Aleksei Navalny’s memoir Patriot (Knopf, 2024)—published posthumously by his wife, Yulia, and her team—reads at turns like a detective thriller, a horror tale, a love poem, and a bellyache-producing comedy set. On one page, the reader’s heart clenches as Navalny lies down on an airplane floor, ready to die, the chemical nerve agent Novichok shutting down his nervous system. A few pages later, the reader is laughing out loud as he finally writes his first post-poisoning word, hoping for the F-word but instead producing “fkuc.”
I began writing “humor” in the margins every time it appeared. By the end of the book, over half the pages had made me smile or laugh—though often through tears—the butt of the jokes first, the absurdism of the Soviet “system,” then Putin’s continuation of the Soviet legacy of oppression and corruption, and, finally, the prisons where Navalny spent his last years. Аs he describes his journey toward becoming the leader of Russia’s opposition to the Kremlin, Navalny makes fun of himself too—in stark contrast to Russian leadership, with its preference for self-aggrandizement over self-deprecation.
Navalny’s stream of satire is reminiscent of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who was an actor in a hit televised sit-com and then an authority-roasting comedian before becoming a politician. Perhaps laughter is the most effective shield when confronting Russian power. It may also be the secret ingredient that inspires us to read about and more deeply contemplate how authoritarianism destroys lives and nations. Because it is with particular urgency that we all must now think about this, and if we are going to dive into modern playbooks that teach us how to build grassroots resistance against corrupted power, our success in absorbing them is surely greater if we can laugh as we learn.
Navalny’s tragicomic memoir, which one might also categorize as his last call to action, accomplishes the feat of keeping the reader so ensconced that they forget the person capturing every ounce of their attention, intellect, and sympathy is no longer alive. Because on each of the 479 pages of Patriot, he is. With a steady stream of jokes—from Ronald Reagan’s anecdote about Soviet citizens waiting for a plumber for ten years, to his own quips during his final prison-bound days about Russia’s inability to upgrade even its snow-shoveling equipment—Navalny demonstrates an uncanny ability to find levity in the heaviest times.
Humor has long been the way Russian people make sense of the absurd cognitive dissonance of Russian life. In the 1980s Moscow of my childhood, hardly a day went by without someone relaying a new Soviet anecdote or two. Navalny masterfully weaves that satire into the realities of the Russian experience, all while pulling back the curtain to reveal the mechanics of Russia’s continuous undoing.
Beyond the jokes, Navalny offers a validating mirror to a Russian-born reader like me. His story of his Ukrainian family’s loss of land (and hence livelihood) echoed my own Ukrainian ancestors’ experience of getting chased off theirs. His description of people’s profound fear of the KGB, and later its modern incarnation, the FSB, evoked a mid-1980s incident, when a KGB agent knocked on our door after my father’s mother falsely but impressively accused my mother of being an American spy. And in reading Navalny’s musings about foreign chewing gumballs that, if you ever got your hands on one, felt like the greatest of treasures, I recalled cutting these rare delicacies into numerous tiny pieces to make them last. The authenticity of the details is palpable on every page.
Patriot also threw wide open a window for what I missed after my family left for the United States in 1990. The experience of recognizing both what one longs for yet also fears is complicated. On the one hand, I’m grateful to have been taken out of Russia and to have grown into an adult in a country where one need not speak in euphemisms or feign adoration for morally bankrupt leaders. On the other, Navalny’s sprinkling of Russian culture and humor, even in sections about Russia’s endless stumbling, intensified my longing for the places, people, and traditions that have become hostages of a government. I imagine the complexity is intentional. Navalny wants us, ultimately, to understand why he doesn’t stop fighting, why it’s so frustrating to him when people ask why he returned to Russia after being poisoned.
Though the wit-filled Patriot is Navalny’s memoir, it is simultaneously the memoir of a country unable to laugh its way out of darkness for a very long time. Navalny’s breakdown of Russia’s political path, particularly over the past four decades, is so accessible and clear, it might make Western readers question Winston Churchill’s famous observation that Russia is “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” On Navalny’s relentless mission to peel back the lasagna-like layers of Kremlin-era corruption, the mystery dissipates. “Our organization’s underlying principle is transparency,” he writes of his Anti-Corruption Foundation.
In reading Navalny, we understand the plights of both the country and the story’s hero. We understand because Navalny always, above all, seeks to capture the humanity at the heart of any political moment. “Demonstrating against the U.S.S.R.,” he writes, “was fighting in favor of something positive—in favor of rock music, of the right to travel abroad, to buy whichever book you wanted, in favor of jeans and chewing gum and foreign goods of any description (or just decently manufactured goods, of which there were precious few), and for all these things to be available in the shops. In favor of medical care without being expected to bribe the doctors with boxes of chocolates and bottles of cognac. . . .” I recalled at this moment flying from Boston to Moscow in the mid-1990s to sell our Moscow apartment. My mother and I had by then lived in America for half a decade, adjusting easily to its transparent processes, so it was quite a shock to trail her around Moscow as she begrudgingly delivered French perfume and other foreign wonders to various officials to get paperwork signed. There was no other way to accomplish anything. Such was Russian life.
A great book offers readers many points of entry, and Patriot is no exception. Navalny’s grasp of both history and the present tense extend far beyond Russia – and beyond politics. A pop culture aficionado and an avid reader, Navalny regularly references familiar titles and names: Leonardo di Caprio in The Revenant, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Doctor Octopus in the Amazing Spider-Man series, Donald Duck, Star Wars, the German film The Lives of Others, The Big Bang Theory, Voldemort in Harry Potter (whom Navalny compares to “our own Voldemort with his palace), and countless other works – reminding us that he was deeply aware of how real people were living, what they were thinking, what they desired, and what made them tick.
Also key to Navalny’s narrative—as it is to Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Navalny’s favorite novel—is the universally irresistible force of love. Aleksei and Yulia’s extraordinary devotion to one another leaps off the pages, especially piercingly at the end, when Aleksei is writing his prison notes and missing his children and the love of his life. To see Yulia in interviews since Patriot’s release is to see that unwavering devotion. Since her husband’s death on February 16, 2024, she has valiantly carried the mantle, vowing to run for president once Putin is gone.
Navalny’s humanity, humor, and humility remind us of why he won such a following, why Russians joined him in huge political rallies at enormous personal risk, and then once again when standing in line for hours to pay their respects and place flowers on his grave in Moscow. According to Yulia, the stream of fresh flowers hasn’t stopped.
As Yulia told PBS, “Even in English, you can feel how funny he was. It’s the main thing why people loved him so much, why people supported him so much, why he became a leader of opposition, because he was a very ordinary man.” On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Yulia said, “His superpower was to be optimistic and to give this power to laugh in these moments to all the people around.”
In the vein of Soviet-era negotiations, this “ordinary man” has now used his superpower—which I imagine he would say is Yulia—to deliver a posthumous gift to the Russian authorities. It’s the worst parting gift Navalny could offer Putin and his administration: an artifact which brings Navalny miraculously back to life. Navalny’s is a story the Kremlin can’t rewrite nor erase, no matter how it tweaks its propaganda machine. Patriot is traveling the world in twenty-six languages. There’s a Russian version which of course is banned in Russia—but Russians are, out of necessity, exceptionally good at procuring banned objects.
I hope everyone gets an opportunity to read it, especially Russians in Russia. Because they deserve a laugh at their government’s expense, the government having been laughing at theirs for far too long.
