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: why do Russian oligarchs have immense estates when their Polish or Czech counterparts live normal lives?

Post-collapse, he begins as a young Yeltsinite then switches to the democratic party Yabloko, where he realises all established parties, even the opposition, are either irredeemably complacent or corrupt. With the existing media as compromised as the political class, he tries direct politics, hosting live debates big enough to attract Putin’s thugs who throw Nazi salutes and intimidate venue owners. These, he invites on stage to debate him.

Shut out from conventional politics, Navalny’s ascent becomes a tech story, another Arab Spring transplanted north. Unlike the Chinese government, the Kremlin acted like the sclerotic Arab regimes who never took the internet seriously until it was too late.

While moonlighting as a lawyer, Navalny investigates corruption, blogging his findings on LiveJournal. There was no shortage of material in a chaotic epoch where the plundering of state assets by oligarchs was the norm. Navalny uncovers the embezzlement of billions of rubles. In Patriot, he downplays his bravery, consoling himself, his wife Yulia and two children, he was “too famous to be killed”. As his peers are cut down, he realises the fallacy but continues undeterred building an expert team from his followers.