Russia’s Prisoner

ALEXEI NAVALNY, the man Vladimir Putin feared the most and who died the way enemies die in Russia, should have called his memoir, posthumously published, ‘Prisoner’. He chose to call it Patriot. Perhaps he knew, or the ghosts from the living gulag of Russia had whispered to him, that the difference was nullified by the personal history of dissent. In the story in which his death in an Arctic penal colony was not the end but a tragic twist in the plot, patriotism was the ruler’s doctrine, a character code sanctified by the revolution, and to cross boundaries, to let conscience play the part, was to obtain a one-way ticket to prison. Still, they were there, the original patriots who dared the Patriot with a capital P, the sole custodian of the state, and became prisoners, exiles and martyrs, and their names, from Mandelstam to Solzhenitsyn to Sakharov, make the glossary of Terror Against Truth a permanent reminder.

Navalny, as whistleblower and campaigner for freedom on Putin’s planet, told the world, through his social media exposés, that the reborn czar of the Kremlin had not abandoned the worst instincts of his Soviet predecessors. Navalny and his young team documented the rotten core of Russia under Putin, turning every punishment into a provocation, with the knowledge that Putin’s enemies, like the dissidents of Soviet vintage, seldom live long enough to celebrate their victory.

The reckoning reached Navalny on a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow after another assignment in truth-telling. From his window seat, he was watching Rick and Morty on his laptop when he felt sick. A few minutes before he collapses after telling the flight attendant that he has been poisoned and is about to die, he likens death by Novichok to 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 writes in Patriot. He won’t die midair that day in August 2020. That would happen four years later in the snowy remoteness in the Arctic, apparently from the old KGB technique of a single punch to the heart.

Elsewhere in Patriot, Navalny quotes his fictional hero, Dmitri Nekhlyudov in Tolstoy’s Resurrection, to make sense of his own existence as an eternal prisoner: “Yes, the only suitable place for an honest man in Russia at the present time is prison.” Navalny’s activism may not echo the quest for redemption that Tolstoy dramatises in his novel set in 19^th-century Russia, but the struggle against power, by prophets as outcasts, as a lonely road to confinement continues to this day. And it is always about the most disputed item wherever power is absolute. As Navalny writes, “The gang of thieves and liars headed by Putin shuns (truth) as vampires shun sunlight. They know I have nothing but the word of truth, and I’m not afraid to use it, even if they lumber me with a dozen more sentences.”

Navalny’s affiliation to truth has not made him a cheerless crusader. The man who bares his life and lamentations in Patriot can preserve his sense of humour even as death remains a constant possibility. The most familiar Russian dissident is the writer who wrote the wrong passages in a system where fiction was the privilege of the state alone. Navalny was the dissident who never lost the touch of lightness. He could make a joke even in the most dangerous situation. He had “abandoned yoga without attaining enlightenment,” and he would return to meditation now, with some guidance from another writer he admires, Yuval Noah Harari. A youthful exuberance, and a determination to appreciate the brighter side of life in his darkest hours, makes Patriot an optimist’s testament. Even as life slipped away, he remained thankful to its pleasures he could only imagine—with a smile.

We read Patriot at a time when the word itself has become an ideological marker in places where the ownership of the nation is the hottest political topic. Navalny died because patriotism in the country he lived and died for is preserved by jackboot nationalism. It could not have been anything but submission of the will. Alexei Navalny’s crime against the state was that he was too patriotic to let Putin’s version of patriotism go unexposed. “Lies, and nothing but lies…” Few patriots are lucky enough to see them crumbling.

Alexei NavalnyideologyPariotpoliticsRussiaVladimir Putin