MEMOIR Patriot Alexei Navalny Penguin, $55 The West’s Alexei Navalny is a sketch joining three data points: his miraculous survival from poisoning, his return to Russia and his death in prison. To Putin, he was another Rasputin who bewitched Russia with the promise of democracy and survived the Kremlin’s attempts to poison, smear and assassinate. Until he didn’t.
Patriot , his memoir, renders Navalny back to human proportions, a man who gets butterflies before public speaking, enjoys Rick and Morty , is sentimental about love and, from the birth of his first child, starts believing in God. On paper, he is instantly likeable, his humility and self-deprecating wit dress a steely core of political conviction, borne from the belief that the Russian people deserve better from history. The son of an officer, his childhood was spent in a closed Soviet Army town in the orbit of Moscow, which allowed enough freedom to blow up lazily disposed military ordinance.
Such fun was accompanied by a burgeoning realisation that the Soviet world Putin would later nostalgically evoke for political gain was deeply flawed. These he clearly understood: the hypocrisy, material impoverishment and, in particular, the corruption that stratified a so-called strataless society, all of which seeded the Russian soul with cynicism. Why Russia, he asks, when most other Eastern Bloc countries have emerged more or less functional? He answers with another question, one that became his political platform: w.