Alexei Navalny is dead. And yet he lives.
He lives to trouble Vladimir Putin, the authoritarian strongman of Russia who may have had the advocate for democracy killed a little more than a year ago and who definitely had him poisoned before that.
Now Navalny is gone, but not gone enough for Putin. There are still those connected to him, including the Russian Orthodox priest who buried him and the lawyers who represented him.
There are still those inspired by him and the way he exposed Putin’s greed and corruption. They are willing to get arrested laying wreaths in Navalny’s memory at monuments to the victims of Soviet oppression, and they appeared at his funeral, defying authorities with chants of “We are not afraid.”
And there is his best-selling memoir, Patriot.
The cover shows his face staring out, refusing to look down, look away. Refusing to just be dead.
Navalny lives in another way too. He lives in the sense the apostle Paul spoke of in 1 Corinthians 15, as one who was sown perishable but will be raised imperishable, was sown in weakness and dishonor but will be raised in power and glory, with a mortal body that puts on immortality with Christ. He lives as one who believed in the Resurrection.
This is, in fact, how Navalny concludes the memoir, which one of his political allies called his gospel.
“Are you a disciple of the religion whose founder sacrificed himself for others, paying the price for their sins?” Navalny asks himself at the end. “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?”
The answer is clear: not death. Patriot testifies to that confidence from its opening sentence—“Dying really didn’t hurt”—to its final statement of faith in Jesus, who Navalny trusts to “take my punches for me.” This is the memoir of a man who is convinced that “the saying that is written will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory’” (1 Cor. 15:54).
For Navalny, the political part of this victory and the religious part are not unrelated. Yet the relationship between them is also complicated. He did not think that the religious could be reduced to the political, nor that the political could transubstantiate into the religious. Faith and political works are separate, as he understood them, but also always interconnected.
Seeing Navalny work this out is one of the most interesting parts of Patriot, though not one that most reviewers have focused on. The memoir is a powerful piece of writing. Patriot starts as an autobiography, recounting Navalny’s experience of being poisoned for anti-corruption activism and then circling back to his childhood outside Obninsk, a restricted-access city where the first Soviet nuclear reactor had been built. One of his vivid memories was seeing scientists and soldiers, including his father, scramble in response to the Chernobyl disaster 700 kilometers away.
“It was obvious the regime was hiding something, which meant it had something to hide, but you couldn’t say that openly,” Navalny writes. “In 1986, it hadn’t occurred to anyone that the Soviet Union and its vast apparatus for controlling thoughts and words would shortly cease to exist.”
The lies would be swallowed up by the truth, though, and Navalny tells the story of his awakening to the lies—a coming-of-age story—and his political education when the authoritarian regime collapsed. At first, tasting freedom, he put his energy into pursuing cars, dreaming of driving a Mercedes, a BMW, or a Chevy Tahoe. He wanted to be a successful lawyer and a cool dude.
But ultimately the corruption that came with the collapse of communism turned him into an advocate for democracy and good government. Which turned him into an opponent of Putin.
The former spymaster came to power in 1999, when Navalny was 23. Putin got promoted from intelligence-service director to deputy prime minister and then acting prime minister in a single day. He was made full prime minister that same month and acting president later that year—all without a vote. Putin passed laws making it harder for people to oppose him at the ballot box, used state media to promote himself, and took advantage of the war on terror to win election in 2000.
That was the start of Putinism, which one Russian observer at the time called the “final stage of bandit capitalism.”
Navalny saw it that way too. “One thing I really was sure of,” he writes in his memoir, “was that the Putin regime was founded on corruption.”
Patriot recounts the lengths to which Navalny went to expose that corruption and try to organize an effective opposition. He talks about political party meetings, public debates, shareholder activism, protest rallies, the discovery of the internet, and especially blogging. (There’s a lot on the thrill of blogging.)
Navalny was not ultimately successful. Putin’s government responded by subjecting him to criminal cases, politicized prosecution on trumped-up charges of embezzlement, and then prison.
The final part of Patriot is Navalny’s prison diary, an account of the minutia of incarceration that feels like an update to the Soviet-dissident classic One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Navalny describes the maddening bureaucracy of prison, the endless transportation between different cells, the sense of passing time, the sense of losing time, emerging friendships with fellow inmates, and the constant companion of hunger.
In the process, he discovers his faith. The political activist writes about faith not in terms of arguments but more as, to borrow a description from one of Augustine’s sermons, “a great jar in which you can receive a great gift.”
Navalny learned prayers as a child, spending summers with his Ukrainian grandmother, who also had him secretly baptized. When he had a daughter of his own, he realized he wasn’t an atheist. At some point he started to cross himself whenever he passed a church, a practice his friends and fellow activists regarded as wildly old-fashioned, superstitious, and gauche.
He didn’t disagree. In fact, he saw something about the gaucheness of religion—the uncoolness of Christian life—that attested to its truth.
In one scene in the memoir, Navalny recalls how an older prisoner who never really spoke to him gave him a prayer card with an angel on it. This was not a beautiful icon but kitsch. The prayer was written in a pseudo-Slavonic script, and Navalny jokes that “there seems to be a consensus that angels and archangels alight more readily” when there’s an old-timey font.
He received the card, however, as a sign. There was something about the incongruity, the aesthetic poverty, the complete uselessness of this item that in fact made it powerful. Navalny, by faith, rejected the valuation of authoritarianism.
It is no accident that, before this, he had taken to memorizing the Sermon on the Mount in Russian, English, French, and Latin. It is only a little more than 100 verses, he writes, and “if I was constantly going to find myself standing in line looking at a wall or a fence, I might as well learn it by heart.”
Navalny came to identify deeply with the Christian values of Jesus’ sermon. He grew to really believe that “everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock” (Matt. 7:24).
Of course, the commands Jesus gave are wildly impractical in our world. Billionaire Elon Musk was right when he noted that it is dangerous, for example, to turn the other cheek. “If you’re facing sort of a predatory threat, and that threat is stronger than you,” Musk said, “you will just get, you know, executed.”
That is, sure enough, what happened to Jesus. That’s what happened to most of the disciples too. One can imagine Peter nodding along from where he hung upside down on his cross. “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44) is not good political strategy and not what strong people do.
Navalny’s friends and colleagues tried to tell him this too. He notes they discouraged him from talking about his faith in the final statements the Russian government allowed him to make before sentencing. And they were right, Navalny admitted, that such a statement wouldn’t “work.” He would seem, instead, like someone who had “gone nuts.”
But he did it anyway.
“Really, Your Honor, I’m not sure anymore what to talk about,” Navalny said in one statement, recorded in the memoir. “Do you think, perhaps, we should talk about God? And salvation? … The fact is, I’m religious.”
The fact is, he was “nuts” in the sense of rejecting political logic, authoritarian logic, the logic of gaining and maintaining power. Because of his faith, he could continue to advocate democracy and oppose Putinism even when the regime made it incredibly clear that he could not and would not win.
Navalny knew the inevitability of his own defeat, even his own death. But he also knew the truth of Easter, the truth that Christ has died (past tense) but is risen (present) and will come again (future).
That had consequences for his politics. He could disregard the fact that he would lose. He could not care that his course of action would likely lead to execution. He could start his memoir with the statement that dying didn’t really hurt.
“Faith makes life simpler,” Navalny writes. “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.”
Daniel Silliman is senior news editor at Christianity Today.
