Narrator: On a flight from Siberia to Moscow, a man begins to feel a cold sweat. His focus blurs, his body feels like it’s short-circuiting, and a single, chilling thought crystallizes in his mind: he is dying. He stumbles to the airplane’s lavatory, splashes water on his face, and realizes with absolute certainty, “I’m done for.” He manages to tell a flight attendant, “I have been poisoned and am about to die,” before collapsing. The man was Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, and the poison was Novichok, a military-grade nerve agent. This was not just a medical emergency; it was a state-sponsored assassination attempt.

This harrowing event is the entry point into his posthumously published memoir, Patriot. The book is far more than a story of survival; it is a meticulously documented journey into the heart of modern Russia, revealing the making of a dissident, the mechanics of a corrupt state, and the unyielding power of a single individual who refused to live by lies.

Narrator: Alexei Navalny’s lifelong war against corruption was forged in his childhood, where he learned that the most pervasive toxin in the Soviet Union wasn’t radiation, but state-sponsored lies. His most vivid formative memory was the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. His family’s ancestral village, Zalesiye, was just a few kilometers from the power plant. While the world registered the radioactive fallout, Soviet authorities flatly denied the explosion, even forcing residents, including Navalny’s relatives, to plant potatoes in contaminated soil. For propaganda, they held a May Day parade in nearby Kiev. Navalny reflects that while the radiation was far away, “the hypocrisy and lies inundated the whole country.”

This culture of deception was everywhere. He recalls his mother placing a cushion over the telephone whenever his father’s friends began criticizing the authorities, a tangible symbol of the pervasive fear of KGB surveillance. He saw it in the absurd propaganda that tried to demonize Western rock music but only made it seem cooler, and in the chronic shortages that made a ten-year wait for a car seem normal. This upbringing instilled in him a profound distinction between his country, which he loved, and the state, which he regarded as an “annoying mistake.” It explains his rejection of nostalgia for the USSR, which he summarized with a simple, powerful memory: “A state incapable of producing enough milk for its citizens does not deserve my nostalgia.”

Narrator: When Vladimir Putin was appointed as Boris Yeltsin’s successor in 1999, Navalny saw it not as a democratic transition, but as a corrupt bargain to ensure immunity for the outgoing regime. This conviction drove him into politics. He joined the Yabloko party, seeing it as the only genuine democratic option, but quickly grew disillusioned with its internal bureaucracy, leadership cult, and fear of decisive action. His pragmatic belief in building broad coalitions to fight Putin, including engaging with nationalists, ultimately led to his expulsion in 2006.

This moment forced him into independent activism. Recognizing that traditional media was censored and rallies were banned, Navalny turned to the internet. He pioneered a new form of shareholder activism, buying small stakes in state-owned giants like Surgutneftegas and VTB. This gave him the legal right to demand documents and ask questions. In 2008, he traveled nearly 3,000 kilometers to a Surgutneftegas shareholder meeting. In a room of 350 silent, reverent shareholders, he was the only one to raise his hand. He walked to the stage and, with legal precision, publicly questioned the CEO about opaque oil deals with a company owned by Putin’s close friend. The management was stunned, but the audience applauded. This strategy, combining legal expertise with online exposure, became his trademark, proving that a single, determined individual could challenge the titans of the Russian state.

Narrator: Navalny possessed a unique talent for translating complex corruption into simple, powerful messages that mobilized the masses. In 2011, live on the radio, he branded the ruling United Russia party as “the party of crooks and thieves.” The phrase instantly became a viral meme, capturing the public’s deep-seated frustration. This slogan fueled his campaign against the party in the 2011 Duma elections, which were marred by blatant fraud. The public anger culminated in the largest protests Russia had seen in decades, with over 100,000 people gathering in Moscow.

His ability to galvanize grassroots support was most evident during his 2013 Moscow mayoral campaign. Just one day after being registered as a candidate, a court sentenced him to five years in prison on fabricated charges in the Kirovles case. He was handcuffed and taken into custody. But the live broadcast of the verdict backfired. Tens of thousands of furious citizens spontaneously flooded the streets of Moscow. In an unprecedented move, the Prosecutor’s Office, buckling under the public pressure, appealed the sentence, and Navalny was released the next day. He walked out of the courtroom and straight back onto the campaign trail, ultimately winning an astonishing 27.2% of the vote against the Kremlin’s incumbent. It was a stunning demonstration that a candidate with no state media access, running on small donations, could mount a serious challenge to the regime.

Narrator: As Navalny’s influence grew, the Kremlin’s response escalated from legal harassment to outright brutality. The politically motivated criminal cases were designed not just to imprison him, but to break him. The most cynical of these was the 2014 Yves Rocher case, in which he and his brother, Oleg, were charged with fraud against a company that explicitly stated in court it had no complaints. The verdict was a masterpiece of state-sponsored cruelty: Alexei received a suspended sentence, but his brother Oleg was sentenced to three and a half years in a real prison colony. Oleg was taken away in handcuffs, a political hostage. Navalny recalls Oleg’s unwavering support from behind bars, writing in his letters, “Don’t stop! If you were to stop, it would mean that I’m in here for nothing.”

This personal sacrifice was compounded by constant physical attacks, culminating in the 2020 Novichok poisoning. The assassination attempt was the regime’s ultimate admission that they could not defeat him politically or legally. Yet, after his miraculous recovery in Germany, Navalny made the deliberate choice to return to Russia in January 2021. He knew he would be arrested, but as he later wrote, “If your convictions mean something, you must be prepared to stand up for them and make sacrifices if necessary.” His immediate detention at the airport and subsequent imprisonment was the inevitable price of his defiance.

Narrator: Navalny’s final years, documented in his prison diaries, are a testament to human resilience in the face of systematic dehumanization. He was subjected to an “infinite loop” of punishment, sent to solitary confinement for infractions as trivial as an unbuttoned uniform. The prison administration employed sophisticated psychological torture, including sleep deprivation and placing a severely mentally ill inmate in the opposite cell to scream for hours on end. He dubbed his first penal colony a “friendly concentration camp” for its blend of unsettling politeness and absolute control.

Yet, they could not break his spirit. He used his time to read, study history, and memorize texts. He found humor in the system’s absurdities and drew strength from the thousands of letters he received and the news of his investigations reaching millions. He unequivocally condemned the war in Ukraine as a criminal enterprise started by the Kremlin to steal and cling to power. Through it all, he held fast to his core belief, which he declared in a court appeal: “Power is in the truth.” He believed that the regime’s greatest fear was a populace that was no longer afraid. His final message to his supporters, shouted as he was led away by police, was simple: “Don’t be afraid of anything!”

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Patriot is Alexei Navalny’s unwavering conviction that a regime built on lies is inherently fragile and can be dismantled by the persistent, collective pursuit of truth. He saw his work not as a hopeless struggle, but as a necessary job. His son, Zakhar, once described his father’s profession in primary school by saying, “My daddy is fighting against bad people for the future of our country.” Navalny called this the greatest moment of his life.

His memoir is not just a historical document; it is a manual for civic courage. It challenges us to look beyond the cynicism that paralyzes so many and to ask a difficult question: If you truly believe in something, what sacrifices are you willing to make? For Alexei Navalny, the answer was everything.