A Dissident Is Built Different

The story of Alexei Navalny is not funny. How could it be? We know how it ends. The Russian dissident died under mysterious circumstances in a prison camp above the Arctic Circle last February, alone, still fighting. He had already spent three years in brutal incarceration following a poisoning that had nearly killed him.

And yet, humor is key to understanding Navalny and his appeal. He stood up to Vladimir Putin, exposing corruption, but he also mocked and scoffed: a jester pointing and guffawing at the naked czar, excited by the chance to deflate men whose chests were puffed with power into tiny hypocrites and liars, asking how it was that these servants of the people were able to acquire half-million-dollar watches and secret waterfront palaces.

Humor also seems to be what buttressed Navalny as he faced the consequences of this courage, sitting in one bleak prison cell after another.

When the Russian state began accumulating criminal cases against him while he was already locked away, even charging him with somehow having “rehabilitated Nazism,” he had to laugh. “Rarely has an inmate in solitary confinement for more than a year had such a vibrant social and political life,” he wrote in his diary. When he undertook a hunger strike that dropped his weight to what it had been in eighth grade, he sadly reported, “I still don’t have a six-pack.” The small absurdities made him laugh, too. He managed early in his detention to order a large shipment of tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions, and was exhilarated at the chance to make a salad, but then realized that after all that, he’d forgotten to order salt. Arriving after an arduous two-week journey at what would be his last prison, in the far north, a land of frost and reindeer, he smuggled out an Instagram message for his millions of worried followers that began, “I am your new Santa Claus.”

This charm and good nature will be familiar to those who have seen the documentary Navalny. But now, with the publication of Navalny’s memoir, Patriot, the chance to hear his own written voice, to spend serious time with him (nearly 500 pages), only reinforces this impression, along with the pain of having lost him. He worked on this book fully aware that it could be his “memorial,” he wrote. And even about this he had a sense of humor: “If they whack me,” he explained, at least his family might profit from the proceeds. “Let’s face it, if a murky assassination attempt using a chemical weapon, followed by a tragic demise in prison, can’t move a book, it is hard to imagine what would. The book’s author has been murdered by a villainous president; what more could the marketing department ask for?”

Funny, though not really anymore.

The memoir is a chance to commune with the mind of a dissident. It’s not always a pretty or comfortable place. I even wondered if it takes a kind of mental illness to put the pursuit of freedom above your own physical safety and your family’s well-being. This single-mindedness is shocking to confront in such raw form. His example seems impossible to emulate, but the qualities he had in abundance and that gave him his superhuman willpower—the humor, yes, but also an unimaginable degree of faith—are important to identify, because they are what true dissidence demands. As I read, I grieved, not just for Navalny the man, but for the idea of a person like him.

Navalny first set out to write a memoir in 2020, while he was recuperating in Germany from being poisoned with a nerve agent in a nearly successful assassination attempt—Russia had reluctantly agreed to let him get medical treatment there. At first he was in a coma; then he had to learn to walk and speak again. He also began this book, opening it with his noirish account of being felled by the poison while on a flight from Siberia to Moscow.

In January 2021, after half a year of recovery, he decided to return to Russia despite knowing that he was certain to face Putin’s wrath. He was arrested at the airport, and his odyssey through the justice and penal systems began. He kept writing, but at some point his chronological narrative became a prison diary. As Putin kept stacking charges, the conditions of his imprisonment deteriorated. He spent 295 days in the solitary confinement of a punishment cell. He was allowed to use pen and paper for only an hour and a half each day, and then only half an hour.

[Anne Applebaum: Why Russia killed Navalny]

Because his circumstances changed, the book did as well. The first half is a classic autobiography, describing Navalny’s Soviet youth and his political awakening and fight against corruption, while the second half combines his diaries with the Instagram posts that his lawyers posted for him up until the final one, on January 17 of this year.

The most revealing question to ask about Navalny—the one he was annoyed that people, even his whispering prison guards, asked him constantly—was why he’d returned. Why, when he knew only arrest and very possibly death awaited him? The answer was “straightforward” and “simple,” he wrote. He had his country, and he had his convictions. He could not turn his back on either. “If your convictions mean something, you must be prepared to stand up for them and make sacrifices if necessary,” he wrote. “And if you’re not prepared to do that, you have no convictions. You just think you do. But those are not convictions and principles; they’re only thoughts in your head.”

The account of Navalny’s childhood in the dying days of the Soviet Union has the same slicing clarity. He describes how his parents used to put a cushion over their telephone whenever they wanted to have conversations about topics that seemed even remotely sensitive, “like the impossibility of finding Bulgarian ketchup in the shops and having to get in the queue for meat at five o’clock in the morning.” He could not see, he writes, “what there was to be afraid of.” As for Russians’ lingering popular nostalgia for the Soviet Union, he swats it away in a sentence: “A state incapable of producing enough milk for its citizens does not deserve my nostalgia.”

It’s fair to ask how much of this projection of a lack of fear or wavering is an invention for his followers. Even in his diary entries, he knows he has an audience. I found only one moment, in the depths of a 24-day hunger strike, when Navalny admits to feeling “crushed,” for the first time “emotionally and morally down.” Otherwise he maintains, again and again, a face both smiling and resolute.

If his state of mind remains obscured behind a mask of constant courage and surety, he reveals much more about his battered body. The diaries are a catalog of his physical well-being. They do not mention politics at all, except in the vaguest terms. This omission may well have been necessitated by surveillance—his prisons had cameras everywhere, even on the bodies of the guards who dealt with him.

What we encounter mostly in this writing are his physical trials. Navalny has terrible back problems, at one point losing feeling in his legs. His pain is constant, and the wooden planks and metal beds he sleeps on don’t help. The food and temperature are daily preoccupations. He struggles to keep himself nourished. It is either freezing or sweltering (“It is so hot in my cell you can hardly breathe. You feel like a fish tossed onto a shore, yearning for fresh air”). He details the degradation of the strip searches every time he enters or leaves the prison, the constant checks by guards who wake him up at night or make him empty his cell at random intervals so that they can rifle through his belongings.

This suffering has a Christlike quality—and Navalny knows it. “Are you a disciple of the religion whose founder sacrificed himself for others, paying the price for their sins?” he asks, laying down a challenge for the reader and himself. “If you can honestly answer yes, what is there left for you to worry about?” And once all of his books except the Bible are taken away, he even sets out to memorize the Sermon on the Mount—in three languages. By returning to Russia, he has presented himself willingly as a sacrifice, and by the sad logic we see unfolding in the diaries, every torment serves as further proof that he’s getting under Putin’s skin. His death, he also accepts, would be the ultimate evidence of the power of his truth—and maybe provide his followers with the martyr they need. When his wife, Yulia, comes to visit him in prison, he manages to convey one unsurveilled message to her, whispered in a hallway, and it is this: Let’s assume that I am going to die here, that I am never getting out. She agrees, and he is overjoyed that she, too, has accepted his fate; they embrace.

This faith helps him. For most of his incarceration, the other prisoners are forbidden from speaking to him. But he recounts a story about one man, Nikitin, afflicted with “religious mania,” who seems annoyed by the presence of the celebrity prisoner. One day, out of nowhere, Nikitin quietly hands over a laminated card to Navalny with the words A Prayer to the Archangel and an illustration of an angel. “Alexei, here take this and keep it with you,” Nikitin tells him. Navalny puts the card in his breast pocket and has a moment of his own religious ecstasy. The authorities want him to feel alone, forgotten. Nikitin has given him a sign that he is not: “the proof of that is fluttering its little wings in my breast pocket.”

[Read: Alexei Navalny’s last laugh]

The scene could have been written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, like much of the passion of Navalny, except that there are jarring reminders on nearly every page that this is happening in our world. Two prisoners watch Billie Eilish on television and argue about how old she is; Harry Potter is frequently mentioned; Navalny gets letters from young women letting him know that he’s been designated a “crush” on TikTok. Remembering his poisoning, he also writes about how much he loves the cartoon Rick and Morty, which he was watching on his laptop when the toxin took effect. At one point, he fantasizes about going with Yulia to New York City and eating oysters and drinking Bloody Marys at their favorite bistro, Balthazar.

Navalny doesn’t mention Dostoyevsky, but he does refer to Leo Tolstoy, writing that his favorite novel is War and Peace—with one caveat. He doesn’t agree with Tolstoy’s view of history, in which, as Navalny summarizes it, “the role of the individual” is “zilch.” Tolstoy used his novel to illustrate the idea that history is shaped by large, unpredictable forces and events, not by great men—not even Napoleon. But Navalny has seen the way that Gorbachev and Yeltsin and, finally, Putin have imprinted their flawed personalities on the country, how their proclivities have altered its direction, and he doesn’t buy the notion that a leader’s character doesn’t matter.

Navalny himself, his life and death, might be the best counterexample to Tolstoy’s theory. Who else but someone with such reserves of fortitude, with such a sense of self, with such an ability to laugh but also believe, would be able to withstand such indignity, such mental torture? He allowed himself, his actual body, to represent another kind of Russia, a freer country. And he did so knowing that he might never actually ever see it with his own eyes.