"Patriot" | Reviewed by Bill Schwab

“Patriot” is a jarring and vivid memoir by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. The opening chapters describe the early days of his up-and-coming career as a corporate lawyer for a prominent law firm. The company took the entire staff to a Turkish resort for a retreat to improve the company’s culture. There, Alexei meets Yulia. Threaded throughout the book is the lifelong love story of their steadfast and unwavering marriage, “When you meet your soul mate, you just know,” he says.

Yulia and Alexei reflect on the fall of the Soviet Union. Alexei expresses his personal disillusionment with  1990s leader Boris Yeltsin. The young lawyer longed for a politician who would tell the truth and “undertake all sorts of needed, interesting projects and cooperate directly with the Russian people.” “I waited and waited, and one day, I realized I could be that person myself.”

The young politician’s vision of a “beautiful Russia of the future” where fair elections are held, and democratic institutions operate for the benefit of all the people won him respect and support that extended through all eleven time zones. Energetic activist allies joined him. “From the outside, we looked like a bunch of Moscow hipsters,” he writes.

Using social media to demonstrate official corruption, followers grew until millions of dissidents called for mass rallies to oppose the Russian government. Putin and his party became alarmed by the size and passion of the opposition. The Russian authorities fabricated many charges against Navalny. They arrested and jailed him and shut down the Foundation for Fighting Corruption, the political structure he began in 2011.

In 2020, he was poisoned with a nerve agent by the Russian government. His family successfully had him released for treatment in Germany after lengthy negotiations with the Russians. After five months of healing, he boldly returned to  Russia, where he was immediately arrested and spent the last three years of his life in prison.

The final third of the book is composed of Navalny’s prison diaries. He records countless sobering anecdotes describing the physical and emotional abuses he endured. Punishment became more brutal as he spoke out against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

In December 2023, he was transferred to the highest security-level penitentiary in a small town above the Arctic Circle. On February 24th, 2024, 47-year-old Navalny suddenly died there; the cause of death was never released. In an uncommon act of defiance, tens of thousands of Russian mourners attended his funeral, a rare happening in a nation where anti-government rallies often end in mass arrests.

Navalny’s dry humor is remarkable, given his daily misery in multiple prisons. His humor brightens the heavy, grinding, and painful narrative throughout the book.

  “Patriot” is a bracing memoir. It is a wake-up call about the danger of autocratic leadership, especially its threat to freedom of speech, assembly, and other liberties we in the US take for granted.

Knopf published the 496-page book, which includes two folios of colorful photographs of this courageous oppositional patriot of Russia.

About the author: Alexei Navalny was a Russian opposition leader who won international recognition and respect. His international honors included the Sakharov Prize, the European Parliament’s annual human rights prize, the Courage Award from the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy, and the Dresden Peace Prize.

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