For Russian liberals, late opposition leader Alexei Navalny represented a glimmer of hope for a democratic future. Yet for many Ukrainians, especially in the context of a decade of war, he was a more complex figure, often casting doubt on whether Russian opposition to Vladimir Putin necessarily aligned with support for Ukraine's fully realized independence.
Navalny’s memoir, “Patriot,” which he began writing in Germany after recovering from being poisoned by a Novichok nerve agent in 2020 and continued writing during his imprisonment by smuggling out the notebooks through his lawyers, was released posthumously in English translation on Oct. 22. Its publication has sparked a new wave of accolades for the former opposition leader, who died on Feb. 16 in one of Russia’s most notorious penal colonies. His widow, Yulia Navalnaya, has been on a major U.S. press tour, with pundits like Rachel Maddow already christening her as the new last hope for a democratic Russia.
Navalny returned to Russia in January 2021 after his recovery from being poisoned. He was immediately arrested at the airport, and what followed was a Kafkaesque sequence of fabricated court cases levied against him, coupled with relentless efforts by the authorities to break his spirit.
From prison, Navalny condemned the full-scale war against Ukraine and acknowledged it was unprovoked, directly challenging Putin's narrative that seeks to justify the aggression through claims of NATO expansion and the need to protect Russia’s "sphere of influence." Navalny's disdain was particularly acute in “Patriot” when he wrote about how the Russian state-controlled media grotesquely distorted the truth about the Bucha Massacre and attempted to rewrite the tragedy as a fabricated event.
At the same time, Navalny also used words like “fratricidal” to describe the war and wrote that “the reasons for (it) are the political and economic problems within Russia, Putin’s desire to hold on to power at any cost, and his obsession with his own historical legacy,” which ultimately overlooks the genocidal intent behind it, such as the destruction of Ukrainian cultural sites, the forced relocation of thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia, and “re-education” programs implemented by occupation authorities.
Putin has repeatedly displayed how his tenuous grasp on historical events has influenced his motivation to launch a full-scale war against Ukraine, such as when he declared that Ukraine’s claim to sovereignty is not legitimate because it was “invented” by the Bolsheviks. In his article “On the historical unity of Ukrainians and Russians,” which was published in 2021, Putin claimed that Ukrainians and Russians were “one people, a single whole.” For the Russian autocrat, his legacy lies in the forced reunification of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. The war cannot be reduced merely to issues like politics and corruption, as Navalny would have had it.
The 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts are noticeably omitted from Navalny’s reflections in “Patriot” on that year. While the former opposition leader mentioned the illegal annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in several passages, it was never specified that it was taken from Ukraine, a stylistic choice that will no doubt perplex attentive readers familiar with his controversial statements from previous years, including "Crimea is for those people who live in Crimea," and his quip that it was "not a sandwich to be passed back and forth" between the two countries. Admittedly, Navalny finally acknowledged from prison after the onset of the full-scale war that Ukraine's 1991 borders should be respected, which would mean the return of Crimea.
Navalny did not hesitate to criticize the Soviet system’s failures, writing in his memoir that “a state incapable of producing enough milk for its citizens does not deserve my nostalgia,” a reference to the food shortages under Communist rule. He devoted multiple passages in “Patriot” to the poor handling of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster and the Soviet-Afghan War of 1979-1989, writing that both events “dug the grave of the USSR.”
At the same time, the closest he came to mentioning historical injustices committed against non-Russians during the Soviet period, including Ukrainians, was an anecdote from his childhood where he asked his Ukrainian grandmother why she hated Lenin so much. She told him how her family avoided deportation to Siberia, yet their wealth was stripped away with the implementation of collective farming. The iron roof on the family’s house, which had supposedly been “the envy of the whole village,” was taken and sold off, the money “spent on drink in the village council,” according to family legend.
“I did not believe that bit at the time,” Navalny wrote, “but now I have no doubt it was true. Nevertheless, out of respect for my grandmother, I never discussed Lenin with her.”
Navalny also recalled being shocked as a young boy when his Ukrainian relatives found it funny to joke about spitting on Vladimir Lenin after a visiting cousin was brought to see the embalmed body of the Bolshevik leader in Moscow because they had been taught in Soviet times that he was “sacrosanct.”
Overall, his memories of his childhood summers in Zalissia, a village located just two hours from Chornobyl in Kyiv Oblast, tempt Russian stereotypes of Ukrainians, like how his relatives would “tut-tut about what a thin, pale Moscow townie (he) was and how they would have to fatten (him) up with good Ukrainian pork lard.”
When asked by his family after spending childhood summers with his Ukrainian relatives whether he identified more as Ukrainian or Russian, Navalny wrote that he always “did (his) best to avoid a straight answer” because such a question was “like being asked who you loved more, your mother or father, to which there is no sensible answer possible.” To a certain extent, this apolitical sentimentality appears to have carried over with him into his adulthood.
Tensions have been running high between Ukrainians and the Russian opposition over the past decade of Russia’s ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine. Nearly three years into the full-scale war, prominent figures like Vladimir Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin — who were released in a U.S.-initiated prisoner exchange with Russia over the summer — continue to refer to it as “Putin’s war,” a framing which many argue absolves the Russian people of their involvement in a conflict that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Ukrainians and displaced millions.
During a speech at the Bled Strategic Forum in Slovenia in early September, Navalnaya also criticized those who renewed the push to “decolonize” Russia, saying that those who advocate for it “can’t explain why people with shared backgrounds and culture should be artificially divided.” Such a statement is an oversight of the systematic discrimination and cultural marginalization that has existed for some of the more than 190 ethnic minorities that call Russia home. Interestingly enough, Navalny noted in his memoir that his wife “holds even more radical views” than him, although he did not elaborate in what sense.
For the Russian opposition, it has been much easier to shine a light on issues like widespread corruption. In “Patriot,” Navalny argued that the Russian state’s corruption, which has plunged so many of his fellow citizens into poverty, is one of the country’s most deeply-rooted obstacles, preventing it from becoming “a normal country, a rich one, governed by the rule of law.” He went on to repeatedly emphasize throughout the book that "the Russian people are good; it’s our leaders who are appalling."
Over the years, Navalny himself made repeated controversial statements that raised concerns among Ukrainians regarding how the Russian opposition viewed relations with Ukraine differently from Putin’s regime. When the Orthodox Church of Ukraine was granted autocephaly in 2018, establishing it as an independent religious body from Moscow, Navalny expressed his displeasure at the historic event, writing that “the Russian Orthodox Church will lose up to half of its ‘living’ parishes. What took centuries to build was destroyed by Putin and his fools in just four years. Putin is the enemy of the ‘Russian world.’”
The term "Russian world" promotes the idea that Russian-speaking individuals across the globe, regardless of their country of origin, are linked through cultural, linguistic, and historical bonds. While similar concepts exist within other imperial contexts, Russia's framing of the idea has assumed a distinctly militaristic character in recent years. This aggressive stance has jeopardized the sovereignty of not only Ukraine but also countries like Moldova and Georgia.
In “Patriot,” Navalny admitted that he cared first and foremost about “the plight of Russians,” and criticized Putin’s regime for preferring to “talk endlessly about oppressed Russians (who live as minorities abroad following the dissolution of the countries that made up the USSR) while doing nothing to help them.” He went on to advocate for the funding of Russian schools abroad to promote the spread of the Russian language and even “resettling people back to their homeland.”
To what extent did Navalny's views on Ukraine-Russia relations evolve during his time in prison? The fact that he finally recognized Crimea as Ukraine, called for reparations to Ukraine after regime change in Russia, as well as an international investigation into Russian war crimes committed in Ukraine was promising. But would he have viewed Ukrainians’ reembrace of their language, culture, and history as a threat to the prosperity of the so-called “Russian world”? His condemnation of the full-scale war and concern with the economic prosperity of Russia suggest that if he had somehow defied all odds and been able to form a political movement strong enough to overthrow Putin’s regime, our current reality could have been avoided. Yet, considering that he was worried about “the plight of Russians” and described both countries as “fraternal,” it seems that tensions between the two would have undeniably taken a different shape.
Bearing all this in mind, one of the most jarring and disappointing aspects of the memoir is the use of Russian transliteration for Ukrainian locations. Kyiv is rendered as "Kiev," Chornobyl as "Chernobyl," and Zalissia as "Zalisiye," which feels not only outdated but careless. This lapse falls on the translators, Arch Tait and Stephen Dalziel, but even more so on Alfred A. Knopf, a subsidiary of Penguin, for allowing such a glaring oversight to remain in the final publication.
The potential trajectory of Navalny’s evolving thoughts on Ukraine-Russia relations will forever remain speculative. Regardless of any valid criticism leveled against him, Navalny should not have faced imprisonment, poisoning, or death in custody. In a better world, political opposition would be allowed to flourish in Russia, fostering a healthy democratic environment. His life’s work is proof that despite the insurmountable odds faced by those living in an authoritarian state, it is never too late to try and fight for a better future. The fact that he was able to smuggle out the end passages of this book through his lawyers and, in that sense, remain defiant of Putin to the very end, is admirable.
The one-year anniversary of Navalny’s death is approaching, and the remaining figureheads of the Russian opposition are all in exile, engaged in spats with one another, and lacking a clear strategy to take on Putin. They condemn the war, yet many still hesitate to address the question of collective guilt. The decade-long war of aggression against Ukraine stands as Russian society’s greatest moral failure – the more than 145,000 war crimes under investigation by Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office are proof of that.
If there is to be hope for a democratic Russia, it must begin with the acknowledgment from those who will continue Navalny’s work that Ukraine’s military victory over Russia is the key to any democratic future for their country. However, Navalny’s widow recently said in an interview with German media that it was “hard to say” whether it’s right to arm Ukraine because “the bombs also hit Russians.” Many of the remaining members of the opposition cannot even move past calling it "Putin's war," and the prospect of such change remains difficult to envision.
Note from the author:
Hi, this is Kate Tsurkan, thanks for reading this book review. There is an ever-increasing amount of books about Ukraine and Russia available to English-language readers, and as always, I hope my recommendations prove useful when it comes to your next trip to the bookstore. If you like reading about this sort of thing, please consider supporting The Kyiv Independent.
