The Man Who Knew the Price

Spencer Weinreich examines the late Alexei Navalny’s memoir “Patriot.”

By Spencer J. WeinreichMarch 7, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

• Politics

BY OSCAR WILDE’S definition of the cynic—“A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing”—Alexei Navalny was at least half cynic. For he made it his business to know the price of everything. In the first pages of Patriot (2024), his posthumously published memoir, he explains the technique. In a photograph taken at the wedding of the Kremlin’s spokesman, for example, he looks for the tangible. An unusual watch catches his eye—most unusual, in fact, as he identifies the particular make and discovers that it is one of only 30 ever produced. The price of such uniqueness, he learns, is $620,000. Navalny then takes to the internet to broadcast that figure, juxtaposed with other useful statistics, such as said spokesman’s official salary ($147,000 per annum) and the level of poverty in Russia (one in five Russians are living on less than 2,000 dollars a year).

This was how Navalny exposed corruption: by becoming a critic and an appraiser of the art, architecture, fashion, and assorted gilded tat of Russian plutocracy. His videos and blog posts did what the best criticism does: teach the viewer or the reader to see for themselves. You didn’t need to know the finer points of contract law or map out a chain of holding companies to work out that a man wearing a watch worth four times his annual salary is getting money from somewhere else.

This accountability-by-art-criticism was effective enough to attract the attention of Vladimir Putin, who proved no less extravagant in his ire than in his home furnishings. Navalny survived decades of official and unofficial harassment, phony prosecutions, and a near-fatal poisoning in August 2020. He spent the last four years of his life a prisoner, with a sentence that kept lengthening as the regime brought charge after charge. This spendthrift violence, too, Navalny appraised. “The number of years does not matter,” he wrote on Instagram after receiving a 19-year prison sentence. “I understand perfectly well that, like many political prisoners, I am serving a life sentence. Where ‘life’ is defined by either the length of my life or the length of the life of this regime.” So it proved on February 16, 2024, when Navalny died, supposedly of a cardiac arrythmia, in a penal colony in the most inclement reaches of northern Russia.

So Navalny is dead. I find I have to keep reminding myself of that fact, such is the sheer vivacity of Patriot and the immediacy with which Navalny’s voice speaks. Under the unblinking blue-eyed gaze of his photograph on the cover, absorbed by the irrepressible, wry brio of the narrative, I still find it somehow unthinkable that Navalny could be anything but alive.

Fittingly enough, the title of Navalny’s social media presence was and remains “Navalny LIVE.” After finishing Patriot, I spent a few minutes listening to one of his old videos, and I urge every reader to do the same. No Russian is required. The cadence is what matters, the sense of sound and rhythm by which one can always recognize the master of a tongue. Simply put, Navalny knew how to do things with the Russian language. He speaks fast, in bursts, with a quicksilver lightness and a satirist’s half smile. It is that voice that speaks through Arch Tait and Stephen Dalziel’s translation.

The sense of Navalny’s presence is compounded by the circumstances of Patriot’s composition. He began to write his memoirs in the wake of his 2020 poisoning. The book begins in medias res, narrating, moment by moment, the day of the assassination attempt and then his agonizingly slow recovery in Germany. But then we embark upon a 100-page amble through the first 20 years of Navalny’s life, and with it a primer on Russian history in the 1980s and ’90s: his military family, half Ukrainian and half Russian; his training as a lawyer; the grim twilight of the Soviet Union; and the hopes, turmoil, and disillusionment that followed its fall. Navalny is an engaging storyteller, interspersing the absurdities of 20th-century Russian life with the absurdities that dog all human lives. The man who emerges from the pages of Patriot is a self-proclaimed nerd, an ordinary man who loves Rick and Morty and The Lord of the Rings and Batman memes.

The beginning of chapter eight is a turning point for the reader, as it was a turning point for the author. This was as far as Navalny had gotten in the writing of Patriot by January 17, 2021, the date of his return to Russia. No sooner had he emerged from the airplane than he was arrested. “Wow, what a dramatic turn in my book. […] My last chapter was written in a beautiful house in Freiburg, Germany. This chapter is being written in prison.” The rest of Patriot is effectively two stories in one, as Navalny’s recollections of his past—how he met his wife, Yulia Navalnaya (née Abrosimova), or his quixotic campaign for the mayoralty of Moscow in 2013—intertwine with his confinement and the legal and political battles that consume his present.

The next 11 chapters chronicle the David-and-Goliath struggle between the Anti-Corruption Foundation and the might of the Kremlin and the oligarchs. Thereafter, Patriot undergoes another, even more drastic change of key, as Navalny disappears into the maw of the Russian prison system. The remaining 200 pages are made up of his prison diary, kept from January 21, 2021 to January 17, 2024, a month before his death, punctuated by Instagram posts he managed to smuggle out. Throughout, Navalny maintains a sense of (gallows) humor even as the horrors of isolation, deprivation, and persecution mount. Reviewing his many sentences, he wrote on Instagram on September 30, 2021:

If they put all that together with nothing running concurrently, we are looking at twenty-three years. They may, of course, come up with something else, but the maximum total allowed for all sentences against one individual is thirty years.

So don’t worry, I’ll be freed no later than spring 2051.

Called before the disciplinary board of the prison, he is unable to resist joking about how much they resemble schoolteachers: “I’m glad to be attending such a major meeting of the teaching staff.” He muses about the scene in the 2015 film The Revenant in which the protagonist survives a wintry night by crawling inside the carcass of a horse; where Navalny is, well north of the Arctic Circle, he would need an elephant, and a roasted elephant at that.

One cannot help but wonder at this resilience. Did Navalny’s spirit never flag, even for a moment? Was he really quite so indomitable? There are unconquerable souls, and Navalny seems to have been among them, who are not broken by any prison because they quite simply refuse to be broken. Certainly, he knew what was expected of a prisoner of conscience, and he did not shrink from the part. He even ruefully acknowledges how his life is shaped by the demands of the genre into which his story fell: “[M]y book, originally an autobiography with an intriguing thriller about uncovering an assassination attempt using chemical weapons, has turned into a prison diary. It’s a genre so saturated with clichés that it’s impossible not to write them.” Or to live them.

So Patriot contains the familiar set pieces of a prison diary, from the pen-portrait ethnographies of prison society to the inmates’ culinary improvisations to the birthdays and anniversaries that pass unheralded. There is indeed a sameness to prison writing, because there is a sameness to prison life. If Patriot strays into cliché, that reflects a want of originality not on the part of Navalny but his jailers.

It is a melancholy fact that Russia has done more than most to ensure that prison writing as a genre continues to flourish. Patriot joins a distinguished tradition of prison writing that forms a history of Russia from the vantage point of its cages, Navalny inheriting the mantle of Dostoevsky, Figner, Gorky, Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov, Sakharov. I wonder if he knew the 1959 cartoon by Bill Mauldin depicting Boris Pasternak in the gulag, asking a fellow convict, “I won the Nobel Prize for Literature. What was your crime?” Navalny certainly loved Russian literature, Tolstoy above all. When he reads Madame Bovary in prison, his verdict is that it does not even merit the description of “Anna Karenina lite.” War and Peace, he tells us, is his favorite book, but he dissents from its theory of history: “Tolstoy, with manic obsessiveness, denies the role of the individual in history.” The historical events of War and Peace happen not because of the decisions of a Napoleon or a Kutuzov but because “a million circumstances, details, lives, words, desires, fears, and hopes conspired so that the French were bound to find themselves in their white breeches in the Russian woodlands in winter.”

This Navalny cannot accept. His life’s work involved belief in the individual, a solemn bet upon all that would change if the ordinary Russian citizen knew certain things and made certain decisions. Not much of a cynic then. On the contrary, idealism suffuses Patriot. Its laments for what Russia has become are equally dreams of what Russia might have been, and what Russia might still be.

On which note, a closing word about the title. Navalny makes no secret of his love for Russia: “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.” None of what Alexei Navalny did and none of what he wrote makes sense without that love. Without his fierce devotion to Russia and the possibility of what he called the “Beautiful Russia of the Future.” Without his conviction that the nation and the people were better and deserved better than their rulers. That Russia was and could be something other than corruption, autocracy, and imperialism.

Navalny gave his life for his love of Russia, expressed with the critical eye of the cynic and the passion of the idealist. As Thomas Jefferson and Howard Zinn did not actually say, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” Or, as Barbara Ehrenreich did say, “No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.” It is a strain of thought rather out of fashion nowadays, in a political moment that prefers patriotism without dissent or dissent without patriotism. Patriot does more than challenge Vladimir Putin’s right to define what Russia and Russianness are; the book is a challenge to every fevered nationalism and every ideology that brooks no disagreement.

Love, too, had its price, and Navalny understood that. He saw a host of friends and comrades killed off or imprisoned or corrupted or humiliated. He acknowledged with astonishing sangfroid that his story was most likely to end with a death in prison, natural or otherwise. Yet he kept writing, laughing, loving.

He knew the price of that.