Alexey Navalny’s memoir Patriot is on display at a bookstore in New York, 22 October 2024. Photo: EPA/SARAH YENESEL

The Russian Justice Ministry has added Alexey Navalny’s internationally best-selling memoir Patriot to a list of “extremist materials”, effectively banning the book and removing it from all but a handful of libraries.

The updated list now includes the Russian edition of the book, which was published posthumously by the Lithuanian publishing house One Book Publishing in 2024.

According to the ministry, Patriot was recognised as an extremist text in June by a court in northwestern Russia’s Leningrad region. However, no public statement on the book being banned in Russia had previously been issued.

Ivan Zhdanov, the director of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, which Navalny founded, said that Navalny’s book being added to the register of extremist materials was “only to be expected of Putin” on Wednesday, adding that there was nevertheless still “no criminal liability for reading the book” and saying he was “sure that even more people will read it now”.

Navalny began writing Patriot while recovering in Germany after being poisoned by Russia’s Federal Security Service with the nerve agent Novichok in August 2020. He was arrested on his return to Russia in February 2021 and sentenced to 19 years in prison in August 2023 on charges of extremism. He died at a penal colony in the Russian Arctic in February 2024.