Alexei Navalny knew what it meant to die. As the Russian opposition leader flew back to Moscow from campaigning in Tomsk, Siberia, on 20 August 2020, he began to realise that something “very, very odd and wrong” was happening to him. Cold sweat was running down his forehead and he could barely make out the words of his press secretary, Kira Yarmysh, who was seated beside him. “Nothing hurts,” he recalls thinking. “I just have a weird sense that my entire system is failing.”
Navalny had been poisoned with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok. As he stumbled towards the bathroom at the back of the plane, he was already becoming disorientated. He struggled to remember how to use his hands to turn on the faucet and splash cold water on his face. “I rinse my face, sit down on the toilet, and realise for the first time: I’m done for,” he writes in his memoir, Patriot, published posthumously. “I didn’t think, I’m probably done for: I knew I was.”
“When I am asked what it’s like to die from a chemical weapon,” Navalny explains, “two associations come to mind: the Dementors in Harry Potter and the Nazgûl in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. The kiss of a Dementor does not hurt: the victim just feels life leaving. The main weapon of the Nazgûl is their terrifying ability to make you lose your will and strength.” He staggered out into the aisle and lay down on the floor at the feet of a bemused flight attendant. “I am overcome by the impossibility of understanding what is happening. Life is draining away, and I have no will to resist.”
Lying on his side, staring at the wall, Navalny was vaguely aware of people running around and “exclamations of alarm”. The cabin crew, and the two colleagues who were travelling with him appealed to the other passengers for anyone with medical knowledge to come forward – one nurse, who has not been identified, attempted to help – as the pilot requested permission to make an emergency landing and diverted the plane to the Siberian city of Omsk. “I have just enough time to think, ‘It’s all lies, what they say about death.’ My whole life is not flashing before my eyes. The faces of those dearest to me do not appear. Neither do angels or a dazzling light. I am dying looking at a wall.” The last thing he remembers hearing was the voice of a “woman shouting, ‘No, stay awake, stay awake.’ Then I died.” He adds mischievously, “Spoiler alert: actually, I didn’t.”
Navalny was rushed to hospital in Omsk, where doctors in the acute poisoning department fought to save his life. Two days later, after intense international pressure and a personal appeal to Vladimir Putin from Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, to allow him to be treated in Germany, he was flown to Berlin in a medically induced coma, where doctors called in chemical-weapons specialists from the German military and later confirmed that traces of Novichok had been found in his blood. As he slowly recovered over the weeks that followed – an agonising process that involved learning to speak, write and walk again, with armed guards posted outside his hospital ward – he realised that the indecipherable symbols that kept appearing on the whiteboard next to his bed were hearts, and that Yulia had been adding a new one when she visited every day.
Together with colleagues at his Anti-Corruption Foundation, Navalny began to investigate the poisoning, tracking down members of the Federal Security Service (FSB) team that had allegedly taken part in the operation. He also began to write his memoir. “If everything ends badly, this will be the point at which my more emotional readers may shed a tear,” Navalny writes as he subsequently reflects on his reasons for writing on the book. “Oh my God, he could see it all coming; imagine how that must have felt!” Apologising for sounding “overly dramatic”, he writes that “if they do finally whack me, the book will be my memorial.”
With the dark humour that characterised his political campaigns, and that permeates his memoir, Navalny ponders how his eventual death might drive sales, and help to support his family with the resulting royalties. “The book’s author has been murdered by a villainous president; what more could the marketing department ask for?”
Alexei Navalny grew up in a military family, moving between the garrison towns that ringed Moscow with anti-missile defences meant to protect the Soviet capital from attack by the “aggressive Nato military bloc”. He was born in 1976 and recalls the Chernobyl nuclear power-plant disaster a decade later, in 1986, when the Soviet leadership attempted to cover up the scale of the catastrophe. This included sending people from the surrounding villages, where some of Navalny’s relatives lived, to plant potatoes in the fields, even though they were now covered with radioactive fallout, “to avoid spreading panic among the population”. It was a formative experience for Navalny. “The standard and completely moronic response of the Soviet – and subsequently of the Russian – authorities to any crisis is to decide that it is in the interests of the population that they should be lied to endlessly.”
As a child, Navalny enjoyed the “relatively easy access to stuff you could fire and blow up” that came with living near a military base. “My parents turned a blind eye to my pyrotechnical explosive experiments,” he writes, “unaware of their true scale until the day I invited my father to explode a bomb I had made on our balcony.” His “most cherished treasure” was two empty cans of imported beer, “so beautiful and alien that everyone, not only children who came to visit, but adults too, picked them up and admired them”.
He noticed how the soldiers painted the grass green before inspection and how his mother would place a cushion over the telephone when friends came round for a drink and started criticising the authorities. “My family had a deep love of our country and was exceedingly patriotic,” he explains. “Nobody, however, had any time for the state, which was regarded as a kind of annoying mistake – one we ourselves had made, but a mistake nevertheless.” Russians, he later concluded, were “a good people with a bad state.”
When Vladimir Putin was appointed acting president on New Year’s Eve 1999 – eight years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and after the tumultuous transition to democracy and a market economy that followed – Navalny was a young property lawyer working in Moscow. “Far from sharing any enthusiasm about the country’s new ‘energetic leader,’ I kept thinking, ‘He never stops lying, just as it was in my childhood.’” Navalny joined the liberal “Yabloko” (Apple) party, volunteering on campaigns as a lawyer. He met his future wife, Yulia, on a company trip to Turkey, where they were introduced to each other by a colleague at a bowling alley, and had their first date at a water park. (“This is the one,” Navalny remembers thinking when he first saw Yulia. “This is the girl I will marry.”) They married and had two children, Dasha, who is now 23, and Zakhar, who is 16. Becoming a father transformed him from a “dyed-in-the-wool atheist” into “a religious person” as he could not reconcile himself to the idea that his children were “only a matter of biology”.
Appalled by the corruption he witnessed around him, Navalny was drawn to politics “to fight against people who are wrecking my country, are incapable of improving our lives, and act solely in their own interests”. After becoming disillusioned with the leadership of Yabloko, he hoped to see a “politician appear who would undertake all sorts of needed, interesting projects and cooperate directly with the Russian people… I waited and waited, and one day I realised I could be that person myself.”
Navalny made his name as an anti-corruption activist. He bought shares in some of Russia’s leading companies to enable him to attend shareholder meetings and access internal documents, publishing the results on his popular LiveJournal blog. He emerged as one of the most charismatic opposition leaders during the mass protest movement that followed rigged parliamentary elections in the winter of 2011-12, and ran for mayor of Moscow in 2013 (he won 27 per cent of the vote despite allegations of rigging and being largely excluded from state television). He attempted to run for the presidency in 2018, but was barred from taking part.
As Navalny’s profile rose, so too did the harassment. His organisation’s offices were repeatedly raided, he was attacked with a green liquid that almost blinded him in one eye, and he was tried in one sham court case after another. “The pressure grew year by year, and by 2019 arrests and searches had become part of our daily lives,” he writes. “Our hipster office remained just as hipsterish, only now the riot police sawed through the door with a chainsaw, burst in with semi-automatic weapons, and made everyone lie on the floor.”
Still, even after the assassination attempt that almost killed him in 2020, he refused to be cowed. “What a dumb question,” he responded from his hospital bed when asked whether he planned to go back to Russia. “Of course I will.” During a family meeting in Germany, Yulia insisted that he build up his strength before returning to Moscow. “You know they may poison you again,” she said. “Let’s make sure you go back so physically fit that if it happens, you have at least some chance of surviving.”
On 17 January 2021, he boarded a plane with Yulia, trailed by dozens of journalists, and flew back to the Russian capital. They understood there was a chance that he might be arrested for failing to abide by the terms of a previous suspended sentence – he had been unable to register with the police as required while he was in a coma and recovering from the poisoning – but Navalny believed that would be “too cynical”, even by the Kremlin’s standards. “Putin is nuts, but he’s not going to be crazy enough to create a major incident by arresting me at the airport,” he thought. This is, of course, exactly what Putin ordered.
“Wow, what a dramatic turn in my book,” Navalny writes from his bare concrete cell shortly after returning to Russia. “My last chapter was written in a beautiful house in Freiburg, Germany. This chapter is being written in prison.” In a series of farcical court trials during the months and years that follow, he is sentenced to ever longer prison terms, to be served in ever harsher conditions, as he laments that what was “originally an autobiography with an intriguing thriller about uncovering an assassination attempt using chemical weapons, has turned into a prison diary. It’s a genre so saturated with clichés that it’s impossible not to write them.”
At first, he is able to get hold of notebooks and smuggle them out during meetings with his lawyers. But as the prison authorities devise ever more creative ways to try to break him – requiring him to work at a sewing machine for seven hours straight then sit for several hours on a wooden bench beneath a portrait of Putin – he is eventually limited to just half an hour with a pen and paper each day, and much of what he writes is “moronically confiscated”. He is repeatedly confined to a punishment cell, which he describes as a “concrete black hole” that is “so hot… you can hardly breathe”, for minor infractions such as having the top button of his uniform unfastened, or walking without his hands behind his back. Other prisoners are forbidden to talk to him, and he spends much of his time in solitary confinement. “In a sense, this is the new sincerity,” he concludes, as he turns 47 in prison in June 2023. “They [the Kremlin] now say openly, ‘We are afraid of you. We are afraid of what you will say. We are afraid of the truth.’”
Despite the tortuous conditions, Navalny retains his sense of humour. In his final diary entry, on 2 September 2022, he recounts how he is locked in the punishment cell with the sole book he is then able to access, A Short History of England, which he describes as a “great read but completely unfathomable” as the rulers keep “stabbing and marrying, marrying and stabbing, and invariably calling their children Henry or Edward”. He amuses himself by imagining the FSB report that will follow from his notes, where he has tried to make sense of the War of the Roses, “warning that I am conspiring to engage in anti-government activities together with citizens Lancaster, Percy, York and others”. The rest of the book is pieced together from his social media posts, made using notes he showed to his legal team, and speeches he made during court hearings. But the authorities were intent on silencing him. In August 2023, Navalny was sentenced to serve 19 years for “extremism” and transferred to a maximum-security penal colony in the Russian Arctic.
On 17 January 2024, three years to the day after he returned to Russia, Navalny reflected on the question he has repeatedly been asked by prisoners, and even, quietly, by prison officials: “Why did you come back?” The answer, he says, is simple. “I have my country and my convictions… If your convictions mean something, you must be prepared to stand up for them and make sacrifices if necessary.” If not, he explains, “those are not convictions and principles; they’re only thoughts in your head”. He died in prison less than a month later, on 16 February 2024.
Navalny had long understood that this was the most likely outcome. He describes how he would lie in his bunk at night, imaging the worst thing that could happen and trying to accept it. “I will spend the rest of my life in prison and die here,” he tells himself. “There will not be anybody to say goodbye to… I will miss graduations from school and college… I’ll never see my grandchildren.”
The most moving passage in the book is his account of a whispered conversation with Yulia after his detention, when he tells her, “Listen, I don’t want to sound dramatic, but I think there’s a high probability I’ll never get out of here. Even if everything starts falling apart, they will bump me off at the first sign the regime is collapsing. They will poison me.” “I know,” she replies. “I was thinking that myself.” Despite everything the family had been through, he recalls, she had never once reproached him or urged him to choose another path. “It was one of those moments when you realise you found the right person. Or perhaps she found you.” They agree to “hope for the best, but expect and prepare for the worst”.
It is fitting that the book, which was compiled under Yulia’s supervision, is titled Patriot. In the end, it was Navalny’s refusal to abandon his belief in the “Beautiful Russia of the Future” that compelled him to return to his beloved country, delivering himself into the clutches of a regime that had already tried to kill him once. He was realistic about the prospect of Putin’s power crumbling any time soon. The Soviet Union had survived for 70 years, he acknowledged, and the Kim dynasty rules North Korea to this day. But he understood the power of his own example, as a political prisoner who refused to live in fear, and of his work to expose the wild kleptocratic excesses at the heart of Putin’s rule. His final project, “Putin’s Palace”, was an exposé of the Russian leader’s lavish lifestyle that has had more than 133 million views. Putin understood this too, which is presumably why he would not allow his most effective critic to live.
Alexei Navalny was the most credible opposition leader to emerge in Russia in decades, and his death is a devastating blow to critics of Putin’s regime. The Russian opposition movement is now in disarray, with its most prominent figures forced into exile. But Navalny hoped his sacrifice would inspire others in the future to continue what he had started, long after he was gone. “Victory is inevitable,” he wrote from his prison cell. “We must not give up, and we must stand by our beliefs.”
Patriot
Alexei Navalny
Bodley Head, 496pp, £25
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[See also: Alexei Navalny’s fatal devotion to truth]
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This article appears in the 30 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, American Horror Story