Patriot, the posthumous memoir of a Russian opposition leader who died in prison, is scheduled to be published on October 22nd.
Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, who died in a remote penal colony earlier this year, said President Vladimir Putin’s rule ultimately “collapsed”, according to a posthumous memoir to be released later. This month, he predicted that it would happen and said it was based on “nothing but a lie.”
The 47-year-old opposition politician was considered the fiercest political opponent of President Vladimir Putin, who has energized the country in recent years and succeeded in organizing massive anti-Kremlin protests against abuses of power and corruption.
Mr. Navalny had resigned himself to the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison and dying in custody, according to an excerpt from his book “The Patriot” published in The New Yorker on Friday.
“I plan to 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…Every anniversary will be celebrated without me. I will never see my grandchildren again.”
Navalny was serving a 19-year sentence for “extremism” in an Arctic prison when he died on February 16.
His imprisonment and eventual death sparked widespread condemnation, with many blaming Putin.
In April, widow Yulia Navalnaya said she began writing her memoir in 2020 after her late husband was poisoned with what Western doctors say was a nerve agent and taken to Germany for treatment. It was revealed that there was.
The Kremlin denied any state involvement in his death while in prison. Before his death, he had been dismissed by President Putin and his political allies as a minor troublemaker destabilizing the country with US support.
Navalny was arrested in January 2021 after returning to Russia after being poisoned in 2020 and suffering a serious health emergency.
“The only thing we should fear is surrendering our homeland to be plundered by a band of liars, thieves and hypocrites,” he wrote on January 17, 2022, in an account of his later years. .
Navalny also claimed that corruption was destroying the country, adding: “The best way to elect leaders is through honest and free elections.”
He said those currently governing Russia “have absolutely no ideas” and that “their only goal is to cling to power.”
He wrote about his country’s power structure under Putin: “Lies and lies,” adding: “It has collapsed and will collapse.”
“A Putinist state is not sustainable,” he predicted in his book, scheduled to be published on October 22nd.
“One day you’ll look into it and it won’t be there. Victory is inevitable.”
In his last entry, dated January 17, 2024, about a month before his death, Navalny wrote: Solitary confinement. Of course I don’t like being there. But I will not abandon my ideas or my homeland. ”
The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, called Navalny’s writing “moving and courageous” and said reading his prison diary left one feeling “not outraged by the tragedy of his suffering and death.” I wrote that it was impossible to read.
“Mr. Navalny writes with ferocious moral clarity about the inhumanity of Vladimir Putin’s regime and the power of its opposition, the humanity of his fellow citizens,” Remnick said of the prose. The face of unimaginable loneliness, fiercely funny. ”
“Some people collect stamps. Some people collect coins. And I have an amazing and ever-growing collection of court cases,” Navalny wrote.
