In His Memoir, Aleksei Navalny Speaks From the Grave

PATRIOT: A Memoir, by Alexei NavalnyAleksei Navalny did not set out to write a posthumous memoir.He began the project in 2020 as a conventional autobiography propelled by an “intriguing thriller about uncovering an assassination attempt.” Of course, he was the victim of the assassination attempt — a nerve agent laced into his clothing took hold on a flight from Siberia to Moscow that summer as Navalny was sitting beside his wife, Yulia, and watching an episode of the sci-fi cartoon “Rick and Morty” on his laptop.

He stumbled to the airplane bathroom.Thanks to Yulia, he came to in a hospital in Berlin.Months later, before he could complete the manuscript, he boarded another flight to Moscow and soon found himself in a jail cell.

Over the next two and a half years, he faced a series of trumped-up charges, from embezzlement to insulting a Russian World War II veteran.“Wow, what a dramatic turn in my book,” he writes, a quarter of the way through.

“This chapter is being written in prison.” The irony is deliberate; Navalny had every reason to believe he would be arrested the moment he stepped foot on Russian soil.For years, he writes, he and his family were routinely harassed.In 2018, his younger brother Oleg was released after three and a half years in prison on fraud charges that the European Court of Human Rights declared “arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable.” Navalny reports that a couple weeks before he was hospitalized, Yulia, who helped edit the book, had herself survived a probable poisoning.

He is worried for their children.“I try to minimize the risk to my family,” he writes, “but there are certain things that are beyond my control.” He adds, “I’m not prepared to live in fear.”The son of a Soviet army officer, Navalny spent many of his childhood summers in the early 1980s with his grandmother in a small Ukrainian village near Chernobyl.

(“I was in charge of Grandma’s immense cow,” he recalls.“That made me feel...