by Alexei Navalny, 2024, translated by Arch Tait with Stephen Dalziel
Memoir written by one brave man who tried to bring truth to Russia in the last 25 years. He was murdered by Putin for his efforts. He was too popular, spreading truth, revealing the lies and corruption of Putin. He loved his country and decided to go back to it after being poisoned with a nerve agent by Putin. He could have stayed away and lived (perhaps), but he had to go back. He was arrested in the airport in Russia in January 2021 and taken from one prison to another for 3 years, until he was murdered in prison in Siberia in 2024. He wrote most of this memoir in the hospital in Germany where he recovered after being poisoned. The last quarter of the memoir are his Instagram posts and his prison diaries, which he managed to smuggle out to his lawyers, when he was allowed to meet with them.
He grew up the child of a Russian army man. He loved to blow things up! He and his friends would find the unused ammo soldiers would sink in the river (rather than go through the headache of returning them). They’d use them to make bombs and blow things up. His first inkling of the lies the government told were right after Chernobyl. His grandparents lived in a village in Ukraine near Chernobyl. He loved visiting them. There were farms and growing things and beauty. After Chernobyl, everyone knew it was caused by a drunk Russian, but the government made the people go farm in fields nearby to make it look like it wasn’t as bad a disaster as it really was. They did other things like make every car stop and get tested for radiation at check stops. He couldn’t figure out why they were going to all the trouble to lie.
He gives a history of the Russian leaders, Gorbachev and then Boris Yeltsin. Gorbachev was a good, honest man, but he didn’t realize it until later. Gorbachev made a mistake trying to get the Russian people to stop drinking. He forever lost them because of that. Boris Yeltsin, it turns out, was a corrupt alcoholic. All he cared about was getting his drink, every day, starting at noon.
He ended up going to law school and then investigating corruption in oil and gas companies. Turns out the leaders of these companies were raking in millions, buying villas, yachts, luxury cars. He sued the companies and publicized the corruption. He filmed them with their mistresses in their villas and on their yachts, including Putin’s Palace, and eventually started a YouTube channel. He decided to try and run for office – starting with mayor of Moscow. Of course, he lost. But he continued to work at spreading the truth, revealing lies and corruption. Eventually, he decided to run for President against Putin. He never got the chance. Putin decided Navalny had to go. He had him poisoned with Novichok, a nerve agent, on August 20, 2020. Navalny survived. He was allowed to be taken to a German hospital, where he spent 5 months recovering. When he had recovered, he had to go back. People asked him over and over again, Why did you go back? He had to. He was passionate about his mission. As soon as he landed, he was arrested in the airport and spent the rest of his life (3 years) in prisons, on one bogus charge after another.
Dear God, How long will the wicked prosper? So much injustice and harm done to so many people for so long. They live in near-poverty, with no hope, and with endless lies and propaganda, while one man (Vladimir Putin) and his select few oligarchs life lives of luxury, telling lies every day, making it so they are in power for life, destroying Ukraine, robbing and stealing from the people they are to serve. They are storing up wrath for themselves, I know that Lord. Please be with the people of Russia. Help them find a way to rise up and destroy the corrupt government they have and raise a democratic, free, uncorrupt government in its place. Please, dear God, save us from becoming like Russia. We have a leader (Trump) who is lying to us daily, who admires the strong man, who is trying to eliminate our free press, who is taking away liberties and making a few men even richer. Save us from him, Lord God! I pray this, asking you to forgive me and have mercy on me and our nation. Amen and amen – come, Lord Jesus, come!
The beautiful thing about Navalny is that he is in heaven now, with his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. He started to become a Christian (after being an avowed atheist) when his first child, Daria, was born. Here is the last paragraph and a half of the book:
“…But are you a disciple of the religion whose founder sacrificed himself for others, paying the price for their sins? Do you believe in the immortality of the soul and the rest of that cool stuff? If you can honestly answer yes, what is there left for you to worry about? Why, under your breath, would you mumble a hundred times something you read from a hefty tome you keep in your bedside table? Don’t worry about the morrow, because the morrow is perfectly capable of taking care of itself.
“My job is to seek the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of his family to deal with everything else. They won’t let me down and will sort out all my headaches. As they say in prison here: they will take my punches for me.”
Thank you, God, for Alexei Navalny and that he is with you in heaven. Guard and protect his wife and his family, his lawyers. Somehow, someway, save Russia from Putin and save us from becoming like Russia. Amen.
Page 270: “I will always remember a conversation I had with Boris Nemtsov ten days before he was murdered. There were three of us there, Nemtsov, his colleague, and me, and Nemtsov explained that I was in danger. The Kremlin could easily kill me because I was an outsider. But he, Nemtsov, was invulnerable, because he was an insider; he was a former deputy prime minister and, what’s more, knew Putin personally and had worked with him for many years. Three days later, I was arrested. And just a week after that, Nemtsov was shot dead two hundred meters from the Kremlin. I then understood that all of these conversations about who was in danger and who was safe were pointless. We have no idea what’ll happen next. There’s one specific madman named Vladimir Putin. And sometimes something twists in his brain, he writes a name down on a piece of paper and says, “Kill him.””
Page 271: “But one day I simply made the decision not to be afraid. I weighed everything up, understood where I stand–and let it go. I’m an opposition politician and understand perfectly who my enemies are, but if I were to worry constantly about them killing me, then it’s not worth my while living in Russia. I should either emigrate or change what I do.
“But I love what I do and think that I should keep doing it. I’m not crazy, nor am I irresponsible or fearless. It’s simply that deep down I know I have to do this, that this is my life’s work. There are people who believe in me. There’s my organization, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, and there’s my country, and I desperately want it to be free. Yes, there are threats, but they’re a part of my work and I accept them.
“I do worry greatly about my wife and children. And the thought fills me with dread that Novichok could be put on my door handle and that my son or my daughter could touch the door handle.”
Page 273: “When Zakhar was in primary school, the children were asked to say what their parents did. Some children answered, “My daddy’s a doctor” or “My mommy’s a teacher.” But Zakhar said, “My daddy is fighting against bad people for the future of our country.” When I was told this, it was the greatest moment of my life. It was if they had hung a medal on me.
“I don’t think in a particular way about the love for my country. I just love it. For me, Russia is one of the components from which I’m made. It’s like your right arm or your left leg; you can’t describe how you like them.”
Page 274-275: “The biggest mistake people in the West make about Russia is that they equate the Russian state with the Russian people. In reality, the two have nothing in common, and the greatest misfortune in our country is that out of all the millions who live here, time and again power ends up in the hands of the most cynical and the biggest liars. There’s a popular saying that every nation has the government it deserves, and many people believe that this applies to Russia. Otherwise, surely, our people would have risen up and overthrown the regime. But I don’t believe this is true. A huge number of my fellow citizens don’t agree with what’s going on and didn’t choose it. But if you accept that, nonetheless, personal responsibility lies on the shoulders of each of us, then it lies on my shoulders, too. So it’s up to me to fight even harder to change things.
“If you were to ask me whether I hate Vladimir Putin, my answer would be, yes, I hate him, but not because he tried to kill me or put my brother in prison. I hate Putin because he has stolen the last twenty years from Russia. These could have been incredible years, the sort of period that we’ve never had in our history. We had no enemies. We had peace on all our borders. The price of oil, gas, and our other natural resources was incredibly high. We earned huge amounts from our exports. Putin could have used these years to turn Russia into a prosperous country. All of us could have lived better.
“Instead, twenty million people live below the poverty line. Part of the money Putin and his cronies simply stole; part of it was squandered. They did nothing good for our country, and that is their worst crime against our children and the country’s future. I’m afraid that we’ll never again have such a well-fed, peaceful, and happy period, and I cannot but feel regret for this and hatred for those who stole from us the possibility of enjoying it.
“The symbol of my convictions is the Beautiful Russia of the Future I mentioned above. I believe that we could be a normal country, a rich one, governed by the rule of law. Above all, the main point is that this Beautiful Russia is the normal one.
“Let’s start with the idea that we stop killing people. Let’s fight against corruption. Yes, it exists in Europe and the United States too, but if we at least lower the current wild level of it in our country then we will suddenly find that we have money for education and health care. We’ll understand that we can have independent courts and honest elections. Throughout our history we have had tsars, then emperors, then general secretaries, then presidents, and all of them have been authoritarian. We can’t go on like that.
“Our task lies in breaking this vicious circle, as a result of which time and again, whoever’s in power, it turns into authoritarianism. The president’s powers must be restricted; too much lies in his hands. Power should be divided among parliament and regional governors and mayors. Taxes that are collected in the regions should remain there, and not be sent to Moscow. But everything in Russia revolves around Moscow. The only source of power is the Kremlin, and specifically the office where the president sits. Such a huge country should never be governed like that.”
Page 276: “My story will continue, but whatever happens to me and my friends and allies in opposition, Russia has every possibility of becoming a prosperous, democratic country. This sinister regime, based on lies and corruption, is doomed. Dreams can become reality.
“The future is ours.”