“Patriote” is released simultaneously in “dozens of countries and in more than twenty languages”. Some 60,000 copies were initially printed in French.
France Télévisions – Culture Editorial
Published on 10/22/2024 5:40 p.m.
Reading time: 5min
Cover of the book “Patriot”, posthumous memoirs of Russian opponent Alexeï Navalny. (EDITIONS ROBERT LAFFONT)
Lots of irony to describe his punishment, hundreds of pages to explain his fight. Patriot, the posthumous memoirs of Alexeï Navalny, were released worldwide on Tuesday October 22, 2024, eight months after the death in prison, at the age of 47, of the main opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The back cover memoirs of Alexeï Navalny, presented as a “international editorial event”does not necessarily give thanks to the tone of a book combining lucidity and lightness, in which the opponent simply tells his story, from his taste for cartoons to his love for his wife.
Son of a soldier and an “economist”, Alexeï Navalny grew up in the USSR, where shortages were common and where the absence of chewing gum embodies, in his child’s eyes, the “symbol of the superiority of other regions of the world over the Soviet Union”.
Then in his adolescence, the USSR broke up in 1991 and Russia was forced to convert to liberalism. Oligarchs are taking over entire sections of the economy, and Alexeï Navalny discovers as soon as he enters university the professors who are being bought and the omnipresent corruption.
“What is the probability that I would still be alive at noon? I don’t know. Six out of ten? Eight out of ten? Maybe even ten out of ten? I’m not trying to evade the question, nor turn a blind eye , or to act as if the danger did not exist But one day, I made the decision to no longer be afraid.
Alexeï Navalny, Russian opponent
In “Patriote”, his posthumous book
He says he is losing all illusions about the political elite. The president of the 1990s, Boris Yeltsin, is described as “dishonest”, d’“alcoholic surrounded by cynical crooks.” Dmitri Medvedev, who will take over from Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin between 2008 and 2012, is not for Navalny “not just a moron, but a guy corrupt to the core.”
As for Vladimir Putin, in power since 1999, he says “hate him”, “not just because he tried to kill me or put my brother in prison”, more “because he stole from Russia for the last twenty years” through authoritarianism and prevarication.
Navalny, in this book, recounts his commitment to the fight against corruption, and the repression he suffers in return. Censorship and its use of online media to circumvent it. His entry into politics, his first detentions. His convictions. And the popular support he enjoys.
In 2020, during a trip to Siberia, he suffered poisoning from the nerve agent which caused him “18 days in coma, 26 days in intensive care and 34 days in hospital”, as well as a long convalescence after his evacuation to Germany. He no longer knows how to speak or write. “My hands did not obey me”, “I still had to relearn how to walk properly.”
However, he chose to return to Russia in January 2021, where he was arrested as soon as he landed in Moscow. And the opponent recounts the bullying in prison, the refusal of care of which he says he is a victim while his back and one of his legs are “in poor condition”. The hunger strike that he observed for 25 days to finally obtain an examination by civilian doctors. But also the continual surveillance to which he explains being subjected and the placement in solitary confinement.
From August 2022, he was locked up multiple times in “Shizo” and “black hole in concrete” where it is sometimes “so hot you can barely breathe” but which most often resembles “a cold and damp cellar”, “a place of torture” where we go “constantly playing music at full volume”. In 2023, he says, we place in the neighboring cell “a madman”, who passes “fourteen hours a day and three a night” to utter howls that make “inflate the veins of the neck”.
In December 2023, Alexeï Navalny was transferred to a penal colony beyond the Arctic Circle. The cold is so intense that“you can walk for more than half an hour (outside) as long as you are sure you can regrow a nose, ears and fingers”he joked in early January. On February 16, 2024, the 47-year-old opponent was declared dead, in murky circumstances. His relatives accuse the Russian state of having killed him.
“These are books that are important to publish,” comments Caroline Babulle, of the Robert Laffont publishing house, which bought the rights to the work in French. According to her, some 60,000 copies were initially printed in French, for hundreds of thousands around the world. Patriot released simultaneously in “dozens of countries and in more than twenty languages”, the widow of the opponent Yulia Navalnaïa recently posted on X.
