It’s the oddest thing, writes Alexei Navalny in Patriot , his posthumous memoir and final political testament. Dying from novichok poisoning doesn’t feel anything like you’d expect. “Heart? No pain.
Stomach? Everything fine. Liver and other internal organs? Not even the slightest discomfort.” This numbness is total and terrifying.
One minute Navalny was sitting on a plane on the morning of 20 August, 2020, waiting for take-off on a flight from Siberia to Moscow with an episode of Rick and Morty lined up on his laptop. The next, he found himself lying inert on the cabin floor. “Life is draining away, and I have no will to resist.
I’m done for. This thought..
. fully takes over from ‘I can’t take this anymore’”. But Alexei Navalny did survive this particular attempt on his life, carried out by the assassins from the FBS, the Russian security service .
After an 18-day coma, he awoke in a German hospital, his wife Yulia by his bedside. It was during his slow recuperation in Freiburg that he wrote the first chunk of this powerful, extraordinarily eerie book. In January 2021, Navalny – by far the most internationally visible anti-Putin dissident, opposition leader and anti-corruption activist – returned to Moscow, where he was almost immediately arrested.
It was in captivity that he composed the rest, as smuggled diary entries and scraps of gnomic pronouncements on Russian society, Vladimir Putin and the daily privations and absurdities of prison life. For .