Alexei Navalny’s Patriot: A Memoir

A year after his death in a Siberian prison, the New York Times reports, “Even in Death, Navalny Is Seen by the Kremlin as an Enduring Threat …Russian authorities have zealously prosecuted people with links to Aleksei A. Navalny’s organization inside Russia in the year since he died.”

On the 12th day of the second Trump administration, I rode my bike across town, over the Manhattan Bridge, and back, through Brooklyn, to Henry Street to talk about Navalny with my friends in book group. Before the election, a friend had suggested we read it. It’s particularly telling now, as the US seems to be joining the oligarchs and autocrats.  We discussed why he went back, why anyone would choose such a fate. Themes of activism and martyrdom, freedom and conscience, truth vs totalitarian censorship run through this most personal of prison memoirs, inspiring a searing conversation, reflecting on his hopes and humor.

It’s unnerving to think of what he endured, of his isolation as a sort of foreshadowing, that those sorts of detentions may be in store for the rest of us as well, for those who oppose the administration.

“For more than a decade the Kremlin persecuted, imprisoned, and tormented Navalny,” said Tirana Hassan, executive director at Human Rights Watch, after Navalny died on Feb 16, 2024. “He should never have been in prison, in the first place. The Russian authorities bear full responsibility for what has happened to Navalny, starting with his first politically motivated arrest.”

 On Jan 17, 2022, he wrote, “The hero of my favorite books, Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy, says, ‘The only suitable place for an honest man in Russia, is in prison.’”

Yet, here is the rub in this most unusual of prison memoirs, he doesn’t believe it. For much of this story about his life and choices, the choices which Jean-Paul Sartre argued are all we have, he laughs about his situation, the absurd legal battles he finds himself fighting, as well as his options. Prison is not so free, neither is the outside world. He could be happy on a stroll in the yard, on the occasional moments when music wasn’t blared through the air, covering up the sounds of screams. He could be happy to have a salad. He could be happy with a book from the prison library (although not by Flaubert).  He still believed his treatment wrong and that he could prevail. Courageous or foolhardy, no one was really sure. His story offers useful lessons in today’s struggling democracies, witness to astounding harm, courage and humor.

Throughout the entries, Navalny reflects on Russian novelists, writing in general, the Russian soul, Tolstoy vs Flaubert. Favoving The Idiot by Dostoyevski or The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy, he doesn’t enjoy his reading of Madame Bovary, compared with the superior Anna Karenina.

“Hello everyone, from the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy,” Navalny joked towards the end of his life. He’d spent much of the previous three years in jail, increasingly in solitary confinement, after he returned to Russia in 2021, feeling the brunt of Trump’s hero, Vladimir Putin’s vengeance, before his demise. There is a sense that Trump wants to be more like Putin, doing as much harm as Bibi is doing. As I write this, the US president has been insisting Ukraine is at fault in the conflict over its territories, with right wing news outlets actually defying him, reminding us as the New York Post did posting a picture of Putin with the headlines Feb 21, “This is a dictator and other truths we ignore at our own peril.” The war on truth, on evidence is everywhere. Navany’s endless court trevails were a frontline in this war.

The first part of the story is a sort of conventional memoir Navalny drafted in Germany recovering from a 2020 poisoning attempt, assumed to be by the Kremlin. The second, completely gripping half, consists of his daily journal entries and letters as his time seemed to slip away. With each day, he’s given less time with pen and paper. Each entry is more poignant.  Still, he laughed, joked with judges at his kangaroo hearings, and penned meditations on belief, attachment, and a zen-like detachment, feeling the consequences for doing what he felt was right, without complaint.

A meta-story of reservations about penning what he sees as a tired genre, it is also a book about writing a book. He self-consciously confesses he doesn’t want to add another prison memoir, he writes as if chasing fate.

“It’s a masterpiece,” says one of our book club members,  “a Dear Richard” greeting.

As much as anything, this is a story about living with choices. Navalny is an activist who was adored, who breathed in adoration, and engagement with people, with his family, wife and kids. Going back to Russia, he knew he was risking it all. But he did it anyway, knowing that he could not live with himself if he did not. But the rest of the world would have understood. He could have stayed in Berlin and continued his work, his investigations of Russian corruption, posting youtube videos and blogs about as an opposition leader in exile.

Still, he went back to the country that poisoned him.

Detention followed as he set foot back in the airport in Russia.

He chained himself to his truth, his mind clear.

And kept on joking, his absurd response not legible to the state.

And the petty indignities, the Kafkaesque mundane tasks, emptying out his carefully organized room again and again, only to have to re-set it up again, among mind-numbing tedium; the solitary increased, the torture. Eventually, he had to say goodbye to his wife. “I’m not sure I’m going to get out of here,” he tells her. She understands.

Cold, detached, real.

I could not imagine.

I know it can feel like torture to be away from family, kids.

I’ve been arrested dozens of times.  It gets boring. It gets cruel. It gets tedious. The groups of guys in the holding cell wear on you, the stories stop offering respite. And at the end of the day, I am always the first to take a plea and get out fast, to a warm greeting, Chinese food outside Central booking, a pizza with colleagues, a donut, hugs and greetings with legal observers and support.

In Before Night Falls, Arneas writes about spending time in solitary in a Cuban jail. It’s a harrowing tale.

Navalny clinically details the water at the bottom of the cell, the trapped feeling, the broom handle used to sodomize him placed in his cell, the cells getting smaller, the insane person who screams in the adjoining cell. It’s worse than you’ve heard, he confesses, without more, leaving it up to us to imagine.

For Navalny, the process of letting go, of renouncing his material needs began with a simple process of “going zen.” He explained that he simply imagined the worst thing that could happen and acknowledged that, letting go of desire for his old life. Sure, he writes about the possibilities that he sees for a democratic Russia, that he sees in the Russian people, not the state, tracing his daily pleasures and jokes, his embrace of the absurd. The little things still offer pleasure, a good salad or novel.  But he also lets go of the trappings, meditating on the life of Jesus, reading “The Sermon on the Mount”, Matthew 5:1-12, with its “Beatitudes” that sound like the Communist Manifesto. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”.

On Jan 17, 2022, Navalny wrote: “Exactly, one year ago I came home to Russia… Having spent my first year in prison, I want to tell everyone exactly the same thing I shouted to those who gathered outside the court when the guards were taking me off to the police truck.  Don’t be afraid of anything. This is our country and it’s the only one we have. The only thing we should fear is we will surrender our homeland to be plundered by a gang of liars, thieves, and hypocrites.”

There is a video of Navalny joking with the judge in one of his countless court hearings, secure in his beliefs, the faith that brought him back home, willing to sacrifice, making the whole court chuckle, the day before he died, still making everyone laugh.

He doesn’t say he’s close, but he seems to know.