Alexei Navalny’s Memoir Is a Gospel in Which He Foresaw His Own Death

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“Dying really didn’t hurt.” These are the opening words of Patriot, the posthumously published autobiography of Alexei Navalny. We know that he died. And this book tells the story of his death—how he approached it, how he prepared for it, and how he conquered it. Navalny’s memoir is that of a man who consciously walks toward death. It is a gospel—but an autobiographical one.

Though Navalny’s memoir is that of a man consciously walking toward death, Patriot begins lightly and humorously. Navalny cracks jokes, recalls old anecdotes, and shares detailed stories from his childhood. He painstakingly recreates the atmosphere of the Soviet Union and the broken Russia of the early 1990s. At times, it reads like a beautifully crafted novel. Here is the author as a little boy, traveling to a village near Chernobyl. Here he is, bundled in his warmest clothes, climbing onto a freezing bus to return home from kindergarten. Here he is, being robbed by an older classmate—Navalny, a nerd who doesn’t like to fight but loves to read, unsure of how to react.

‘Patriot’ by Alexei Navalny

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The book begins this way because the author still has time. In August 2020, Navalny was poisoned with Novichok—but it failed. He recovers in Berlin and then Schwarzwald, Germany. He relearns how to walk, how to hold a pen, and prepares to return to Russia.

It is during this time that Navalny begins writing this book, Patriot. He still has enough time to joke, to draw historical parallels, to craft an enjoyable read.

I was probably one of the first to read her in the original, pure Russian version. Alexei’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, was very worried that the file might be stolen—so about a month ago, she asked me to fly from New York to Vilnius, Lithuania, to read the typeset manuscript there. As I began the book, Alexei’s style was immediately recognizable—it felt as though I could actually hear his voice. But that was only the beginning.

In January 2021, Navalny flies back to Russia and is arrested immediately at the Moscow airport. In the book, he explains why he returned, the same way he did in his previous writings and interviews: It is his choice, his Golgotha; this is his sacrifice for his beautiful future Russia.

He continues writing the autobiography in the same tone up until he describes what may be the most important and cherished moment in his life: meeting his wife, Yulia. This is the funniest and most uplifting part of the book. Navalny is in prison when he writes it—separated from his wife. The reader knows, reading it now, that this separation will be forever. But it seems Navalny does not know this yet. Or does he?

The next chapters are Navalny in a rush—he’s chasing time, hurrying to finish. He skips details, cramming several years onto a single page.

I first met Navalny in 2010. I still remember that bold young man, freshly returned from Yale, walking into my office with the exclamation, “At last, I’ve made it to my beloved TV Rain!” At the time, I was running Russia’s only opposition TV station. Navalny was trying to speak like Barack Obama—though it came off a bit exaggerated. But soon, he learned how to be a true politician. The following decade, from 2010 to 2020, was the most active, most remarkable period of his political life. During those years, he became Putin’s chief adversary, Russia’s most popular politician, and a hero to young Russians. He infuriated thousands of officials and fell out with hundreds of journalists.

Navalny during these years was sharp, biting, sarcastic—but in the book, he doesn’t have time for these details. He’s racing against death, unsure if he’ll be killed tomorrow.

He completes the story up until his imprisonment. And at this moment, the next part of the book begins. It’s a completely different kind of literature, and a completely different Navalny. What follows is his prison diary.

This part is terrifying, because he mostly writes about food. Every day, about food. He starts a hunger strike. And he still writes about food—now he’s truly starving, but refusing to give in, even as the prison guards slip candy into his pockets and fry chicken right in front of him to provoke him to end his hunger strike.

This part reveals a Navalny I personally didn’t know. I’ve never seen him like this. I can’t recall a moment when he suffered. A moment when he acknowledged that everything was terrible. When he was tortured and tormented—and no longer had the strength to smile.

In Patriot’s prison diary, you see a completely different face: He’s struggling immensely. Reading these lines is very hard. This fearless intellectual writes about food, food, food. It’s horrifying, but impossible to stop reading. And that is when you realize that the change in style is a precise reflection of the hero’s own evolution.

Navalny wrote many letters from prison. Some of them were published as Instagram posts. The English version of this book includes his most important posts. The difference between his writings is striking. When he writes for an audience, he uses every last ounce of strength to be radiant, cheerful, and full of hope.

In all these messages, he remained unfailingly radiant, always joking humorously, skillfully encouraging others, delivering aphorisms, and never letting on how dreadful his life in prison really was. Even his hunger strike was always commented on with a wry grin.

He also wrote to hundreds of friends and thousands of strangers who had sent him letters of support. He wrote to me too. All his letters had one goal: to uplift and encourage. He was delighted to hear that I was working on a new book, saying it already had a devoted reader beyond the Arctic Circle. And jokingly, he compared me to other Russian writers who had moved to America. “Be Nabokov, not Dovlatov,” he urged, referring to the author of Lolita, who successfully integrated into American society and found great success, and the latter—beloved by many Russians, immensely talented, but never achieving recognition beyond Brighton Beach.

After the hunger strike ends, the entries become less frequent. Navalny is constantly being transferred from one prison colony to another. He has fewer and fewer opportunities to write—they simply don’t give him a pen and paper, they don’t allow him to pass anything to his lawyers, and even his lawyers are imprisoned. Finally, two or three of his notebooks are confiscated by the guards—obviously, some portion of this book now likely lies in the safes of the FSB.

By the end of the book, instead of the daily short notes, he starts writing philosophical reflections—just one, every few months. This becomes his final testament.

He begins to describe how he’ll be killed. Then he reflects on how he should approach his impending death. He explains how he made peace with it.

“I will spend the rest of my life in prison and die here. There will not be anybody to say goodbye to…. I will miss graduations from school and college…. All anniversaries will be celebrated without me. I’ll never see my grandchildren.”

Afterward, he recounts how he prepares Yulia for his upcoming death.

“I whispered in her ear, ‘Listen, I don’t want to sound dramatic, but I think there’s a high probability I’ll never get out of here…. They will poison me.’

‘I know,’ she said with a nod, in a voice that was calm and firm. ‘I was thinking that myself.’”

And he joyfully notes that she understood everything correctly, that she will manage. His wife accepts the inevitable as steadfastly as he does.

In the final pages, “good old Jesus,” as Navalny calls him, appears—as a sort of senior cellmate, a fellow sufferer, a colleague who has also been through it all.

“Good old Jesus and the rest of his family…won’t let me down…will sort out all of my headaches. As they say in prison here: they will take my punches for me.”

The book abruptly ends; the main character has been killed, just as he had foreseen.

What makes this book a gospel is also the fact that Navalny explains clearly why he died. Because he firmly believed that Russia could be a free, democratic country. Not an empire, not a dictatorship, not a nation with some exceptional mission, mysterious soul, or unique path, but a normal country where people would be happy.

He is not going to be the political leader for future generations of Russians. But he might be the moral example—some kind of Russian messiah.

The book’s author, Alexei Navalny, is firmly convinced that its main character, Alexei Navalny, did not die in vain.