Russian dissident Alex Navalny always knew he would die

On Alexei Navalny’s first night in a prison cell, after being arrested at a Moscow airport in early 2021, he slept like a baby.“You would imagine you would be pacing around within those four walls and unable to settle down,” the late activist writes in his posthumous memoir, “Patriot” (Knopf), out now.But instead, he felt a weird sense of relief. “I had no doubt I would be spending the next five years in prison,” writes Navalny.

“My future was predetermined and clear.There would be no surprises.”It had already been a year of too many surprises for one of Vladimir Putin’s most outspoken critics.

(In the book — pieced together between diary entries before and after his death along with his social media posts — Navalny describes the Russian president as a “vengeful runt” and a “bribe-taking old man.”) Five months earlier, Navalny had nearly died during a flight from Siberia to Moscow, after being poisoned with a nerve agent.He realized something was wrong mid-way through watching an episode of “Rick and Morty” on his laptop, he writes.Navalny spent the next 18 days in a coma, waking up in hospital in Germany.

Though he was lucky to have survived, he wasn’t deterred from his campaign against Putin.After all, it wasn’t the first attempt made on his life.

He’d been attacked with mysterious chemicals before: once in 2017, when he was temporarily blinded in his right eye from a green substance, and again in 2019 while at a prison hospital.Despite the huge risks, he remained “obsessed with the idea of getting back to Moscow as quickly as I could,” he writes.“Putin is nuts, but he’s not going to be crazy enough to create a major incident by arresting me at the airport.”Navalny was wrong; Putin was that nuts.

And what’s more, one of the arresting officers looked strangely familiar to Navalny.Though he was wearing a mask — this was still during the thick of the pandemic — Navalny could’ve sworn that he l...