The Russia Report
From the editor: Navalny sends defiant message from beyond the grave
The question of how to resist dictators is sadly becoming more and more relevant, and the late Alexei Navalny’s translated memoir Patriot is full of suggestions, although they may well lead to abject failure. At one point Navalny mentions that some people are held in prison for 27 years, referring to Nelson Mandela, but South Africa’s Apartheid regime was evidently less ruthless than Vladimir Putin’s and made the “mistake” of letting the resistance leader live until he could emerge triumphantly to become president.
Photographs from Navalny’s attempt to run for president in 2017-18 in Patriot
Navalny does poignantly consider the possibility that he could die in prison. After all, he had already poisoned with novichok in August 2020 and describes this episode and its aftermath, when he awoke in hospital and completely hallucinated visits from an imaginary famous Japanese neurosurgeon whose two-year-old son had been run over by a car, and the most he could manage to write was the word “fkuc”. At the time of the opposition leader’s return to Russia and immediate arrest in January 2021 he was also suffering from extreme back pain, and later went on hunger strike for 24 days until authorities agreed to take him for an MRI at a civilian hospital.
“Yulia has been such a help in this. I didn’t want her to be tormented by all that ‘perhaps they’ll let him out after a month’ stuff. Most important, I wanted her to know I was not suffering here,” Navalny writes. “On her first extended visit we walked down a corridor and spoke at a spot as far removed as possible from the cameras wired for sound that are tucked in all over the place. I whispered in her ear, ‘Listen, I don’t want to sound dramatic, but I think there’s a high probability I’ll never get out of here. Even if everything starts falling apart, they will bump me off at the first sign the regime is collapsing. They will poison me.’ ‘I know,’ she said with a nod, in a voice that was calm and firm. ‘I was thinking that myself.’”
Navalny attempts to accept the possibility of the worst happening and to his credit refers to the fact that he had a good life for 45 years, while, “Right now, dead civilians are lying in the streets in Mariupol, their bodies being gnawed at by dogs, and many of them will be lucky if they end up even in a mass grave – through no fault of their own. I made my choices, but these people were just living their lives. They had jobs. They were family breadwinners. Then one fine evening a vengeful runt on television, the president of a neighbouring country, announces that you are all ‘Nazis’ and have to die because Ukraine was invented by Lenin.”
If over the years Navalny made offensive comments about migrants and occasionally Ukrainians, in this book he only comes over as endearing, amusing and admirable. It’s hard to criticise someone who keeps his spirits up while writing a memoir that starts with a near-fatal poisoning and ends with years in prison, in solitary confinement subjected to an incredibly creative range of deprivations and torments, with guards and fellow prisoners strictly forbidden to speak to him or even acknowledge him. Navalny survives by savouring every cup of coffee and boiled egg, memorising the Sermon on the Mount in four languages, writing to his supporters and imagining that he’s on a spaceship headed for the Beautiful Russia of the Future. His belief that everything he has done is right keeps him going to the end.
The first half of the book is about Navalny’s life before prison, from his childhood in a military family (with visits to relatives in Ukraine) to qualifying as a lawyer setting out on his path of exposing the corruption of officials under Putin, going on trial multiple times on fabricated charges and organising campaign offices around the country to ultimately try to enter the presidential election in 2017. It was on December 24 of that year that the regime started to demolish everything he had built when he was barred from being on the ballot and his organisations were subsequently banned and designated as extremist. Navalny’s tactical voting strategy of calling on people to vote for any party other than United Russia, including the Communists, had little impact and exacerbated tensions within the Russian “non-systemic” opposition.
Navalny’s insistence that Russians are “wonderful” people and it is just the regime that is evil will rightly be doubted by readers. Was this his biggest mistake? On the other hand how could he have done anything if he thought his fellow countrymen were a lost cause? Navalny attracted millions of viewers on YouTube but at the same time Russians were being brainwashed by state TV, which he says little about apart from a mention that they were told Bucha was obviously a false flag massacre because it sounds like the word “butcher” in English. This seems completely crazy, but then you look at America and see how Donald Trump’s lies work in exactly the same way, on a very different population.
On August 4, 2023, after a closed trial inside prison, Navalny wrote, “Nineteen years in a maximum-security penal colony. The number of years does not matter. I understand perfectly well that, like many political prisoners, I am serving a life sentence. Where ‘life’ is defined by either the length of my life or the length of the life of this regime. The sentencing figure is not for me. It is for you. You, not I, are being frightened and deprived of the will to resist. You are being forced to surrender your country without a fight to the gang of traitors, thieves and scoundrels who have seized power. Putin must not achieve his goal. Do not lose the will to resist.”
Navalny died from the physical strain of his poisoning and incarceration or was intentionally killed on February 16, 2024, at the age of 47. He took on the Kremlin using every legal method available to him, but the regime had the advantage of being able to flout all law and morality. If Russians want democracy they will also have to be prepared to give their lives for it, but there is no sign that significant numbers of them want it enough. Nearly three years after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it is still overwhelmingly Ukrainians who are the only ones putting up a real fight.
Patriot by Alexei Navalny is published by Vintage, translated by Arch Tait with Stephen Dalziel.
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Russia attacks Zaporizhzhia and Kyiv, general killed
Russia attacked Zaporizhzhia with aerial bombs yesterday afternoon, killing eight people, including a one-year-old child, and injuring 42 others. Residential buildings and a medical facility were damaged. Yesterday morning people in Kyiv sheltered in metro stations as the city endured another drone attack that caused damage to blocks of flats. A Kyiv resident called Victoria wrote on X: “The Russian attack on Kyiv has been going on for seven hours now. There is destruction in most areas. One is close to my home. Many people have been evacuated from their homes and from one hospital. The attack is still ongoing. As I listen to the sounds of drones, I’m reading how Americans are relieved there won’t be WW3. To stop the spread of war, people need to stop the country that’s attacking, not destroy one of the countries that are being attacked.”
Meanwhile it was reported that Russian Maj. Gen. Pavel Klimenko, commander of the 5th Separate Motor Rifle Brigade, was killed near Donetsk when a drone hit him while he was driving a motorcycle. Klimenko’s unit ran a concentration camp for soldiers who refused to attack, and earlier this year his soldiers tortured to death 64-year-old American Russell Bentley, who had been fighting on the Russian side in eastern Ukraine. They also tortured music teacher Vladimir Frolov to death. Frolov had a disability and had been illegally drafted into the army.
Maia Sandu wins another term as president of Moldova
Maia Sandu defeated her pro-Russian opponent, Alexandr Stoianoglo, by 55.4 percent to 44.6 percent in the second round of the presidential election in Moldova on Sunday. The results were neck-and-neck until the votes of the Moldovan diaspora were counted. Sandu, 52, has been president since December 2020 and is a strong supporter of the country’s accession to the EU.
Courts hand down more treason sentences for Ukraine support
A court in Sverdlovsk Oblast has sentenced a 32-year-old engineer from Nizhny Tagil, Danil Mukhametov, to 16 years in a maximum-security prison for treason for allegedly providing information from Uralvagonzavod, where he worked, to Ukrainian intelligence services in 2022 and 2023. The plant is the world’s largest tank producer. Mukhametov was accused of giving Ukraine defence industry secrets in return for payment. In early October his 23-year-old wife Viktoria, who worked on the Uralvagonzavod production line, was sentenced to 12 ½ years in prison on a similar charge. The couple were initially arrested at a bus stop in Yekaterinburg in March last year and charged with “hooliganism” for allegedly swearing in public.
A court in Moscow has sentenced 34-year-old Alexander Kraychik to 13 years in a maximum-security prison for treason for allegedly sending 50 euros to a fundraiser for the Ukrainian armed forces in February. After a visit from the FSB in April Kraychik attempted to fly to Istanbul but was arrested on the plane before it took off. He was initially charged with “hooliganism” for allegedly swearing in the airport.
A court in Rostov Oblast has sentenced 35-year-old Yelena Popova from Rostov-on-Don to 12 years in prison and a fine of 500,000 roubles ($5,100) for treason for sending 7,000 roubles ($71) to pro-Ukraine blogger Arkady Babchenko, a Russian journalist who left the country. Popova was fired from her job at the Central Bank in autumn last year and asked to explain the transfer to Babchenko, which occurred on February 27, 2022. A few months later police came to her home and shortly afterwards she was given three jail terms for “hooliganism”. Babchenko has been designated as a foreign agent by Russia and included on the country’s list of “terrorists and extremists”.
Woman who dug up husband’s corpse released to go to war
A court in Voronezh has closed a case against notary Yelena Pobedova, who was accused of digging up her husband’s body together with her lover and burning it three years ago. Pobedova was allowed to sign a contract with the Defence Ministry to go to the war in Ukraine. Her accomplice Sergei Polishchuk was sentenced to 2 ½ years in prison and ordered to pay compensation of a million roubles ($10,200) to the family of the dead man, Maxim Fomenko. Pobedova had sent a video of the burning of Fomenko’s body to his father, saying that she was fulfilling his final wishes. She claimed he had wanted to be cremated and would be uncomfortable under the ground.
American admits being spy for Russia in Ukraine
US citizen Daniel Martindale has appeared at a press conference in Moscow and announced that he was a spy for Russia in eastern Ukraine. Martindale said he had worked as a missionary and held up his US passport and birth certificate. While in Donetsk Oblast he made contact with Russian forces via Telegram and gave them the location of Ukrainian infrastructure for two years. Russia reportedly used a drone to supply Martindale with a phone. “For the last two years I have done everything to save the lives of Russian soldiers and ensure some kind of future for Russians in Ukraine. I would like to continue doing this,” he said.