Patriot

May 1, 2024

The late Russian opposition leader Navalny began working on this memoir in 2020. It addresses the attempts on his life, includes correspondence from prison, and details his fight for Russian democracy. Knopf plans a global simultaneous release. Prepub Alert.

Copyright 2024 Library Journal

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 11, 2024
In this intrepid memoir, Russian political dissident Navalny, who died under suspicious circumstances last February, recaps his career fighting against what he depicts as a kleptocratic bureaucracy. After Putin’s rise to power in 1999, Navalny and his Anti-Corruption Foundation exposed massive theft committed by government officials, state-owned companies, and Putin himself. Navalny ran for office several times, including for the presidency in 2018; his campaigns were thwarted by bureaucratic interference and trumped-up corruption charges. In 2020, Navalny suffered a near-fatal poisoning, allegedly by Russian intelligence services. The book’s second half comprises Navalny’s prison diary after his incarceration in 2021; in it he denounces Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, gets convicted of more corruption charges, and weathers subtler torments (“The fluorescent light is now flashing brightly at random intervals.... It’s impossible to read”). His narrative is full of mordant humor—“in Volgograd, thirty Cossacks... tried to drag me out of the headquarters by my legs, while my supporters were pulling me back inside by my arms”—and Kafkaesque absurdism. (His application to see a prison dentist was “withdrawn by the censors as containing evidence of a crime.”) Navalny faces demoralizing injustice with good grace, enduring it with simple appeals to decency and poetic evocations of his homeland (“I love the melancholic landscapes, when you look out of the window and want to cry; it’s just wonderful”). It’s a stirring final testament.

Starred review from December 15, 2024
How one man took on a tyrant. Navalny suffered greatly during his short life as an activist and opposition leader. He required months of recovery after a near-fatal poisoning, he needed surgery on his right eye after an assailant threw an antiseptic in his face, and he was placed in solitary confinement and endured a 24-day hunger strike during his final imprisonment, which ended with his unexplained death on Feb. 16, 2024. As President Biden said in condemning Russian President Vladimir Putin, the man Navalny had tormented for years, "there is no doubt that the death of Navalny was a consequence of something that Putin and his thugs did." In reading Navalny's posthumous memoir--written before and during his time behind bars, sections secreted out of prison--one feels a deep sense of not only sorrow over the loss of such a magnetic figure, but also awe for this man's extraordinary resolve. His rebellion began early. As he recounts in his enormously appealing voice, he grew up in a family that talked politics. A formative experience was seeing how ordinary citizens were lied to by the government after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. And then there was music--"the crucial source of ideological sabotage that subverted me and turned me into a little dissident." Aside from reading, his favorite pastime was setting off explosives--a fitting precursor to the metaphorical bombs he would ignite in exposing corrupt politicians and tycoons who engorged themselves in the kleptocratic state that supplanted the USSR. Navalny was justifiably angered by the "unholy horde of hypocritical thieves and lowlifes" who steered his beloved Russia toward totalitarianism. That righteous passion empowered him, but so too did his irrepressible spirit--his humanity and his decency. Every page is alive with Navalny's ever-present humor, his self-deprecation, his affection for his wife, Yulia, and their children, and his empathy for fellow prisoners. Long after Putin draws his last breath, people will read this aptly titled book, an inestimable record of a heroic life, one that will inspire generations to come. A true profile in courage, written with verve and wit.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.