Patriot. Memoirs,
by Alexei Navalny,
Robert Laffont, 528 p., €25
Alexeï Navalny was, for ten years, the little stone in Vladimir Putin’s shoe. Then the Russian leader ended up crushing him. What remains is this 500-page book, written during the last months of his life: a few chapters begun in Germany, while the Russian opponent was being treated for an attempted poisoning. Then other writings in prison, and at the end, simple notes, a sort of diary, while the opponent is aware that he has little chance of ever seeing freedom again.
In this book, Alexeï Navalny looks back on his youth, that of the son of a Soviet soldier, a teenager at a time when the Soviet Union was unraveling. From this time, young Alexei keeps the memory of a happy family life. He seems indifferent to the changes taking place. Then it’s university: law studies, in Moscow. He is a carefree student. The future champion of the fight against corruption recounts how he sometimes paid bribes to pass his exams, a common practice at the time.
Then becoming a lawyer, married to Yulia, he became involved in politics with the Yabloko party which brought together center-left intellectuals. He finds them as brilliant as they are incapable of campaigning to defend their ideas. He is impatient. He wants to fight, seems animated by inexhaustible energy, a kind of Don Quixote eager to fight and who is afraid of nothing. He then launched an anti-corruption blogging activity on his own account. He does not mince his words, has a retort and becomes the emblem of the fight against the Putin clan and its billionaire friends.
Supported by a third of voters in Moscow
The more Russia lives in fear, the more audacious it becomes. He ran for mayor of Moscow in 2013 and obtained 27% of the votes, however far behind the official candidate. “It’s the last time that the government let me run for office,” he wrote soberly in his Memoirs. The rest is known: Alexeï Navalny was the victim of an attempted murder by poisoning in August 2020, organized by a team from the FSB, the security services. He is saved at the last minute and treated in Germany. Then he decides to return to Russia, is arrested at the airport, immediately incarcerated, and dies in prison on February 16, 2024 without anyone ever being punished for it. He was 47 years old.
From his writings, it appears that Navalny knew the risks associated with this return. But optimistic, he believed himself protected by his popularity. These posthumous memoirs paint the image of a courageous, rebellious, eloquent man, knowing how to take all events with optimism and a good dose of humor. We follow Navalny in his battles against the security services, enduring, skilled in exposing the turpitudes of the clan in power.
But this is also the limit of this book and of the character: he manages to draw up an indictment of the regime in place but never tells us which one he would have wanted to replace. We will not know what he himself would have done if he had been able, one day, to sit in Vladimir Putin’s chair in the Kremlin, as he hoped. Navalny simply says he struggles to live in a country « normal »without privilege, where everyone can live their life, take care of their family and earn their living honestly. He is critical of the war in Ukraine. But this only occupies a few lines of his work. We will not know, for example, whether he would have liked Russia to return Crimea to Ukraine.
He talks about his faith in a playful tone
We will also not know what was the driving force behind his fights. He barely says, in two very short passages, that he became a believer when his second child was born. But what role did faith play in his decisions and his commitment? He doesn’t elaborate, and instead chooses to talk about it in a playful tone, dodging questions with a pirouette.
So, at the very end of the book, Navalny describes himself in prison, and ends with his words: “I always thought that being a believer makes your life easier. It doesn’t matter if you really believe that some old guys deep in the desert lived to be 800 years old or that the sea split in two in front of someone. The real question is: Do you believe in the immortality of the soul and all that stuff that goes with it? If in all honesty you can answer yes, then why worry? Why mutter a hundred times under your breath words taken from a big book that you keep in your bedside table? Don’t worry about tomorrow: tomorrow will worry about itself. »
