at the end: his Ukrainian grandmother’s religion wins out over his Soviet atheism. It’s the pillar of his faith alongside his unshakable belief in his “beautiful Russia of the future.” To borrow a hint of Navalny’s relentless optimism, maybe PATRIOT is one small step towards making that day come true.”

(May 8, 2012: Alexei Navalny, a prominent anti-corruption whistle blower and blogger, center, speaks to protesters gathered across the street from the presidential administrations building as a police officer tries to stop him in downtown Moscow.)