My friend Chris posted a list of books he read in 2025 and said "Patriot," the

posthumous memoir of the Russian political activist Alexei Navlny, was

"important" and "depressing." I was attracted like a trout to a fly.

Navalny and I are close in age and it is hard for me not to draw parallels as I

read the biography part of the book. It is interesting to see the U.S.S.R and

Russia through his eyes. For example, according to him,

- Afganistan doomed the Soviet Union,

- Gorbachev's downfall was his irresolution and Prohibition,

- Gorbachev was incorruptible,

- Yeltsin was the snollygoster who took power by smart slogans,

- Putin has carried on the kleptocracy,

- The War with Ukraine is to bleed Russia to death, and

- "The essence of politics has been that a tin-pot tsar who wants to arrogate to

  himself the right to personal, unaccountable power needs to intimidate the

  honest people who are not afraid of him."

He came from an elite military family with a Russian mother and Ukrainian father

and grew up in a society that valued higher education while outwardly extolling

the working-man. His parents were strict with regard to grades. From early on,

Alexei preferred reading to math or sports and in his words

    "I had no wish to be an engineer. There was no pastime better than reading,

    except perhaps causing explosions and setting fire to things. And the

    combination of the two was my idea of the perfect life."

The boy was the father of the man.

The Soviet Union had collapsed and paradigms were shifting. Navalny studied law

and had a bad college experience: widespread corruption (bribing for entrance

and passing tests), drugs on campus (the Nigerian mafia and the cops), and the

professors who couldn't teach him anything (as their knowledge was being

outdated as they spoke). He was not shy to admit his own mistakes, some simply

because he was young. He bribed the department head to over-rule a professor who

failed him. His blind support of Yeltsin turned to hate as he matured.

His Anti-Corruption Foundation had been publishing youtube videos exposing

government officials. After treating his first poisoning in Germany, he was

arrested on his return to Russia and it was two days later that they posted

their video on Putin. Since then, case after case was filed by the government

against him. He was never released. And the book turned into a prison diary.

It was in prison where Navalny fought his best, bravely and never losing his

human touch.

Navalny launched a hunger strike that lasted 24 days. On day 22, they gave him a

glucose injection. Toward the end, he had lost more than 40 lbs of body weight

and weighed 160 lbs. Describing himself as a skeleton staggering around the

cell, he said "I really could be used now to scare children who won't eat their

meals." In the end, he concluded

    "It was a valuable experience in my life, a powerful and dangerous form of

    combat. It should not be embarked on unless absolutely necessary."

It might be that he never treated the prison staff or even the judges as his

true enemies. Instead, he showed empathy and reflected on his own thoughts.

    "Febuary 15 It's my yard time today and again it is cold. It must be far

    colder for the guard patrolling on the iron mesh above us, monitoring all

    the yards."

    "By the way, yesterday, I bad-mouthed them unfairly. I accused them of

    stealing my notebook. Today I learned it had been stored with my personal

    possessions. I feel a bit ashamed. It is Stockholm syndrome, of course. Here

    I am, innocent, imprisoned in a concentration camp, and worrying about the

    feelings of the camp guards. But on the other hand, there is such a thing as

    emotional intelligence."

He tried meditation which he joked as "a spiritual practice for rich people

suffering from a midlife crisis," and "These people pay to be locked in a room

where they remain silent for two weeks, eat scant food, and have no contact with

the outside world. They just meditate and reflect. And I'm getting all that for free."

He read Harari, loved Maupassant, and was turned off by Vanity Fair and The Hero

with a Thousand Faces. Studying certain parts of English history, he summarized

it as "endless stabbing and marrying, marrying and stabbing."

Both Navalny and his wife Yulia had made peace with the prospect that the

government would never let him out while he was alive. He swore by the trick:

imagine the worst thing that can happen and accept it. The second technique he

said was religion. A born atheist, he turned to Christianity and found solace.

If you haven't suspected so far, Navalny had a great sense of humor and was able

to laugh at himself. His is a sad story and his cool lightheartedness made it at

the same time palatable and sadder still which, oddly, inspires admiration.