We All Must Read This Russian Hero’s Book
I opened Alexei Navalny's posthumous memoir, Patriot, and could not put it down. From late that night through the next day I read it to the end. It was impossible to turn away.
When I got to his prison diaries, I felt I was a witness, much the way I did when reading the Soviet secret police file on the last months of my father's life in a Moscow prison in 1941 (as described in my own memoir, Flight, published two years ago).
At this moment, when the United States teeters on the edge of fascism, Navalny’s book is highly relevant. It is an antidote to cynicism.
It's the nobility of Navalny's mind, the strength of his will, and dedication to his cause that make his book a document we all must read. The account of his resistance in prison also holds valuable lessons in how to save one’s soul.
Until he died in an Arctic prison at age 47 on February 16, 2024, Navalny led the most powerful movement of opposition to Vladimir Putin in his country. His clear voice describing his work to inform fellow citizens of the corruption in the Kremlin, enlivened by humor and exclamations of anger, rings out against Putin’s most blatant lies. His faith in his cause, bringing democracy to Russia, does not falter, he willingly and knowingly sacrifices his life for it.
Putin’s tyrannical regime is built on lies and corruption; the kleptocracy he heads squandered Russia’s natural wealth, he wrote. Instead of improving conditions for the people, as other Eastern European countries did after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the regime diverted public funds into the pockets of a few, who now own palaces abroad, huge yachts on the Mediterranean and some of the most luxurious apartments overlooking Central Park in Manhattan. Navalny and his allies acquired and published detailed images of some of this luxury real estate, including Putin’s, on the internet, generating massive protest rallies and the growth of opposition.
The book opens with Navalny’s account of his near-death by poisoning aboard a flight from Tomsk, in Siberia, to Moscow in 2020. The poison, Novichok, was an internationally outlawed nerve gas agent that is not traceable after 48 hours (This may explain why Putin yielded to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s plea that the dying man be released for treatment in Germany.) He recovered, then tried to return to Russia, knowing full well that he would be imprisoned, as he had been several times before, for “extremism” and other offenses. He was arrested at the airport and spent the next three years—the rest of his life—in prison.
Why did he choose to return, surely aware of what awaited him?
“I don’t want to give up my country or betray it,” Navalny explains. “If your convictions mean something, you must be prepared to stand up for them and make sacrifices if necessary. If you’re not prepared to do that, you have no convictions. You just think you do. But those are not convictions and principles; they’re only thoughts in your head…..
“I took part in elections and vied for leadership positions….I traveled the length and breadth of the country declaring everywhere from the stage, ‘I promise that I won’t let you down. I won’t deceive you and I won’t abandon you.’ By coming back to Russia, I fulfilled my promise to the voters.”
Moving backward and forward in time, Navalny’s memoir tells what led him to become politically active as a youth (the lies told to the Russian people about Chernobyl), and describes the growth and tactics of the prodemocracy movement. It also provides a day-by-day account of Navalny’s resistance to cruelties and humiliations in prison--the details of his refusal to succumb. Choosing to focus on the beauty of falling snowflakes instead of the pain in his back and the icy mud drenching his feet kept him committed to life. He received thousands of letters from supporters. Meanwhile, more and more charges of “extremist crimes,” were lodged against him, for which he was tried in absentia, and his sentence was repeatedly extended.
“To my question, ‘May I ask what terrible extremist crimes I am committing?’” Navalny wrote in a note dated November 17 [2023], “They replied: ‘That is secret information. You are not allowed to know it.’”
It's amazing to me that this prisoner was permitted to have pen and paper, use e mail and Instagram and to keep a diary during some of this time. (Some notebooks were confiscated and not returned.) Have the tyrants not yet learned the power of the word? And it’s also amazing that, despite constant surveillance, his writings got out.
The book, published in October 2024 by Alfred A. Knopf as translated into English, is a call to action. Right now, in this country, our president is attempting to destroy our government and we watch horrified but paralyzed. What can we do? Most of us live here comfortably, eating fresh food, taking care of our health, trying to be nice to our neighbors, walking our dogs, and avoiding any talk of politics with Trump supporters. This life of self-indulgence won’t last, however. In the months ahead, opportunities to take action on our convictions will present themselves. One way to begin to prepare is by reading Navalny’s book.
