Paul O’Connor, longtime newspaper journalist and something of a world traveler, reviews a memoir by a courageous man who died an early death last year after having been a relentless critic of the Putin regime in Russia.
Reviewed by Paul T. O’Connor
PATRIOT: A MEMOIR. By Alexei Navalny. Knopf Doubleday Publishing. 496 pages. $35, hardcover. Also available in audiobook, read by Matthew Goode. 16 hours, 46 minutes.
Alexei Navalny annoyed Vladimir Putin no end. Time and again, he exposed the corruption and incompetence of the Putin regime and, Putin, despite the many means at his disposal, could not silence him.
As he states in this memoir, Navalny believed he was telling the truth, and so long as he could get his message out to the people of Russia and the world, then no level of discomfort could silence him.
In the end, the Russian state had to kill him.
Navalny was the most recognized dissident and opposition politician in Russia. Using social media, he delivered a steady flow of damning information, whether in the form of Instagram posts or YouTube videos, that show how Putin’s kleptocrats were stealing the country blind.
Patriot is a two-part memoir. It opens with a detailed account of the day that Russian authorities poisoned Navalny before he boarded a domestic flight. Although the poison should have killed him, it didn’t, and because of international pressure, he was evacuated to Germany.
Then Navalny steps back, telling the story of his early years as the son of a Russian military officer, a university student and a budding political activist. Later in life, he came to rue that he ever supported Boris Yeltsin, berating himself for failing to see that Yeltsin wasn’t a real reformer, just a thief with a different circle of accomplices. In one of the memoir’s more light-hearted anecdotes, Navalny’s wife Yulia tells him to get over himself: He was a pimply college student when he supported Yeltsin, not exactly a political figure who might have made a difference.
But beat himself up he does, nonetheless, for failing to see that there never was a post-Soviet democracy movement of any significance or strength in Russia. He cites the many so-called reformers who later became Putin stooges. Russian politics, he says, was rotten to the core in those years.
(Personal note: When in Russia during the summer of 1994, I attended a number of press seminars where democracy advocates were heartily complaining at the lack of true freedom and democracy in the country.)
Over the first decade of the 21st century, Navalny ascended to the forefront of the opposition. Jailed repeatedly, on release he always resumed leading rallies and sponsoring a movement that called for voters to support any party so long as it wasn’t Putin’s One Russia. He told voters to rally around their district’s strongest opposition candidate, regardless of their personal support of that party. In some cases that might be the communists or the rightists. What mattered most was breaking Putin’s grip on power.
His support of Russian nationalist candidates when they were the strongest in a district led to him being questioned in the West at times. But he made clear in the memoir that that support relied entirely on their opposition to Putin, not to any philosophical sympathy.
The second half of the memoir covers his years in Russia after recovering from the poisoning. Once he arrived at the airport, he was arrested and jailed. His trials were all double-speak. Determined never to set him free, Russian authorities continued to charge him with additional crimes allegedly committed while he was in solitary confinement.
Much of this memoir was smuggled out of the various prisons where he was incarcerated, and this section details the life of a Russian inmate. He died in February 2024.
Overall, this is a story of Russian corruption and oppression as compelling as Bill Browder’s Red Notice and Freezing Order, but with a far sadder ending.
I recommend the audio version, as I do with most books about Russia, simply because my brain gets hung up on Russian names when reading from a printed text. Matthew Goode does an excellent job of narration.