If you've ever wondered what it's like to die from a nerve agent (the type of poison Russian President Vladimir Putin is known to use against his enemies), I highly recommend Alexei Navalny's posthumous memoir, “Patriot.”
The story begins in the summer of 2020. Navalny, the charismatic Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption crusader, is on a plane en route to Moscow from Siberia, where he had been organizing candidates to run against Putin's United Russia party. He is watching an episode of “Rick and Morty” on his laptop when he is struck mid-air. He feels no pain, but his body and brain seem to slowly shut down. The physical world no longer makes sense.
Soon, he's on the floor of the plane's galley, lying on his side and staring at the bulkhead. He has been poisoned, he tells a stewardess, and is about to die.
“Spoiler alert,” he writes. “I actually didn't.”
The plane makes an emergency landing and, after a two-day pressure campaign led by his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, Russian authorities allow Navalny to be flown to Berlin, where he will spend 32 days in a hospital, 18 of them in coma.
However, unlike in the movies, he didn't suddenly wake up.
“The whole process,” he writes, “was like a long and very realistic journey through the circles of hell.”
A famous Japanese neurosurgeon was frequently at his bedside. The doctor shared a haiku he had written in memory of his son, who had died in his arms at the age of 2. The poem moved Navalny so much that he cried for days.
Later, Navalny discovered that there were no Japanese neurosurgeons, no dead children, and no haiku. He had hallucinated the entire episode, even the poem that made him cry.
“When I am asked what it is like to die from a chemical weapon, two associations come to mind,” Navalny writes. “The Dementors from 'Harry Potter' and the Nazgûl in Tolkien's 'The Lord of the Rings'. “
His memoirs are divided into two parts: an autobiography that begins with his birth in Ukraine and his early disillusionment with its government, beginning with his lies about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, which forced his family to move when he was 10 years old. ; and a prison diary kept throughout his three-year confinement at the hands of Putin.
Navalny's enduring idealism, optimism, and humor (even as he suffers terribly in a penal colony in the Russian Arctic nicknamed “Polar Wolf”) are surprising and inspiring.
“It's a real Russian spring day,” he wrote on April 3, 2023. “I mean, the snow is up to my waist and it's been snowing all weekend.”
She struggled to remain hopeful and refused to allow Putin to imprison her mind the same way he had imprisoned her body in freezing “punishment cells.” He called his coping strategy “prison Zen,” imagining his imprisonment as a kind of “space travel.”
“One day I simply made the decision not to be afraid,” he writes.
After his nine-year sentence for a variety of bogus “extremist activities” was extended by an additional 19 years, he understood he would likely die behind bars.
“I knew from the beginning that I would be imprisoned for life,” Navalny writes, “either for the rest of my life or until the end of the life of this regime.”
Russian authorities announced in February that Navalny had collapsed after a walk and died. No specific cause of his death was ever confirmed, but he was severely weakened from the 2020 poisoning, at least 300 days of isolation in a punishment cell, and lack of adequate medical care.
Navalny could have avoided his imprisonment and his death at the age of 47. After being poisoned, he could have stayed in Germany, or any Western country, with his wife and two children. However, in principle he returned to Russia, to his country, to his home, to his mission.
“It is necessary to save our miserable and exhausted homeland,” he wrote on the second anniversary of his imprisonment. “It has been looted, wounded, dragged into a war of aggression and turned into a prison run by the most unscrupulous and deceitful scoundrels. … I am not going to hand over my country to you and I believe that the darkness will eventually give way.”
Navalny's widow has been promoting “Patriot.” She told the BBC that she hopes to return to Russia to continue her husband's pro-democracy work and run for president one day. However, until Putin leaves, she would risk the same fate as her husband: arrest, imprisonment and death.
Appearing on “The View” on Thursday, Navalnaya was asked if she had a message for American voters. His response was diplomatic: Don't take anything for granted, he said. “You still live in a democratic country… and you make the right decision.”
Her husband was much more direct in a letter to a friend last year.
“Trump's agenda and plans seem really scary,” Navalny wrote. “What a nightmare.”
He knew better than most.
Rags: @rabcarian
