Navalny expected to die in prison, according to his memoirs

Russia’s most prominent opposition leader for a decade, Alexei Navalny, believed he would die in prison, according to his memoirs.

A fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin, he died in an Arctic Circle prison in February after serving 19 years on extremism charges widely seen as politically motivated.

The New Yorker and the Times published excerpts from the book, a posthumous account of Navalny’s final years, including those he spent in prison.

“I will spend the rest of my life in prison and die here,” he wrote on March 22, 2022.

“There will be no one to say goodbye to… All birthdays will be celebrated without me. I will never see my grandchildren.”

Navalny’s death earlier this year was met with shock and anger from around the world, with tributes paid to his power as a political campaigner.

Many blamed Mr Putin. In the immediate aftermath, however, the Kremlin simply said it was aware he had died.

In August 2020, Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent at the end of a trip to Siberia.

He began writing his memoirs, Patriot, while undergoing specialist treatment in Germany.

Recovered, he returned to Moscow in January 2021 and was immediately taken into custody.

Navalny spent the remaining 37 months of his life in prison, during which time he kept the diary entries he had collected in his memoirs.

On January 17, 2022, he wrote: “The only thing we have to fear is that we will surrender our homeland to be plundered by a gang of liars, thieves and hypocrites.”

The excerpts trace Navalny’s declining health and capture the isolation of his captivity, with a touch of his characteristic humor.

About a typical day on July 1, 2022, he wrote: “At work you sit at the sewing machine for seven hours on a stool below knee height.”

“After work you sit for a few hours on a wooden bench under a portrait of Putin. That’s called ‘disciplinary activity’.”

Patriot will be released on October 22nd. American publisher Knopf is also planning a Russian version.

In its presentation of the exceptions, the New Yorker says that while in captivity, Navalny managed to get his team to post some diary entries on social media.

David Remnick, the magazine’s editor, wrote that it was “impossible to read Navalny’s prison diary without being outraged by the tragedy of his suffering and by his death.”

In the final excerpt published in The New Yorker, dated January 17, 2024, Navalny says fellow prisoners and prison guards often asked him why he had chosen to return to Russia.

The answer, Navalny writes, is simple: “I don’t want to give up or betray my country. If your beliefs mean something, you must be willing to stand up for them and make sacrifices if necessary.”