Review of Patriot, by Alexei Navalny
A Master Class
If you do not know who Alexei Navalny is, in short, he was the oozingly charismatic father, husband, son, brother, lawyer, blogger and politician who sacrificed his life to take on Russian President Vladimir Putin for a “beautiful Russia".
He died in a remote “strict regime colony” in the depths of Russia in February 2024 aged 47.
At his political height he was declared the main opposition leader to Putin (and perhaps always will be). When he was later imprisoned in 2021, and never to be freed, multiple Nobel Peace Prize winners advocated for his release, in vain.
At his most famous, before incarceration, he was the Russian politician who was taken ill on a flight to Siberia. It was widely and immediately speculated that his illness was an attempted poisoning. The flight made an emergency landing where Navalny was taken to a local hospital in Omsk and where the authorities denied his wife access to him.
An intelligent woman and former banker and economist, who knew her husband’s political rise in Russia and popularity made him a risk of being killed by the regime, a woman who had already stood by him when he was held under house arrest a few years prior, she had watched him be put in prison many times. Suspecting that he had been poisoned, Yulia Navalnaya fought hard to have her husband released from the Omsk hospital in which he had been placed.
Of course this did not happen, the authorities claimed his illness was nothing untoward and that he would be kept in, I think for two weeks, before she could see him. The authorities even questioned why Navalny’s wife was so suspicious of them! Nothing to see here. Wait and we will give him back to you. But Yulia Navalnaya knew that the authorities were keeping him and waiting for him to die, and for traces of what he was poisoned with to disappear.
Luckily, a German charity stepped in, as did Angela Merkel, and within two days he was flown to Berlin, where German authorities claimed that Navalny had been poisoned with Novichok, and not, as it was being claimed on Russian TV, as having had too much to drink.
NOVICHOK
If you don’t know what Novichok is, start with googling Salisbury Poisonings. This is a wild story, and although a digression from discussing the important work in Patriot, it is worthy of a mention in this Substack.
On March 4, 2018 Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal were found on a park bench collapsed. Salisbury is a town with a medieval cathedral in England.
Sergei Skripal had been accused of being an MI6 spy and jailed in Russia in 2006. In 2010 he was released and it was arranged that he settle in the UK in 2010, hence he was living in Salisbury. Yulia, his daughter was simply visiting him in Salisbury and had arrived in the UK just a day before from Russia. It is important to note that Skripal’s wife and son had died in the two years previous.
Found slumped, Sergei and Yulia were taken to hospital where doctors could not decipher what had happened to them. It was initially thought that it was a fentanyl and an opioid overdose yet their symptoms were too extreme for such diagnosis. Doctors soon suspected a nerve agent was involved. Sergei and Yulia survived. But sadly Dawn Sturgess did not.
What? Who is Dawn?
She was a British woman who died from Novichok just over 4 months later. Unlike the Skripals, she had no connection to Russia and no connection to the Skripals, but she did live only seven miles from Salisbury in Amesbury. Having read Patriot I can confidently now guess that Navalny, who writes so whimsically about British history from his prison cell, would have had a lot of fun with these rhyming English town names.
Sturgess was exposed to Novichok not because she was a covert spy or enemy to Russia, but because her husband had gifted her a perfume bottle that he had found in a charity bin. You cannot make this up.
He found it on 27 June, his wife opened it to apply it on 30 June, and she sadly died on 8 July.
Novichok is not to be underestimated.
The bottle Dawn Sturgess was given apparently had enough to kill thousands. Having read extensively about Novichok, it makes you vomit, convulse, your body rigid and eyes bulge.
The Skripals were poisoned through Novichok placed on a door knob of their home. I know that this is a review of Navalny’s Patriot, but can’t just stop there on the Skripals. It has been revealed that one of the reasons Sergei Skripal who was very old survived, was because he vomited at a precise point when the paramedic was reaching to administer him naloxone which is what medics use when presented with someone they believe may have taken an opioid overdose. Thanks to Sergei’s vomiting profusely which is a classic effect of Novichok, the paramedic was distracted and by mistake reached for atropine not naloxone in his drugs bag, which happens to be a more effective drug to counter Novichok. This helped Sergei breathe and could have saved his life.
In a second notable moment in this story, when the Skripals survived it was reported they had been resettled to New Zealand. Have any of you NZ readers seen them I wonder?
But third, what I find most interesting and very funny about this case, and an important pre setting to Navalny’s account of his life in Russia, which he has also littered with humour, is the Russian TV interview that was released of the two men that the British authorities believed to be members of Russia’s GRU military spy agency, who they believe committed the poisonings.
The British authorities had looked at CCTV footage around the time of the poisonings and it picked up two men that they thought were connected to the poisoning. They released the footage. The two men managed to fly back to Russia and bizarrely, turned up on Russian TV being asked questions about their involvement in the poisonings.
A still image taken from a video released by the RT TV shows two Russian men who say they are Ruslan Boshirov (left) and Alexander Petrov. British police accuse the pair of being intelligence officers who tried to kill former KGB spy Sergei Skripal.
RT via Reuters
Their interview was so poor it was hilarious.
They look very similar to the men in the video. They said they were suggested to visit Salisbury on a short trip to the UK (seriously?). They claimed Salisbury was a famous European town and they were going to see the cathedral. They answered the questions so dodgilly. Who makes a trip to the UK, a short one, to Salisbury alone?
You would be in good company if you thought they were related to the poisonings and if you thought this was an order from the Putin regime.
PATRIOT - A Death-Oir
And so this provides a vital backdrop to what Alexei Navalny exposes us to in his death-oir. I call it a death-oir as he was approached to write this book in the time he spent in Berlin, recovering from the poisoning. From that moment onwards it became probable that there would be an attempt to poison him again either in Germany or Russia.
What made those odds even more likely though was that Navalny had already decided that he would return to Russia as soon as possible. What made matters worse was an investigation which he later was involved in when he prank called one the agents who tried to poison him in 2020, who admitted that agents of Russia contaminated his underpants with Novichok.
Navalny knows how to make enemies of the regime.
And, for many interested in this book, I know, that like me, you will be thinking why on earth did he return? There is no precedent in fact for a Russian who has criticised the regime who then returns. Look at Chess star Gary Kasparov. No one returns to Russia. But Navalny did.
And so Navalny begins to write Patriot in Germany in 2020. And it ends with him in prison as he was arrested as soon as he touched down in Moscow in January 2021.
Patriot is therefore a collection of chapters which get more and more anguished. It starts off as you would expect with the 2020 poisoning, his early childhood, life as a bachelor and student and then his rise to political notoriety.
We learn he has a brother who is seven years younger than him who is the first to go to prison for Navalny’s work in 2015. At that point, I turned to my husband and wondered how we would react if our youngest child, commonly seen as the baby, had to live out harsh prison conditions for being involved with their older sibling!
Navalny is no different as a man to the boy he portrays. He speaks out from the beginning, like all political giants, he grows up listening to his parents talking about it, you slowly see how his political views form but above all, what was an unexpected delight was the details history he gives of Russia ruled by Lenin, Gorbachev, Yeltsin and more. We hear about Glasnost and Perestroika. He writes accurately about the foreign people going to Russia and getting involved in running drug gangs. I was told about this by an Uncle of mine.
What hit me though is that he describes his generation as the “lost generation” and backs it up with an analysis of the Russian economy. This is a fascinating insight to his knowledge. You truly get to see firsthand how he thinks that Putin has held his people back, including him. And then it is not hard to see, when you reflect on Russia, that its people have not evolved in the way Navalny describes the countries of Ukraine and Poland have.
Without being OTT, every word is revolutionary.
LOVER
He is as bright as he is charismatic as he charms you with his discoveries of who is buying which house overseas (ie corruption) in Russia, how he used to buy shares in companies to expose them. It is all very slick.
From charm to love. I defy anyone not to bawl, knowing that he is now dead, of the chapter regarding how he came to meet his wife, which I understand he wrote in prison, at a point where he knew it was unlikely he would ever be freed and be with her again.
In this video you can see him drawing a heart for her as he is being sentenced.
Below, Navalny, sending a heart gesture to his wife in a 2021 trial.
It is a pure love story and as someone who comes from a culture with the arranged marriage system, where many of my generation were “introduced” to people to marry, and admittedly, some have resulted in love and others look torturous, I couldn’t help but think what a master class that chapter was, in encouraging every person to fully putting faith in the moment that you meet the love of your life. I truly believe that if more people married who they loved, we would have world peace.
Yulia, his wife goes on to become a huge part in supporting his belief system and so his activism and at the end of the book he shares a beautiful yet tragic moment in their relationship when they both realise, when she visits him in prison, that he will never be freed. But in a pure Navalny way, he does not dress it in sorrow, he dresses it in love and optimism and happiness, This is only a moment that people who are in love, and who have found true love, will understand.
THE LAST WORD
Later in the book, we have what I think is the most powerful when he gives his “final words”, at one of his many trials, mocking that they keep putting him on trial, and yet keep asking him for a “final word”.
What bowled me though is how painfully truthful he is, even in court when he tells the judge and prosecutors that he only ever sees them looking down. It is a powerful speech that can easily be taken out of the context of Russia and even into the free world, where in essence we humans habituate to “looking down” and hence never make change.
In my own career, I will never forget the precise moment, a woman who was about to give me unfavourable news about my own employment later that afternoon, looked down when she unexpectedly saw me in the lift an hour before she was due to give me the news. I don’t remember the call she gave me, but nearly three decades on I remember that she looked down in the lift.
Later in my career, I listened to conversations about bankers. They would say that in order to progress in your banking career, you had to look away, not down though. Navalny’s speech in that trial, known as Yves Rocher, is a powerful blueprint for the world and for those of us who do not live in a regime.
On a whatsapp group I am on for one of my children, parents were recently discussing a questionnaire our children had to do which revealed what career they would be suited to. Amusingly one of the children had been told that they would be a prison guard. There was general humor that the jobs being suggested were not lucrative. I understood that parents want their children to do well and get good jobs, but in relation to that conversation, and later after I had read this speech, I told my children I value more that they not stay quiet and never look down than what career they choose.
FANCY A LATTE?
And so this brings me on to the prison diary part of the book.
It is harrowing, dark and merky, meticulous, but never ever sad. In fact he is so strong and brave that in every post and entry you know that he protects you from pain he is really enduring. He shows optimism at all times, his words have cheer in them, and despite spending nearly a year in a severe punishment cell where he cannot roam, be warm, lives in the damp and has only one book, and a cell he is put in and out of, for the strangest violations, he is still writing, and reading when it is permitted and writing posts for Instagram and his lawyers.
He never once gives up, he laughs in the face of the absurdity of the cruelty he is subjected to and above all he knows he has done nothing wrong. He talks extensively about Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs which he is at the bottom, yet at the same time jokes about the British history and the War of the Roses he has read in prison, mocking the Europeans and Brits for being obsessed with marriage (yes arranged!) and war and strange names for their kids! That is SO TRUE. I told you love and marriage avoid wars!
If you do not come away with a better grasp of history, you will certainly come away with a master class in prison torture, cruelty and regulations in Russia. If you do not glean that, you will laugh hard as to how he likens his conditions to the whims of the wellness industry who pay to be fed nothing, to sit in silence on flimsy beds in small rooms.
In one scene he chastises, always in jest, a letter writer who tells him he is depressed and he responds that when you have freedom you can do anything, so go and have your pumpkin latte and do something!
And finally, in addition to wondering why he came back to Russia to be treated so poorly, I also learned why he did this to his children. I mean, shouldn't he just have stayed in Berlin and protected himself and be a Dad? And lived?
And so this brings me on to the most haunting line in the book which is when he talks about convictions. It has been a long time that someone reminded me, like Navalny does, that unless you have the courage to back and enact and voice your convictions they are not convictions and instead just ideas.
We need this reminder as we have access to social media, to whatsapp, to a phone, to media, to news, but at the end of this book, Navalny has made me question what has all this done to our convictions? I believe it has silenced us.
And so, in relation to his surviving children, I welcomed one of the most joyous moments in the book when Navalny describes how his wife once told him that his young son was asked at school to tell his school friends, what his father did.
The boy described his father as someone who was fighting the bad guys to make Russia a better place. Navalny says it was the proudest moment in his life.
And it reminded me that we spend so much time thinking of what our kids will do, and how well they will do, but in having the courage of his convictions, fighting a regime, sacrificing his life, his freedom and every basic need, Navalny did the entire opposite.
He lived and died in a way no child could ever be more proud of when thinking of their parent.
I should add that he also has a daughter who is now approaching mid 20s or so.
And in that regard, as he is a feminist and I think he would agree, I recently saw a post on Substack where a writer, lamented, correctly, how hard it is to be a mum and a writer. There is laundry, feeding the kids, getting them from school.
I loved Obama’s memoir, but I could not help but grimace when I read that early in his career, Obama took off for weeks away from his family to write a book. Daddy is writing a book! Give me a break. Men who write books while their wife watches the kids. Now that should be a separate genre in itself. Isn’t that called Help Help Books?
And so I am astounded by how Navalny, the ultimate Dad, found the discipline to write his diary in prison with the trauma he was experiencing. How he developed the mental strength and all the while doing it knowing that when he died, it would be a source of income for them. That is a genre that takes him out of masculine literature. This is the Master Class.
Above is a random photo of us on Honeymoon in Russia in 2007.
PRINCE HARRY
When I set about writing this review I truly did not know where to start. It kind of reminded me of a review I wrote of Spare, by Prince Harry. You may think that this is an unworthy comparison, but seriously, both books have so much to tell you. They want to impart so much. Harry is related to the Kings and Queens that Navalny would have read about in prison!
But whatever you think of Prince Harry, he is in fact a Spare. And Navalny is a Patriot.
Navalny has so much personality, and he also comes across as having a temper, is a feminist, and addresses the far right nature of his earlier work. Yes he did seem to have issues with foreigners! In one scene his lawyers got worried that he was being too nice! I loved that. Navalny never let an opportunity go to speak up for people. Even when it came to prisoners rights he was incarcerated with.
Truly I did not know where to start.
AT THE TIME OF WRITING
Navalny’s lawyers, who we get to know well in Patriot, have just been sentenced for up to five years. They look gaunt just like Navalny did when he appeared in court. The story has not really ended. They will now undergo what Navalny did. Torture, malnutrition, isolation, biological warfare, sleep deprivation. And like Navalny, they too smile from the Russian glass cage.
What you learn in Patriot, is that the regime could not poison Navalny’s mind, they could not make him look down, they could not shut him up, they could not turn his family against him. Whilst it is not confirmed that he was killed by the regime, it is obvious that he was, likely by poison.
In 2020, he was poisoned with Novichok that shuts down one’s nerve endings. And I think in 2024 February, Navalny held his nerve until it was taken away from him.
Patriot - the last “writes” of Alexei Navalny a visionary of a democratic Russia.
I personally don’t think I can ever look at a latte again!
I hope you have enjoyed this Subtsack, and……..
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