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.”
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