A frank, often funny account of his activism and a harrowing, courageous prison diary, Patriot is destined to become the canonical text of Russia’s democratic tradition.
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...
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. 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.
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. Corruption and dictatorship Navalny pointed to different life experiences of Yeltsin, an ex-communist party boss who had ruled the city of Yekaterinburg “like a typical Soviet petty tyrant,” and the former dissidents who had led “velvet revolutions” in communist East Central Europe. had stood their ground in the face of oppression and persecutions, and over many years had shown in action a genuine commitment to the words they proclaimed from the podium.
Navalny undertook another bold experiment, aiming to draw moderate Russian nationalists into an anti-Putin democratic coalition. “A serious political leader,” he explains, “cannot simply decide to turn their back on a huge number of his fellow citizens because he personally dislikes their views.” The record shows that Navalny sometimes mirrored these views, and sometimes challenged them.
A network of activists Navalny’s account of his political campaigns offers valuable insights into the nature of civic activism in authoritarian conditions. To outside observers, he often appeared to be a brilliant, solitary hero locked in a lonely struggle with a brutal regime. The reality was more complicated.
In increasingly authoritarian conditions, large numbers of ordinary Russians took real risks to express their rejection of Putin’s path. Prison diary Navalny’s prison diary, which makes up the final part of the autobiography, constitutes a kind of political testament. It puts on record his condemnation of Russia’s war against Ukraine. It sets out a vision of a postwar settlement, which includes war crimes trials, reparations, and the restoration of Ukraine’s 1991 borders.
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