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A Memoir
by Alexei Navalny
Book Reviewed by:The powerful and moving memoir of a fearless political opposition leader who paid the ultimate price for his beliefs.
Alexei Navalny began writing Patriot shortly after his near-fatal poisoning in 2020. It is the full story of his life: his youth, his call to activism, his marriage and family, his commitment to challenging a world super-power determined to silence him, and his total conviction that change cannot be resisted—and will come.
In vivid, page-turning detail, including never-before-seen correspondence from prison, Navalny recounts, among other things, his political career, the many attempts on his life, and the lives of the people closest to him, and the relentless campaign he and his team waged against an increasingly dictatorial regime.
Written with the passion, wit, candor, and bravery for which he was justly acclaimed, Patriot is Navalny's final letter to the world: a moving account of his last years spent in the most brutal prison on earth; a reminder of why the principles of individual freedom matter so deeply; and a rousing call to continue the work for which he sacrificed his life.
National Book Awards
2024
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...continued
Full Review
(1069 words)
(Reviewed by Alex Russell).
Patriot by Alexei Navalny covers the Russian opposition leader's life from his childhood in the USSR in the 1980s to his final days in an Arctic penal colony in 2024. One important moment in the development of his political consciousness that he outlines in his memoir is the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis, an event which eventually became known as the "October Coup."
In 1993, Russian democracy was two years old. Boris Yeltsin, a former Communist Party functionary, had been chosen in 1991 as the Russian Federation's first democratically-elected president on a wave of popular support. Having restyled himself as a reformer, he embarked on economic "shock therapy"—the rapid implementation of market forces on the Soviet ...
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