Patriot: the memoirs of the incredibly brave Russian anti-corruption campaigner, Alexei Navalny

📚 Finished listening to Patriot by Alexei Navalny.

This is the incredibly brave political campaigner Alexei Navalny’s (tragically posthumous) memoir.

Navalny was an unimaginably brave anti-corruption campaigner who wanted to see the freeing of Russia from the cruel and kleptocratic regime of Putin et al. He is perhaps most famous for the YouTube documentary-style videos his organisation created to reveal the hypocrisy and corruption of the Russian political elites as well as call for a popular uprising to liberate Russia from this gang of criminals who he saw as, apart from anything else, ruining Russia’s chance to become a successful and happy country. That said, along the way, we learn that making videos was far from his first choice of activity. It’s just what he found broke through the most.

Famously, back in 2020, he was poisoned with Novichok, and nearly died, via a criminal act facilitated by the Russian state. Thankfully, his life was saved in Germany. And he no doubt could have stayed there with his family and continued his campaigning remotely if he wanted to. But he most certainly did not want to.

In the book he makes it clear that he wanted to lead by example. He does not want everyday Russians to act in fear of Putin’s state, and so he made himself act as though he didn’t either (it may not have been an act, certainly later on he enumerates the ways he found to avoid the fear at the darkest points in his journey). So he returned, with his equally courageous and supportive wife Yulia, to his homeland. Inevitably he was immediately captured and imprisoned, and was stuck there for years, in increasingly cruel and punishing jails.

Much of the book is thus a prison diary, interspersed with a few of his Instagram posts over the years. However he tells of even the dourest of events with incredible humour; wit and irony abound. He’s an incredibly likeable character, perhaps amongst the best of what humanity has to offer.

Whilst he’s almost entirely locked away, invisible to the outer world, the regime throw more and more allegations of new crimes against him, ramp the level of his punishment up and up - and yet still in no way does he give in.

When he is able to convey some sort of message to the outer world, it’s always to thank his many supporters for their efforts and implore anyone subject to Putin’s state to fight back, to never be afraid, to never stop highlighting the cruelty and hypocrisy of their government, and above everything else, to never let go of the idea that Russia could be a truly happy and successful country if only it was led by a less greedy, cruel and criminal government.

Of course recent events don’t necessarily suggest that that day is particularly near. And when the day eventually comes sad to say, Navalny will not be around to see what one has to hope will be a marvellous enactment of his vision at some point in the future, having, since writing the book, died of “natural causes” / in very suspicious circumstances whilst jailed within a Siberian penal colony, at the age of 47.

His brave widow, Yulia Navalnaya, herself an avid campaigner, convinced that her husband was murdered with poison, continues the fight. She’s now the head of the Anti-Corruption Foundation that Alexei founded as well as the chair of the Human Rights Foundation. Godspeed.