Patriot, the memoir-cum-prison diary of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who posed a credible political challenge to President Putin as an alternative candidate for the Kremlin, is a sad and melancholic book but with a luminous core—that of Navalny and his extraordinary courage in resisting authoritarianism.
The saga begins in August 2020 in a dramatic manner, akin to a thriller, with the author/protagonist realising that he has been poisoned while on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow and recalling each detail till the point where he tells the flight attendant: “I have been poisoned and I am about to die.” He adds with matter-of-fact candour: “I have just enough time to think. It’s all lies, what they say about death. My whole life is not flashing before my eyes. The faces of those dearest to me do not appear. Neither do angels or a dazzling light. I am dying looking at a wall… the last words I hear are ‘No, stay awake, stay awake.’ Then I died.”
Navalny does not die on page 15 and his cheeky line in the book is “Spoiler alert: actually I didn’t.” Luckily he was moved to Germany for emergency medical treatment and he recovered. But only to insist on returning to his beloved Russia in January 2021, where he was arrested on arrival. But the campaigner remained defiant and rallied his supporters with the innovative use of social media and related communication technologies. Well-wishers in Russia spoke of him as an alternative to President Putin, but this was wishful thinking.
Navalny and his supporters were termed ‘extremists’ and banned from meaningful political activity, and an authoritarian state slapped more charges on the popular crusader. In early 2022, soon after the Russian invasion of Ukraine (of which he noted in his diary “President Putin has unleashed an unjust war of aggression against Ukraine on ridiculous pretexts.”), Navalny was charged with contempt of court and moved to a penal prison in western Siberia where he died on February 16. He would have turned 48 in June but alas, that was not to be.
In a poignant entry dated January 17, 2024—the last pages in the memoir note: “Exactly three years ago, I came back to Russia after treatment following my poisoning. I was arrested at the airport. And for three years I have been in prison.” Explaining why he chose to come back to Russia despite the dangers posed by the Putin regime, Navalny in his final entry writes: “I have my country and my convictions… By coming back to Russia, I fulfilled my promise to the voters. There need to be some people in Russia who don’t lie to them.”
Divided into four parts, the book covers a wide swathe of events from Navalny’s near death in August 2020 to the RIP in February 2024, when the patriot pays with his life for his unwavering patriotism. Through a judicious mix of the author recalling his life trajectory and lucid commentary on various seminal developments, including the transmutation of the Soviet Union to the Russian Federation, Patriot is a chilling account of the venality and brutality unleashed by the Putin regime against a resolute political opponent.
The content of Patriot is grim and forbidding. But the form, the manner in which it is written is a mix of breezy wit leavened with a large dash of chutzpah, wherein the author cocks a snook at the authoritarian Russian state and the persona of its President, Vladimir Putin.
The collapse of the Soviet Union is recounted in vivid detail and the free for all that ensued when Gorbachev was replaced by Boris Yeltsin. This was a tectonic geopolitical event—the implosion of the USSR— and Navalny deftly introduces Putin as a junior Lt Colonel in the KGB who “was by no means making a fuss about geopolitical disasters (as he did subsequently) but, in pursuit of money and new opportunities, cheerfully leaving the ranks of his organization in order to throwing his lot with the mayor of Leningrad.”
The rise of Putin and the steady erosion of the dream of normative democracy taking root in Russia is the tragic subtext of Patriot. It moves in flashback from the author’s childhood and the idyllic time spent with his grandmother, to student days and contemporary events in Russia, with Navalny emerging as a political activist and social media influencer. Interspersed is the fast forward in the narrative, to the author being intimidated by the state and imprisoned. In one chapter, he writes of being stripped naked and interred in a high security cell, deprived of books and even a newspaper. The hapless yet cocky prisoner asks for a pen and some paper “and that is how I came to write this chapter”.
Navalny’s meeting with his wife to be —Yuliasha in Turkey—is rendered in pithy manner and he writes lovingly of her and adds “I was fortunate to meet Yulia. If I had not, I might now be a very different person—three times divorced, single and still looking for someone.”
Paradoxically, what Navalny was looking for all his life was that elusive hope— hope that Russia, which emerged from the infamous Soviet gulag, would nurture freedom and democracy. In the epilogue, the author writes in an elegiac manner: “The truth of the matter is that we underestimate just how resilient autocracies are in the modern world.”
Navalny is no more. Putin is firmly ensconced in the Kremlin. The war in Ukraine grinds on. And democracies are differently blighted the world over.
Patriot is a searing first-person account of a committed Russian citizen’s battle against oppression, deceit and the turpitude of the authoritarian state. A must read for those who consider citizen freedom and democratic dissent to be sacred and precious. That is the afterglow Navalny gives to the diligent reader.
C Uday Bhaskar is director, Society for Policy Studies
