Book Review: PATRIOT, By Alexei Navalny

This book should have a warning at the start, to the effect that, ‘Be careful if you’re reading this in a public place, as you may be prone to laughing out loud’! This may seem a strange comment when we consider that this is a book about the life and slow death of Vladimir Putin’s main opponent. The Russian president had Navalny murdered, but, as the book illustrates, at no time did Putin manage to crush Alexei Navalny’s spirit.

(I should declare from the start that I have a particular interest in Navalny’s memoir. Arch Tait had been working on the translation almost since Navalny had started writing, while he was recuperating in Germany in 2020 after being poisoned on Putin’s orders. After Navalny was murdered, there was an added urgency to publish the book, and I was asked to translate part of it. The language Navalny uses made it a delight to work on the text.)

Inevitably, a great deal of attention has been paid to the diaries and thoughts of Navalny when he was in prison, from the time he returned to Russia in January 2021. It is horrific to know that in the 21st century Russian prisons are run under such a cruel regime. Mental and physical torture are the order of the day. This not only demonstrates a return to the ways in which the Soviet Union treated political prisoners, but reflects Putin’s medieval mentality that might is right, and no one can be allowed to challenge ‘the tsar’.

Yet even at the worst of times, in late 2023 and early 2024, when Navalny had been transferred to a maximum security prison camp of the harshest regime within the Arctic Circle, he writes with humour. On 26 December 2023, he describes himself as ‘Santa Claus’, and says, ‘you’re probably wondering about the presents. But I am a special-regime Santa Claus, so only those who have behaved really badly get presents’.

A few days after New Year, he’s still laughing (Putin and his cronies must have been furious about this). On 9 January he wrote,

It hasn’t got colder than -32C. Even at that temperature you can walk for more than half an hour, but only if you are sure you can grow a new nose, ears, and fingers.

Few things are as refreshing as a walk in Yamal at 6.30 in the morning. And what a wonderful breeze blows into the courtyard despite the concrete fence, it’s just wow!

The book begins with the story of how Putin’s henchmen poisoned Navalny when he was campaigning in Siberia, how he was taken to Germany in a coma and his slow recovery there. Then Navalny goes back to his childhood, and writes about how, aged ten, he realised that the Soviet system was based on lies, after the cover-up of the Chenobyl disaster.

From this point, this is much more than simply a personal memoir. It is an excellently written history of the last years of the USSR under Mikhail Gorbachev; the situation in the 1990s, when crony capitalism and criminal gangs decided much of the country’s fate; and then the way in which Putin has imposed a stranglehold on freedom in modern Russia. As such, there are few better summaries of late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.

But PATRIOT is also a love story. For a quarter of a century, Navalny had his wife, Yulia, beside him. With no sentimentality, it is obvious that his marriage to Yulia gave Navalny strength, even in the bleakest of times. When he was in prison and the sadistic treatment he received from the Russian state shut off any meetings with his wife and children, it is clear that Navalny knew that he still had their moral support.

Yulia, and others from Navalny’s team, continue his work to highlight the total corruption of Putin’s regime. Yulia has played the major part in ensuring that this memoir has been published. We should be grateful to her. Few books will show the truth about Putin’s regime as starkly as this one does. Nor do it with such humour.

PATRIOT, by Alexei Navalny (Translated by Arch Tait with Stephen Dalziel) is published in the UK by Bodley Head