‘Even the worst possible scenario is not actually all that bad.’ Alexei Navalny’s memoir is a testament to resisting authoritarianism

Robert Horvath

No one who watched Alexei Navalny’s meteoric trajectory, from civic activist to opposition leader to the world’s most famous political prisoner, could avoid the question: how will this extraordinary saga end? Was Navalny destined to become Russia’s Nelson Mandela, a redemptive leader who guided his people from oppression to the promised land of democracy? Or was he doomed to be silenced by the henchmen of the despot whose rule he had challenged?

We now know the answer. Before his death in an Arctic prison in February, Navalny also pondered his uncertain future. In the epilogue of his autobiography, Patriot, he recalls a poignant conversation with his wife, Yulia, in which both come to terms with the likelihood he will die in captivity.

Yet at the same time, he writes, “there is an inner voice that you can’t stifle: Come off it, the worst is never going to happen.”

These two possible destinies have left their mark on Navalny’s book. The first part is a candid, often funny and self-deprecatory narrative of his life, his activism and the making of his political career. This section is framed by his shocking 2020 poisoning with the nerve agent novichok, his recuperation in Germany and his subsequent return to Russia.

The second part is a prison diary, interspersed with public statements and his “final words” at trials. As he is shunted between ever more hellish outposts of Putin’s penitentiary system, the text becomes more fragmented.

For many months, his sleep was disrupted by hourly inspections because he was an “escape risk”. Later, during a long stretch in a punishment cell, he endured the unrelenting, blood-curdling screams of his neighbour “the psycho,” a murderer used by the administration to torment Navalny.

What lends unity to his book is the unwavering consistency of Navalny’s resistance. As a pro-democracy activist, he instigated mass protests that repeatedly shook the foundations of Putin’s dictatorship. As an anti-corruption campaigner, he shone a spotlight on the kleptocratic rot that festered behind the patriotic posturing of Kremlin propagandists. As a political prisoner, he demonstrated extraordinary moral courage, speaking out against war while enduring mistreatment that can only be described as torture.

One sign of Navalny’s enduring importance was the crowds of citizens who defied brutal repression to pay their respects at his funeral. Another is the unrelenting torrent of disinformation and vilification now directed against his memory.

The most common smear is that Navalny was not a freedom fighter, but a far-right nationalist, a Russian imperialist, and a supporter of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. In 2021 Amnesty International designated Navalny a prisoner of conscience. In response Kremlin trolling factories spread accusations that became an article of faith for a vocal group of academics, commentators, and social media influencers.

Navalny’s autobiography is an important corrective to the disinformation. It shows how his activism was inspired not by nationalist grievances or far-right ideology, but by the lessons of growing up under totalitarianism and by his awareness as a young adult that the historic opportunity offered by the collapse of the Soviet regime was being squandered.

It also illuminates aspects of his inner life overshadowed by his persona on social media. A voracious reader since childhood, Navalny has a lot to say about books. His prison diaries are scattered with reflections on literature ranging from Soviet-era rebels like Viktor Erofeev to European classics by authors such as Tolstoy, Maupassant and Dickens.

No less surprising was his unostentatious but strong Christian faith. Being a believer, he reflects, “makes it easier to live your life and, to an even greater extent, engage in opposition politics.”

No childhood event left a greater impression on Navalny than the Chornobyl disaster. Half of his extended family was Ukrainian. He used to spend summers at his grandparents’ farm in the village of Zalissiya, remembered as “paradise on earth”, a place with “a stream and trees laden with cherries”. Here he was surrounded by crowds of relatives who were “the jolliest, most wonderful people”.

Unfortunately the village was near the Chornobyl nuclear power plant. After the meltdown of the plant’s No.4 reactor on 26 April 1986, Navalny’s pastoral paradise became a radioactive exclusion zone. His relatives were forcibly relocated and scattered across Ukraine.

What most affected ten-year-old Alexei was the duplicity of the government’s response. Instead of warning about the disaster, officials tried to conceal it, with lies that exposed countless people to lethal radiation. Decades later, this lesson in the dangers of mendacious, unaccountable power shaped Navalny’s first impressions of Putin. “He never stops lying,” Navalny recalled, “just as in my childhood”.

Unlike Putin and most Russian imperialists, Navalny was indifferent to the breakup of the Soviet empire. What aroused his indignation was the hypocrisy of the “democratic reformers” of the 1990s. As a teenager, he had admired Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first post-Soviet president, but he was slowly disillusioned by pervasive corruption and the rise of the oligarchs.

The turning point was Navalny’s attempt, as a university student, to import a cheap car from Germany in 1996. After three days spent lining up at a customs office, where everyone else was paying bribes to cut through red tape, he reached the head of the queue, only to be informed the office was closing because of a visit by Yeltsin’s press secretary.