No matter what form it has taken—land of the tsars, nucleus of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or today’s All-Russian Federation—the place known as Russia has displayed an enduring capacity to spawn dissidents and an equally striking inability to tolerate them. This is not unusual for authoritarian systems, but in Russia’s case what stands out is the persistence of the phenomenon across centuries and widely varying types of rule, as if “loyal opposition” were a foreign substance rejected by generation after generation of the host organism. “We are a nation of optimists,” Zhores Alferov, a 2000 Nobel laureate in physics, once joked, “because the pessimists have all left.”
Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, nearly a million people, mostly young and well educated, have fled Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Some (men) sought to avoid the military draft, others (men and women) feared arrest for criticizing the war—or for simply calling it a war, as opposed to the farcical official designation of “special military operation.” According to the Russian human rights organization OVD-Info, over 20,000 Russian citizens have been detained since 2022 for expressing antiwar opinions, including online. Russia currently has an estimated 2,142 political prisoners and an additional 4,710 individuals under criminal prosecution for political activity.1 Prominent opponents of the Putin regime have left Russia for Almaty, Berlin, London, Tbilisi, Tel Aviv, and Yerevan. They too belong to a tradition that stretches across Russia’s historic incarnations: an émigré diaspora of unfettered speech, intense infighting, and political impotence.
Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most outspoken antagonist and a relentless optimist until his death at age forty-seven in a Siberian prison on February 16, 2024, refused to become an émigré. The title of his posthumously published memoir, Patriot, positions its author as representative of a loyal opposition—loyal not to Putin but to the patria, Russia. Published simultaneously in over two dozen languages, Navalny’s testament is a postmodern mélange in just about every way imaginable. It combines long-form autobiographical exposition with fragments of Instagram posts and diary entries. Its cultural references ricochet between high and low, East and West, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and The Amazing Spider-Man. Its protagonist’s coming of age is propelled by a ceaseless contest between hope and disenchantment. Patriot leaves one with the impression of a work unfinished—like Navalny himself.
Born in 1976 to a provincial family fifty miles southwest of Moscow, Navalny had a typical late Soviet childhood, not least in its eclecticism. His father, a military officer and Communist Party member, enrolled him in the Pioneers, the Communist children’s organization, and sent him to spend summers in rural Ukraine with his grandmother, who secretly had him baptized. His mother kept a concealed copy of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago at home. As loyal Soviet citizens, Navalny’s parents took a dim view of Leonid Brezhnev and were even less impressed with Mikhail Gorbachev, whose apparently egalitarian partnership with his wife, Raisa, according to Navalny, did not play well in “patriarchal and backward Soviet society.” The “henpecked” Gorbachev was faulted for his indecisiveness, verbosity, and deeply unpopular anti-alcohol campaign. Navalny traces his own disaffection with the Soviet system less to the foibles of its leaders, the USSR’s rusting economy, or the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster than to the “mind-blowing” Western rock music that “subverted me and turned me into a little dissident.” Condemned by official Soviet media as “immoral” and “stultifying,” groups like Kiss captured his imagination along with those of millions of Soviet young people. They were “much cooler…than the winners of our Song of the Year prize.”
In Patriot Navalny casts himself as a Russian Everyman in all respects but one: he was unafraid to criticize authority figures. Everyone, including his parents, grumbled privately about the indignities of daily life, but fear of the KGB kept them from speaking out. “I could not see what there was to be afraid of,” he writes, especially when it came to things that were “obviously true,” such as long lines for food and frequent shortages of consumer goods. In school he was a “show-off who thought himself terribly smart and undermined discipline…in order to get the girls to giggle at his jokes,” and he was unable to understand why his classmates feared their teachers.
Navalny read voraciously and got good grades, but not good enough to get him into a first-rate university. He settled for the law faculty at Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University in Moscow, from which Lumumba’s name was dropped during his first year. It was 1992, and post-Soviet Russia, free-falling into what contemporaries called “primitive capitalism,” had neither the desire nor the resources to prolong the USSR’s patronage of anticolonial forces in the developing world. (In 2023, with Putin’s renewed strategic interest in Africa, the university restored Lumumba’s name.) Navalny was shocked at the corruption he found on campus: parents bribed administrators to get their sons and daughters admitted, students bribed professors (usually with US dollars) to pass their exams, and “nobody made any secret of it.”
After graduating, Navalny worked for several years as a real estate lawyer at a large Moscow property development company, where paying bribes was a routine aspect of doing business, including with the mayor’s office. The “super-cynical attitude to everything, the ease, ubiquity, and general acceptance of corruption,” he realized, were ruining the country. Boris Yeltsin and other self-described “liberal democrats” who raised the hope that a genuine market economy would extricate Russia from socialism’s moral and economic bankruptcy appeared to Navalny as saviors. He became a “market fundamentalist” and a crusader for Yeltsin’s plan to privatize state-owned industries using a system of vouchers distributed to citizens who would then form a class of efficient property owners. It all turned out to be a lie: Yeltsin and his team, according to Navalny, were interested only in maximizing their own wealth and power. During its first post-Soviet decade, Russia became one of the most corrupt countries in the world, with resulting levels of wealth inequality significantly higher than in other former Communist states such as Poland.
Navalny’s explanation for this unexpected turn focuses exclusively on the moral character of Yeltsin and his entourage, who he insists were neither democrats nor liberals but rather “an unholy horde of hypocritical thieves and lowlifes.” It was they who, in the 1990s, deprived Russians of “the marvelous opportunity…to live the normal, civilized European life we deserve,” they who traded “the freedom of the citizens of Russia” for their own enrichment. One can understand Navalny’s rage: for years he had defended Yeltsin as a bulwark against a potential resurgence of the Communist Party. Now he felt personally duped. The focus on moral character allowed him to preserve his faith in the free market, democracy, liberalism, and the Russian people’s innocence, without asking how and why they had allowed their freedom to be stolen by a band of thieves. It reminds one of earlier lamentations about the evil, paranoid Joseph Stalin derailing the bright hopes of the Russian Revolution and the promise of socialism’s shining future.
Fighting corruption became Navalny’s mantra. Taking a page from the playbook of Bill Browder, the billionaire American founder of Hermitage Capital Management and at one point Russia’s largest foreign investor, Navalny bought modest shares in various Russian companies and then demanded corporate transparency in accordance with Russian laws on their obligations to shareholders. When companies balked at exposing their bookkeeping to the scrutiny of a petty investor, Navalny began to exhibit the tactical agility that would soon make him famous: he launched a blog about corporate misbehavior on what was then Russia’s freewheeling Internet and gathered a large following. As his biographer David Herszenhorn has noted in The Dissident: Alexey Navalny, Profile of a Political Prisoner (2023), he not only was quick to embrace new technologies but “had a knack for explaining complex transactions and financial frauds in simple, easy-to-follow language.” He also proved adept at using humor and sarcasm to make the hunt for corporate malfeasance fun. Soon he was encouraging his online fans to become sleuths themselves and to report all manner of corruption in state procurement contracts and other publicly accessible records. Evidence began to pour in, leading to the annulment of millions of dollars’ worth of contracts. So did donations from those eager to help Navalny expand his anticorruption campaign.
Which is precisely what he did, switching from blogs to YouTube videos and from corporate fraud to the unaccountable affluence of Russia’s political elite. Long before drones became a hallmark of the Russia–Ukraine war, Navalny used them to produce spectacular footage of the palaces, yachts, luxury cars, European vacation homes, and other accoutrements of Putin and the members of his inner circle (and occasionally of their offspring and mistresses). He presented evidence of enormous graft at the highest levels of government. As in his school days, he seemed immune to the fear that normally checks the impulse to criticize powerful figures. Targets included Attorney General Yuri Chaika, Putin’s press spokesman Dmitry Peskov, his prime minister (and briefly president) Dmitry Medvedev, his daughter Katerina Tikhonova, and finally Putin himself, with his billion-dollar palace overlooking the Black Sea. Sleek production and Navalny’s unflappable, can-you-believe-this-shit narration helped his videos go viral, attracting tens of millions of views—in the case of “Putin’s Palace,” 135 million views and 1.8 million comments to date.
Corruption was hardly new to Russia. The Soviet Union and before it the tsarist empire were widely known as places where bribes and illicit favors were woven into the structures of everyday life, if not quite on the Olympian scale of Yeltsin’s and Putin’s kleptocracy. To be sure, corruption is notoriously difficult to measure or quantify. In autocratic systems, however, accusations of corruption are a weapon for removing perceived enemies and thus consolidating the leader’s power. While the most spectacular charges in Stalin’s infamous purges during the 1930s were of espionage and sabotage on behalf of hostile capitalist states, the more common (and credible) accusations were of graft and fraud. China’s Xi Jinping has similarly used anticorruption campaigns to eliminate rivals, weaken independent power networks, and enforce political loyalty. In the latest sign of our own drift toward autocracy, President Trump announced on April 3, via Truth Social, his appointment of Vice President J.D. Vance as “FRAUD CZAR” of the United States, focusing “primarily in those Blue States where CROOKED DEMOCRAT POLITICIANS…have had a ‘free for all’ in the unprecedented theft of Taxpayer Money.”
Navalny, acting as a one-man securities and exchange commission in Russia, presented a double threat: exposing pervasive graft in Putin’s government while also breaking the Kremlin’s monopoly on the political use of anticorruption campaigns. Which raises the question: What kind of politics was Navalny’s anticorruption campaign meant to serve? Fighting graft and fraud was never just about stolen funds. “Corrupt officials don’t perform their direct duties properly,” Navalny told the veteran Polish dissident Adam Michnik. “Their value systems, goal-setting initiatives and motivations become totally warped.” Only fair and transparent elections, an independent judiciary, and a free press—genuine democracy—could extricate Russia from the scourge of corruption.
During Putin’s early years in power, Navalny thought he could advance these goals by working for the liberal Yabloko party. But he found it too elitist, too eager to play insider games, and too afraid of experimentation, in contrast to his own instinctive pull toward social media as a novel instrument of mass mobilization. Yabloko’s leaders looked down on ordinary Russians, whereas Navalny, the Russian Everyman, felt “at home with my former classmates, almost all of whom [were] in the armed forces or the police,” just as he would subsequently feel at home in detention centers “with drug addicts and hooligans of every variety.” “The Russian people are good,” he insisted. “It’s our leaders who are appalling.”
Democratic institutions alone, however, do not a politics make. In the absence of a more substantive agenda, Navalny initially relied on a default position: nationalism. The Russian people, who had long historical experience as the dominant ethnic group within an empire but none as a nation-state, became his political reference point. He was vexed by the plight of the 25 million Russians who woke up the morning after the USSR’s disintegration to find themselves an ethnic minority in Latvia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and other former Soviet republics that were now independent states. Russians, he notes in Patriot, “suddenly became the largest divided nation in Europe.” Unlike Putin, Navalny did not use this fact to justify meddling in the affairs of the country’s ex-Soviet neighbors or a policy of irredentism, let alone a full-scale war of imperial reconquest. Instead he advocated a right of return to Russia for anyone with an ethnic Russian grandparent, analogous to similar laws in Germany and Israel. During Russia’s 2008 war with Georgia, Navalny sided with Moscow, calling for ethnic Georgians to be deported from Russia and at one point referring to them as “rodents” (for which he later apologized). He also called, in terms tinged with racism, for tighter regulation of migrant laborers from Central Asia. In his quest to expand his base of support, he attended “Russian March” rallies held by far-right nationalist groups.
Most controversial, in light of subsequent events, was Navalny’s stance on Ukraine. After Putin’s seizure of the Crimean peninsula in 2014, Navalny expressed the view, widespread among Russians, that Crimea historically belonged to Russia and that its transfer in 1954 to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was a capricious act by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.2 In Putin’s hands, the claim that Crimea was a “gift” from Khrushchev echoes a much larger (and more threatening) claim that the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic itself was a “gift” from Lenin meant to secure Bolshevik power, even at the cost of ceding “Russian” territory. But unlike most Russians, Navalny denounced Putin’s use of force to take Crimea back. “Correct on substance, wrong on procedure” was not an unreasonable position to take, but it didn’t enhance Navalny’s popularity in Russia (where the exultant hashtag Krymnash—“Crimea is Ours”—became ubiquitous in 2014) and antagonized many Ukrainians.
Even more (unintentionally) inflammatory were Navalny’s early statements on relations between the two peoples. In the abstract, praising “fraternal relations” that link Russians to Ukrainians may sound benign. But many Ukrainians heard echoes of an era when they were referred to as “little Russians,” suggesting that the little brother lacked a distinct identity within the “fraternal relations” forged under Romanov imperial expansion. When Navalny announced, “I don’t see any difference between Russians and Ukrainians,” he may have thought he was taking the moral high ground (like a white American politician declaring that “when it comes to race, I’m colorblind”), but the effect was to suggest that Ukrainians did not constitute a distinct people. With Putin’s full-scale assault on Ukraine in February 2022, that notion became irredeemably tied to a murderous campaign to destroy independent Ukraine, the junior sibling who had dared to dishonor the imperial family (Putin’s “Russian World”) by flirting with Europe. To his credit, Navalny immediately denounced the invasion, expressing the hope that one day Russians would follow the example of Ukrainian protesters in Kyiv’s Maidan in 2013–2014 and “stand on the street in the cold for as long as necessary” to oust their corrupt rulers. “Whether such people will be found in Moscow,” he added, “is a question that only we ourselves can answer.”
As the sociologist Zeynep Tüfekçi has observed, antiauthoritarian movements organized via social media can quickly summon impressive numbers of protesters but often fall victim to their own leaderless “horizontalism,” which leaves them unable to adjust tactics, agree on goals other than large turnouts, or move beyond what she calls “adhocracy.” Navalny’s anticorruption campaign exhibited none of these flaws. Shrewd use of social media brought him fame and influence, but in 2011 he established the Anti-Corruption Foundation to translate grassroots activism into an openly political movement. He announced his campaign for mayor of Moscow two years later and for president of Russia in 2018. In the first instance, Putin used bureaucratic subterfuge in a failed attempt to keep Navalny’s name off the ballot; in the second, he succeeded. At its peak, Navalny’s presidential campaign nonetheless managed to open offices in over eighty Russian cities, often encouraging local candidates to run on his anticorruption platform. His “Smart Voting” strategy—urging voters to coalesce around whichever opposition candidate was most likely to defeat the candidate of Putin’s United Russia party—produced notable local victories in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Tambov, Tomsk, and other cities.
Navalny never lost his ability, as he put it, to “entertain and outrage our audience,” whether online or in person at political rallies. His dubbing United Russia “the party of crooks and thieves” became so popular that for a time the first thing that came up when one typed its name into a search engine was Navalny’s meme. On one of the many occasions when he was arrested at a street protest, he tweeted from inside the police van, “Our police wagon is Number 2012. Attention! DO NOT SET IT ON FIRE. Just puncture the tires.” He barely survived an assassination attempt by agents of the Russian security services, who managed to dab the deadly nerve agent Novichok, Putin’s signature poison, on a pair of his underwear while he was away from his hotel room on a campaign trip to Tomsk. After spending two weeks in a coma in a German hospital to which he had been airlifted, he began referring to Putin—who was fond of comparing himself to historic state builders such as Yaroslav the Wise and Peter the Great—as “Vladimir, Poisoner of Underpants.”
Such quips probably helped Navalny cope with whatever anxiety he felt as the Kremlin’s noose tightened around him. They may also have been intended to inspire his supporters to overcome their own fears. A similar melding of humor and indignation characterized the huge street protests against electoral fraud in Moscow and other Russian cities in 2011–2013, notable for their homemade signs featuring witty slogans and wordplay of the sort familiar to Americans from No Kings demonstrations, late-night talk shows, and countless Instagram posts.3 I can’t help wondering whether this genre of political humor, ubiquitous among global progressives, serves mostly as an escape valve for pent-up frustration, sublimating outrage at corruption and misrule into sound bites and memes rather than channeling it into political action.
Navalny was also capable of great earnestness, for example when invoking—as he frequently did, without a hint of irony—“the Beautiful Russia of the Future.” This future Russia would be “a rich northern country with a low population density, where everyone lives well,” by which he meant a life of material abundance, democracy, and the rule of law in a country that didn’t periodically drive hundreds of thousands of its citizens into exile. “Let’s become a normal country at last,” he pleads in Patriot. “That would be beautiful.” The sublime aesthetic of this vision signals its utopian quality—along with its detachment from history. The twentieth century, Navalny assured Michnik, “clearly demonstrated that all projects save for the European are unsustainable.” That would be news to China. Leonid Volkov, an IT specialist and chief of staff for Navalny’s 2018 presidential campaign (sponsored by the Russia of the Future party), echoed Navalny’s mantra: “My dream is for our country to become a normal European country, while retaining its identity and culture.”
A Russia that retains its identity and culture cannot, by definition, be a normal European country in the contemporary sense. Across Russia’s historic incarnations, an anti-European or anti-Western animus has repeatedly gained the upper hand; we are currently witnessing a particularly intense manifestation of that pattern. Navalny’s claim that the good Russian people deserve a European life sustained by European values assumes that most of them want such a life and that the reason they don’t have it is because their leaders are crooks and thieves. In a trenchant essay, the exiled writer Sergei Lebedev notes that Navalny imagined Russia as “an ideal community over which the past had no power,” based on
the strange notion of a society that experiences the oppression of an authoritarian regime but somehow automatically aspires to democracy and is in a certain sense innocent, historically undetermined, without, so to speak, a medical record. His “beautiful Russia of the future”…only needed to be unblocked, unveiled, unpacked, affirmed in reality…. He announced it with the disproportionate confidence of a fakir with a grateful audience that also wished to believe that you can turn over a new leaf without acknowledging historical guilt or admitting historical responsibility, without recognizing the stubborn presence of the past, without punishing the criminals and thereby severing the umbilical cord of violence.4
Patriot’s strangely flattened view of history—Russia’s as well as Europe’s—reduces deep structural problems, including corruption, to the moral flaws of leaders. It urges Russians to emulate the bravery and persistence of Ukraine’s Euromaidan protesters without registering the fact that their protests were animated largely by the desire to prevent their country’s subordination to a foreign power—Russia.
Should Alexei Navalny be understood as an heir to the Soviet dissidents? He didn’t think so, at least not until the final months of his life, when he began to read some of their memoirs in prison. Like many of their readers, he found himself wondering how he would have behaved in their circumstances, had there been no Gorbachev and had the USSR continued its gradual senescence into the twenty-first century. He hoped that he
would have had the courage to act and speak out the way the Soviet dissidents did, without receiving a great deal of sympathy or support…. That version of my future is grim, but it is the only one that is not shameful.
Soviet dissidents, in Navalny’s view, were noble failures. Mostly members of the intelligentsia, they were isolated from the surrounding society, bravely criticizing the Kremlin’s lawlessness but without aspiring to positions of power and in fact regarding themselves as operating outside of politics. Navalny, by contrast, aspired to be known as a politician open to people from all walks of life and a populist who campaigned for the highest public office. These and other contrasts position Patriot at some distance from the roughly 150 book-length dissident memoirs, beginning with the fact that it was published posthumously, unlike nearly all of them.
Its rhetoric, too, distinguishes it from the genre. Navalny peppers his prose with slang terms such as “dude” (chuvak), “cool” (kruto), and “nerd” (botanik), along with references to contemporary Russian rap and rock musicians, all signaling his youthful hipness. Anglo-American popular culture—terra incognita to Soviet dissidents—is a pervasive presence in Patriot: Leonardo DiCaprio and The Revenant,Hunter S. Thompson and gonzo journalism, Rick and Morty, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings.
Such cultural syncretism, a symptom of the post–cold war surge of globalization during Navalny’s youth, complicates arguments about his memoir’s implied readership. Soviet dissident memoirs, insofar as they included explanations of peculiar Soviet rituals and terminology, often seemed to have in mind an audience on the other side of the Iron Curtain; until the eve of the USSR’s collapse in 1991, they were invariably published there first, in Western languages and/or in Russian. The simultaneous publication of Patriot in twenty-six languages—a remarkable feat of marketing and coordination—suggested the disappearance of such distinctions. Patriot sought and reached a genuinely global audience. Or so it seemed.
To no one’s surprise, Patriot was banned in Russia. For a time, those with a VPN could download the digital Russian text inside the country for free, and printed copies can be purchased outside Russia. To everyone’s surprise, the Russian text turned out to differ significantly from the translations.5 Missing from the Russian version, for example, is Navalny’s emphatic fifteen “theses of a Russian citizen who desires the best for his country,” in which he condemns Putin’s attack on Ukraine, predicts Russia’s defeat, and demands an unconditional return to the borders of 1991 (with Crimea returned to Ukraine), full reparations by Moscow for damages caused by the war, and the criminal prosecution of Putin and other Russian officials by an international tribunal. The final two years (2023–2024) of Navalny’s prison diary are also absent from the Russian edition.
These and other discrepancies, which are neither noted nor explained in the various editions of Patriot, have triggered a storm of controversy among Russian émigrés, including accusations of political manipulation and bad faith. One commentator described the Russian and English editions as “two different books,” with the “castrated” Russian edition failing to highlight Navalny’s capacity to change his thinking. Another, referring to the inclusion of Navalny’s pro-Ukrainian statement in non-Russian editions, concluded that “notwithstanding the title ‘Patriot,’ the book is clearly addressed to the Western reader.” It is difficult to discern a logic behind the various textual discrepancies, which also include lengthy passages in the Russian version—on the Brezhnev and Gorbachev eras—that do not appear in the English.
What stands out most are the narrative and thematic contrasts between Patriot and Soviet dissident memoirs, which were structured around the authors’ quest to overcome Soviet doublethink and find an authentic voice. That quest typically involved a process of self-emancipation from silence (or whispering), hypocrisy, conditioned ideological reflexes, and the psychology of the underground. Nothing remotely similar appears in Navalny’s account of his life. His authentic voice, fearless in its defiance of authority figures, is already evident in the schoolboy “who enjoys making loud remarks.” There is no ideological force field from which he struggles to free himself, nothing analogous to the common dissident experience of reading Lenin and becoming disenchanted with Leninism. Navalny’s post-Soviet disillusionment with Yeltsin and the so-called liberal democrats is entirely about their personal greed and lust for power; his commitment to capitalist markets and privatization survives fully intact.
His relationship to history is also entirely different. Soviet dissidents lived in the shadow of Stalinism and were consumed with preventing its return. “The bloody past calls us to vigilance in the present,” the dissident mathematician Alexander Volpin urged in his samizdat leaflet “Civic Appeal,” inviting Soviet citizens to take part in the first “glasnost meeting” in December 1965. Patriot, as Lebedev notes, has remarkably little to say about Russia’s history, preferring instead to conjure the Beautiful Russia of the Future. The last page of the Russian edition of Patriot reproduces a handwritten message from Navalny: “Russia will be happy!” Soviet dissidents had an expression for that kind of thinking: pathological optimism. They had an anekdot, too: “A pessimist is one who says things are absolutely the worst they could be, and an optimist is one who says no: things could be worse.”
After being evacuated to Germany to receive lifesaving treatment following his near-fatal poisoning in August 2020, why did Navalny return to Russia? Seemingly everyone was asking this question. When the opposition leader Benigno Aquino flew back to the Philippines in 1983 after three years of exile in the United States, he emerged from the airplane wearing a bulletproof vest and was promptly assassinated on the tarmac by a member of President Ferdinand Marcos’s military. Navalny’s Western supporters were concerned: Did he not fear for his life were he to set foot again in Putin’s Russia? His supporters in Russia were also concerned, but many others were suspicious. The political landscape in Russia, he notes with frustration,
has implanted cynicism and conspiracy theories so deeply in society that people inherently distrust straightforward motives. They seem to believe, If you came back, there must have been some deal you made…a hidden plan involving the Kremlin towers.
Navalny’s reasons for returning were indeed straightforward: to remain outside Russia would have been unpatriotic and a concession to impotence. Coming from Berlin, the taunt “Vladimir, Poisoner of Underpants” wouldn’t accomplish much. Mocking a despotic teacher doesn’t count if you do it outside of school. In one of his late diary entries (absent from the Russian edition), he declares:
I don’t want to give up my country or betray it. If your convictions mean something, you must be prepared to stand up for them and make sacrifices if necessary.
And if you’re not prepared to do that, you have no convictions. You just think you do. But those are not convictions and principles. They’re only thoughts in your head.
Navalny flew back to Russia on January 17, 2021. Putin was subtler and more patient than Marcos. Rather than immediately destroying the man who, more than anyone, threatened to disrupt the consolidation of his dictatorship, Putin had him arrested upon arrival at Sheremetyevo Airport, subjected to a sham trial, and sentenced to a series of prisons, each more remote and severe than the last. The final third of Patriot (in the English edition) consists of selections from Navalny’s prison diaries interspersed with Instagram posts transmitted by his lawyers. The diary entries, too, appear to have a wide audience in mind—not surprising for an inveterate blogger. Unlike previous generations of Soviet political prisoners (brilliantly captured in Solzhenitsyn’s autobiographical novel In the First Circle), Navalny was cut off from potential allies behind bars. Over the course of three years, not a single other political prisoner appears in the diary. Prison did not become a “university” for him, a place to incubate shared principles and strategies with like-minded inmates. It was instead a place of mounting isolation and despair.
“There is a moment,” wrote the Belgian-born Russian revolutionary Victor Serge, “when those whose lives [prison] will crush suddenly grasp, with awful clarity, that all reality, all present time, all activity—everything real in their lives—is fading away.” That moment arrives in Patriot’s final pages, when Navalny realizes that “I will spend the rest of my life in prison and die here. There will not be anybody to say goodbye to.” The heartbreaking fragments of his diary trace—and on a formal level, mirror—the gradual crumbling of his seemingly invincible optimism, or perhaps its reformatting into a characteristically eclectic mixture of “prison Zen” and a Russian Orthodox faith whose substance remains largely unspoken—the hope of things unseen, like the Beautiful Russia of the Future. In words one assumes are addressed to himself, he asks, “Are you a disciple of the religion whose founder sacrificed himself for others, paying the price for their sins?”
In February 2024, in the maximum-security Polar Wolf penal colony more than a thousand miles northeast of Moscow, above the Arctic Circle, Navalny was fatally poisoned, presumably on orders from Putin. More than a hundred thousand Russians had turned out nationwide to protest his arrest in 2021; as a result of the wartime hardening of repression and the emigration of many of his supporters, an estimated 23,000 Russians, under heavy police surveillance, took part in his funeral procession, out of a total population of roughly 140 million. Four decades earlier in the Philippines, two million people had gathered for Aquino’s funeral, also under heavy police surveillance, out of a total population of 48 million. They sparked the “People Power” movement that culminated three years later in the toppling of Marcos’s kleptocratic dictatorship and the election of Aquino’s widow, Corazon Aquino, as president. Marcos fled to Hawaii, returning to the Philippines a decade later in a casket, to be buried.
No such outcome seems likely in Russia, despite Yulia Navalnaya’s pledge to continue her husband’s work. Notwithstanding the BBC’s egregiously mistitled 2021 documentary on Navalny, The Man Putin Couldn’t Kill, not only did Putin have him killed, he did so with impunity, above all from his own citizenry. Since 2019 the Kremlin has labeled the Anti-Corruption Foundation a “foreign agent,” then an “extremist” organization, and in 2025 a “terrorist” organization. Most of its staff have been driven out of the country by threats of imprisonment. Russians who donated money to the foundation, even before it was declared a “foreign agent,” now face prosecution. Three of Navalny’s former attorneys have been sentenced to prison, in response to which the Russian Federal Bar Association has maintained a fearful silence.
“He Does Not Lie and He Does Not Steal” was one of Navalny’s wittier campaign slogans. He was determined to show, contrary to long-standing Russian opinion, that one could simultaneously be a politician and a person of moral integrity. Patriot may someday inspire public-spirited young Russians to emulate his example, but for now it’s hard to escape the impression that it was precisely Navalny’s patriotism that cost him his life.
—May 14, 2026
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