A brave final message to the world

Hopefully, the world is not forgetting Alexei Navalny, the fearless opposition activist and political prisoner who died suspiciously at only age 47 on February 16 this year while serving a 19-year sentence in the brutal conditions of a Russian Arctic prison. Russian President Vladimir Putin denies ordering the death, just as he rejected involvement in the demise of Yevgeny Prigozhin, Sergei Yushenkov, Anna Politkovskaya, Aleksandr Litvinenko, Natalya Estemirova, Sergei Magnitsky and Boris Nemtsov. They had all run afoul of the Kremlin.

But as Navalny writes, presciently, In this posthumous autobiography, much of which was written while incarcerated: “… there are a thousand and one simple ways you can be killed in prison.” Though, as his public profile grew, he reasoned that he had become too well-known for Putin and his cronies to risk killing him. “Clearly I was mistaken,” he foresees.

The book’s blurb suggests other apt descriptions for Navalny – “Leader, Fighter, Husband, Prisoner” as well as “Patriot”. We could suggest “Martyr” and “Hero” too. After all, Navalny made the brave decision to return from safety in Germany (or as safe as you could be in a foreign land from the long poisonous reach of Putin’s autocracy) to his homeland on January 17, 2021, knowing that he would likely be arrested on trumped-up charges.

But he felt that he could not ask his fellow Russians to join his opposition to the regime if he was not prepared to be on hand to do so himself. In fact he was obsessed with getting back to Moscow as quickly as he could. As he explains – “My family had a deep love of our country and was exceedingly patriotic. Nobody, however, had any time for the state, which we regarded as a kind of annoying mistake – one we ourselves had made, but a mistake nevertheless.”

Further, “There was never any talk about whether we ought to emigrate, and I can imagine no circumstances in which there might have been. How could you emigrate when your people is here, when the language you speak is here, and Russians are the world’s most wonderful people? A good people with a bad state.”

As the free world knows, Navalny was poisoned with the Novichok nerve agent while electioneering in Tomsk, Siberia, on August 20, 2020, and collapsed on a flight back to Moscow. He writes how, stretched out on the floor next to the plane’s toilet, his body shutting down, he thought he had died. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, and two days later, in a coma, he was evacuated to Germany after pressure on the authorities.

There, in the Charité university hospital in Berlin, Navalny slowly revived, hallucinating, mentally confused and physically uncoordinated. Finally getting better, he was visited in hospital by then-Chancellor Angela Merkel, who told him not to hurry back to Russia.  In all, Navalny spent almost five months recovering in Germany before returning. He was instantly apprehended at the Moscow airport Sheremetyevo and never saw freedom again.

It was while in Germany that he began writing “Patriot”, now translated from the Russian into English. It takes us on a first-person journey from his boyhood near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the then-Soviet Republic of Ukraine to his final days in prison camps.

Navalny was born on June 4, 1976, and says his childhood in Zalesiye, Ukraine, his father Anatoly’s home village, was a paradise on earth. Anatoly was an officer in the Soviet Army and the family lived in various military towns. One, near Obninsk, was a restricted-access city 700 kilometres from where the first Soviet nuclear reactor had been built at Chernobyl. After the explosion there on April 26, 1986, the authorities flatly denied any problem.

But even in Obninsk soldiers were wearing gas masks. Navalny writes how the disaster taught him, age 10,  that the state functioned on hypocrisy and lies. The authorities’ standard and moronic response to any crisis was to lie endlessly to the population. It was a rule – play down the the damage, deny all, bluff. The health of tens of thousands of people around Chernobyl was ignored in the cause of a big cover-up. It was part of his political awakening.

He offers much fascinating detail about life under communism – early morning queues for milk and food, travel passes, compulsory work in the fields, bullying in the army, fear of the security agency KGB and so on (a life with which elder Hungarians will be familiar, of course).

Navalny tells of the last years of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its emergence into capitalism during the 1990s, or rather “crony capitalism”, and how those in power have continued to defraud the state in the sum of billions of dollars. While communism had been built on a series of lies, so do those lies continue under Putin in a country built on corruption.

Navalny offers his appraisals of Boris Yeltin, Mikhail Gorbachev and the war in Afghanistan. He confesses his own faults, such as shamefully lying and paying bribes to pass exams, flirting with far-right nationalists for a while and his ruthlessness to those he abhors.

His entry to politics was a crusade to fight against the people who were wrecking his country, who were incapable of improving Russians’ lives and who were acting solely in their own interests. Without corruption, Russia could be a prosperous country.

His founding of the Anti-Corruption Foundation in 2011 made him Putin’s fiercest foe. The foundation is a cross somewhere between journalists, lawyers and political activists. When it comes across corruption, it examines the documents, collects evidence and publishes it. The regime was rattled and fabricated endless criminal charges against Navalny, banning him from running for office nine times in eight years. One prison sentence after another led to physical and mental torture, solitary confinement and no visits or phone calls, mail, personal belongings and warm clothing. Such opposition to Putin required resolute courage.

But Navalny built an operation that became one of the most vocal and effective critics of the entrenched President and his entourage. Perhaps he signed his own death warrant with the “Putin’s Palace” film, released by his team two days after his return and detention.

This asserts that Putin used illicit funds to build an immense palace paid for “with the largest bribe in history”. The property reportedly has a casino, an underground ice hockey complex and a vineyard. Also, impregnable fences, its own Black Sea port, own security, church, permit system, no-fly zone, and even a border checkpoint.  “It is a separate state within Russia. And in this state there is a single, irreplaceable tsar. Putin.” The film, seen by millions,  is a deeply humiliating portrait of “a madman… obsessed with money and luxury”.

“Patriot” reveals Navalny as intelligent and insightful, a man who understands and knows how to use the system. He can even find occasional humour in the tribulations of the path he chose and he isn’t sorry for himself. And he knew how to write, in quite a casual style. His prison diaries reveal the sickness of the thieves who run Russia.

“… if they do finally whack me, the book will be my memorial,” he says. We can only offer to read it and admire the man, though this is little compensation for the barbarism endured.

One of the saddest aspects of “Patriot” is that Navalny’s cruel end came when he had a deep love for his supportive wife and their two children. She offers the following –