PATRIOT: A Memoir, by Alexei Navalny
Aleksei Navalny did not set out to write a posthumous memoir. He began the project in 2020 as a conventional autobiography propelled by an “intriguing thriller about uncovering an assassination attempt.” Of course, he was the victim of the assassination attempt — a nerve agent laced into his clothing took hold on a flight from Siberia to Moscow that summer as Navalny was sitting beside his wife, Yulia, and watching an episode of the sci-fi cartoon “Rick and Morty” on his laptop. He stumbled to the airplane bathroom. Thanks to Yulia, he came to in a hospital in Berlin.
Months later, before he could complete the manuscript, he boarded another flight to Moscow and soon found himself in a jail cell. Over the next two and a half years, he faced a series of trumped-up charges, from embezzlement to insulting a Russian World War II veteran. “Wow, what a dramatic turn in my book,” he writes, a quarter of the way through. “This chapter is being written in prison.” The irony is deliberate; Navalny had every reason to believe he would be arrested the moment he stepped foot on Russian soil.
For years, he writes, he and his family were routinely harassed. In 2018, his younger brother Oleg was released after three and a half years in prison on fraud charges that the European Court of Human Rights declared “arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable.” Navalny reports that a couple weeks before he was hospitalized, Yulia, who helped edit the book, had herself survived a probable poisoning. He is worried for their children. “I try to minimize the risk to my family,” he writes, “but there are certain things that are beyond my control.” He adds, “I’m not prepared to live in fear.”
The son of a Soviet army officer, Navalny spent many of his childhood summers in the early 1980s with his grandmother in a small Ukrainian village near Chernobyl. (“I was in charge of Grandma’s immense cow,” he recalls. “That made me feel very cool.”) After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, the village was devastated. The Soviet government’s lies in the aftermath of the accident, Navalny writes, “had a formative impact on my outlook.”
He joined the liberal Yabloko party after Putin’s ascent in the late ’90s, but a few years later he marched alongside far-right ultranationalists, on the grounds that every element of the opposition would be needed in the fight against despotism. In 2008, as Russia waged war on Georgia, Navalny called on the Kremlin to deport all Georgians, referring to them as “rodents.” As late as 2013, in an unsuccessful bid for mayor of Moscow, he railed against undocumented immigrants from Central Asia.
In his memoir, he seems exasperated by such details, but in the past decade he apologized for some of his earlier comments and spoke out against racism. His blog posts and YouTube videos on corruption in Russia gained an ever wider audience. By 2017, he had come out in support of same-sex marriage, a deeply unpopular proposition in a deeply homophobic country. Did his politics evolve — or did he simply wager that a more cosmopolitan approach, friendlier on the world stage, would be more effective in the long run? He suggests that, before the attempt on his life, he believed greater renown might ensure his safety, but otherwise “Patriot” is silent on this question.