BookBrowse Reviews Patriot by Alexei Navalny

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Alexei Navalny demands a new Russia in a posthumous memoir full of courage and humanity.

On the 17th of January, 2024, colleagues of Alexei Navalny posted a message to his Instagram account. Being held in a remote penal colony beyond the arctic circle, the Russian opposition leader was unable to post it himself. "I have my country and my convictions," it read. "If your convictions mean something, you must be prepared to stand up for them and make sacrifices."

Navalny was already no stranger to sacrifice. Having shot to prominence with the Anti-Corruption Foundation—an organization he launched in 2011 to expose high- level corruption across the Russian political class—he had long been a target of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his policy of repression. At the time of his post in January 2024, he had just marked his three-year anniversary in prison. A year before his incarceration, he had survived an attempted assassination with Novichok nerve agent. Even still, he knew he was likely to sacrifice more—and less a month later, he did. On the 16th of February, the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service issued a short statement on their website. Navalny was dead.

Even as political repression in Russia accelerated following the country's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Navalny's death was shocking. That the regime of Vladimir Putin—the "vengeful runt," as Navalny calls him—was murderous came as no surprise; that the government seemed confident enough to be so brazen did. US intelligence services have since concluded it is unlikely Putin personally ordered the killing, but the dictator's objective was always to snuff out the light of his most dangerous opponent. He will hardly be too distraught at having extinguished it early.

Patriot, Navalny's posthumous memoir, is his furious refusal to let that light go out. Having started the book in Germany while convalescing from Novichok poisoning, he continued to add chapters and diary entries after his imprisonment back in Russia, smuggling out pages through his lawyers. The result, edited in part by his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, is a blistering patchwork of personal reflection and political manifesto.

What starts as a conventional memoir, covering Navalny's life through 40 years of turbulent Russian history, ends in fragments from a prison cell. These last diary entries offer the most immediate and devastating moments of the book; they are testaments to his courage in the face of unspeakable cruelty. Navalny says it's clichéd to call the Russian legal system "Kafkaesque," but how else to describe it? There is no other word for the series of trumped-up charges and increasingly brutal prison conditions.

Through it all, Navalny stays human. In a country run by stony-faced authoritarians, this was always his superpower. His damning investigative journalism, carried out with colleagues at the Anti-Corruption Foundation, proved his unflagging work ethic. But it was his easy-going charm and likability that made him such a fearsome political threat. In the pages of Patriot, these qualities are on full display.

He is wonderfully alive—more alive in death than Putin has ever shown himself in life. Translators Arch Tait and Stephen Dalziel have done a fine job capturing how Navalny swings from insult-laden invective to laid-back, "dude"-inflected good humor. For a man of such moral rectitude, he has a joyously goofy, adolescent sense of fun. He is as happy discussing the ills of modern Russia as he is The Simpsons, The Sopranos, or Rick and Morty. (The episode where Rick turns into a pickle is his particular favorite.)

Patriot proves the extent to which Navalny was a dissident for the social media age, a world away from the grey-haired, slightly doddering Soviet dissidents of old. You can't imagine Sakharov or Solzhenitsyn dancing on TikTok, but Navalny knew the importance of going where the people were. There is power in the immediate connection with an audience, and he knew it. After all, his own induction into political dissent came thanks to music: "completely mind-blowing rock," to put it in his terms.

Such roots may well explain his emphasis on the aesthetics of dissent; it was always the "eternal quandary," he writes, "how to strike a balance between entertainment and boring journalistic and legal matters." Where he struck that balance undoubtedly gave his politics a populist tinge, but Navalny can hardly be criticized for that. Wide-scale popular support is something of a necessity when trying to overthrow a dictatorship.

As his career went on and his legal troubles mounted, that support increasingly came from outside his country's borders. Indeed, one gets the sense Patriot was written as much for Western audiences as for fellow dissidents back home. This outward-facing impulse was a common criticism of the opposition leader during his lifetime, and one that led to accusation of posturing. He was long suspected of having shed his early ultranationalism less out of conviction and more out of a sense of realpolitik, knowing how it would go down in the liberal West.

Navalny's memoir will do little to dispel those suspicions, and his early politics will continue to haunt his legacy. As a young radical in 1993, he cheered on Boris Yeltsin's military assault on the country's parliament during the "October Coup" (see Beyond the Book). In 2008, he supported the Russian invasion of Georgia, calling the Georgian people "rodents." In 2014, his initial ambivalence to the annexation of Crimea left many Ukrainians sensing a latent imperialism in his democratic ideals. Such positions have ensured potential allies against Putin east of the old Iron Curtain remain lukewarm about Russia's opposition movement to this day.

In prison, Navalny sought to make amends. He called for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine, the re-implementation of 1991 borders (thus returning Crimea), and the payment of reparations. The "fifteen theses" in which he laid out these positions are included in Patriot, but they are some of the only concrete policy positions he advances in the book. His mission, as he saw it, was something much more fundamental: creating a democratic space in Russia where positions like those could be debated in the first place.

On leaving office in 2001, Lennart Meri, Estonia's first post-Soviet president, took pride in handing over to his successor what he called "a normal, boring country." In Patriot, Navalny dreams of a chance to say the same. "Let's become a normal country at last. That would be beautiful." He died for a chance at normality. At least some part of him knew he would. "If they finally do whack me," he writes, "the book will be my memorial." It is a memorial worthy of his courage, and one that will outlast the regime that killed him.

This review first ran in the November 20, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.