Patriot, Christian, Family Man

In the three years since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, a significant number of books have been published on the history, politics, and ideology of contemporary Russia. These books are written in various languages and reflect diverse perspectives, and yet they have one thing in common: they are all published outside Russia. Given the conditions of total censorship that now prevail inside the country, the publication of such books and their free discussion are inconceivable. This is precisely the reason why today it is so crucial to foster a critical dialogue concerning these texts, particularly from a leftist perspective, which is presently underrepresented in public discourse.  

Today's column, “A View from the Left,” features an essay by Kirill Medvedev on Alexei Navalny’s posthumous publication “Patriot”, published in 2024 in 26 languages.

In 2020, while undergoing rehabilitation in Germany after being poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok, Alexei Navalny began writing a memoir reflecting on how his worldview was shaped by the upheavals of post-Soviet history. He completed the book while in prison. Patriot, compiled by Navalny’s close associates, includes a posthumously revised version of the memoir alongside Navalny’s 2021–22 prison diaries and several speeches spanning different periods. The book was published on October 22, 2024, in 26 languages. The American print run of Patriot totaled half a million copies, and it topped Amazon’s bestseller list on its release day. The Russian-language e-book is available for free.

Unsurprisingly, media controlled by the Russian authorities ignored the bestseller. Like the regime he opposed, Navalny sought to articulate a political vision that could resonate with the majority of Russians. But unlike the regime, he was willing to stake his life on it. While the state ultimately succeeded in physically eliminating him through the full force of its repressive machinery, defeating him in the realm of ideas and values still seems like a hopeless task for its propagandists. So what values and ideas stand out when reading Patriot?

The Temptations and Disillusionments of the 1990s

Leftists sometimes take at face value the right-wing’s claims that the family makes people into conformists; that religion demands subservience, patriotism, and loyalty to the state. But Navalny shows how family, faith, and homeland can become both the stakes of political struggle and a source of strength within it.

Through one man’s story, we also see the new Russia being born and dying. In the early 1990s, the emergence of a new Russia seemed almost inevitable, given the break with the old system. We were promised a country of free speech and freedom of conscience, a place where enterprising, civically minded, law-abiding people would thrive. We were told that reformers, well-versed in the secrets of the market and democracy, would lead us there.

Instead, 

“There was nothing there. Zilch. Yeltsin’s entourage were a bunch of crooks, some of whom called themselves patriotic statesmen while a similar bunch called themselves reformers” (p. 129).

Navalny took a long road to arrive at this conclusion, both in his book and in his life. Consciously or not, he frames adolescent sexuality as a key force behind his transformation (as inevitable as the transformation of the country itself) from the son of a Soviet military officer into a cocky, ambitious young man keeping pace with the rise of wild capitalism. As a teenager, he fears that the leaders of the August 1991 attempted coup, who denounce the “propaganda of sex,” might ban naked women from “newspapers and magazines… on the pretext that they were a threat to our health” (p. 74). As a university student, he buys a car so he no longer has to leave parties early to rush back home to the Moscow suburbs, especially when “the young women have only just consented to stop sipping champagne and start drinking vodka” (p. 104).

Standing at the customs checkpoint with his newly purchased car from Germany, Navalny sees in front of him the same systemic corruption, incompetence, tyranny, and servility that he associates with the USSR. He begins to grow disillusioned with Yeltsin’s regime and, like many Russians at the time, loses interest in politics. Working as a bank lawyer, he spends his own money to go on a corporate vacation to Sochi, partly to make career-boosting connections, partly because “flocks of sweet girls working as [the office’s] receptionists would be coming too.” It’s on that trip that he meets Yulia, the great and only love of his life. A few years later, they have a daughter, Dasha. Soon after, Alexei finds faith along the same path.

“Looking now at Dasha and how she was developing, I could not reconcile myself to the thought that this was only a matter of biology.… There must be more. From a dyed-in-the-wool atheist, I gradually became a religious person” (p. 181).

Around the same time, the new president Putin rekindled Navalny’s interest in politics. As Navalny experiences deep love and family joy, and sheds the atheist cynicism of his early circle, the protagonist of Patriot begins to free himself from the spell of the 1990s that shaped him. This process takes time. Ultimately, a critical distance from the ‘90s would become central to the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s political program. Navalny captures the spirit of the decade that he argues we must move beyond in a single paragraph:

“Thinking back, I am struck that nobody appeared to see anything incongruous about my persistent efforts to present myself as someone verging on criminality, or at least associated with criminals, only to turn up claiming to be an assistant of the prosecutor of the Central Moscow district. So what did people think a prosecutor’s assistant, or for that matter a prosecutor, would look like? They expected him to look like a criminal, or at least someone who associated with criminals, because they were, the whole lot of them. There was one homogenous field of human endeavor that encompassed prosecutors, criminals, the National Directorate for Combating Organized Crime, and people driving BMWs and Mercedes. That state of affairs was the norm in the 1990s but ceased to be in the early to mid-2000s (and that, as I have noted elsewhere, was an immense and genuine achievement of Putin’s). It has now, however, come back with a vengeance. Today the prosecutor is again a criminal, only in a more highly organized crime gang” (p. 110–11).

A very accurate assessment. My own trauma from the 1990s, which shaped the rest of my life, came from encounters with those elusive new types: businessmen, gangsters, officials, all mimicking one another, infiltrating every realm of society and the media. By the 2000s, they had seized political power. A decade later, they began lecturing us on morality, culture, and love of country.

Homeland, God, and Personal Happiness

The regime’s distinctly conservative agenda began to take shape after 2012. By that time, Navalny had already passed through the left-liberal party Yabloko, the nationalist movement Narod, the Right Marches, and the Bolotnaya Square protests. It seems he gradually came to realize that a political alternative to Putinism couldn’t be built from isolated groups — committed liberals or nationalists — alone, but needed to rest on a platform that made sense to the majority, just as Putinism attempts to do, but without the hollow rhetoric. Instead, it had to be filled with genuine civic values. To express what mattered to most people, Navalny didn’t have to invent anything. At that time, according to the book, he genuinely saw himself as a patriot, a Christian, and a family man.

“I have found it helpful to make a distinction between my country and the state, something that was passed on to me from my parents. My family had a deep love of our country and was exceedingly patriotic. Nobody, however, had any time for the state, which was regarded as a kind of annoying mistake — one we ourselves had made, but a mistake nevertheless. There was never any talk about whether we ought to emigrate, and I can imagine no circumstances in which there might have been. How could you emigrate when your country is here, when the language you speak is here, and Russians are the world’s most wonderful people? A good people with a bad state” (p. 51).

Priest Alexei Uminsky, who supported Navalny and was later defrocked and stripped of his parish for refusing to read a wartime prayer for “Holy Russia,” describes love for one’s homeland as something rooted in childhood impressions: the love of parents and friends, the gentle connection with nature and language that shapes you as you grow up. Patriotism, on the other hand, he defines as worship of the state, often personified as an armed woman. According to Uminsky, the absence of that early, organic love creates an overgrown hunger for the latter. From Patriot, we get the sense that Navalny’s parents didn’t just teach him to love his homeland. Thanks to their unconditional support and deep understanding, that love became part of his political worldview.

“I was prepared for the Kremlin to persecute me, as was Yulia. But going after the broader circle of my relatives to take revenge on me really hurt. I remember one evening having dinner with the family. I was trying to find something encouraging to say, and the response was, ‘Don’t. We understand perfectly’” (p. 219).

“‘Listen, I don’t want to sound dramatic, but I think there’s a high probability I’ll never get out of here. Even if everything starts falling apart, they will bump me off at the first sign the regime is collapsing. They will poison me.’ ‘I know,’ [Yulia] said with a nod, in a voice that was calm and firm. ‘I was thinking that myself.’ At that moment I wanted to seize her in my arms and hug her joyfully, as hard as I could. That was so great! No tears! It was one of those moments when you realize you found the right person. Or perhaps she found you” (p. 477–478).

“[In prison, my brother] Oleg didn’t complain once. Every time that his life in prison became worse, he wrote to me in his letters, ‘Don’t stop! If you were to stop, it would mean that I’m in here for nothing.’ He knew that I was concerned for him, yet he constantly told me not to worry” (p. 235).

I’m reminded of the dissident legend about human rights activist Father Gleb Yakunin’s wife, Iraida, and her dealings with the KGB agents who tried to pressure her husband into repentance. At first, she had tried to dissuade him from becoming a dissident. But on her way to visit her husband in jail, when the agents threateningly tell her, “Don’t forget that you have children,” she retorts, “I also have God.” At the visit, in front of the investigator, she adds, “Gleb, everyone supports you. The whole world is behind you. Don’t turn around, don’t look back!”

For a political activist, happiness lies in knowing that your family supports your battle against a massive repressive machine. And yet, most of them would’ve probably chosen a different path if they could. The ethical dilemma this presents is almost impossible to resolve. That’s why the idea of God, as a judge, as a source of strength, is so central in this worldview. “Leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of his family to deal with everything else. They won’t let me down and will sort out all my headaches,” Navalny writes in the final paragraph of his book on page 479. (Which, notably, is also about family.)

Luxury, Corruption, and “Traditional” Values

Here we see a man whose life is grounded in three things: family, love for his country, and faith in God. And this is exactly what he tries to set against the official ideology, a system built on contradictions. He exposes those who loudly proclaim their patriotism while snapping up luxury homes abroad; those who praise “family values” and party with escorts on yachts; those who preach about God while racing through Moscow in motorcades of blacked-out Mercedes.

“This is hypocrisy. How is this possible?!” That’s the message Navalny’s team keeps repeating in their videos, and it resonates, we agree with them. 

Yes, it’s possible.

Putin’s propaganda machine relied heavily on familiar talking points, constantly trying to highlight the supposed gap between Alexei’s words and his “true” intentions, reducing everything to cynicism and greed. But it was unconvincing, which is one reason he was first poisoned and later killed in prison. Yet perhaps such defamatory efforts weren’t even necessary. Navalny’s creed, a struggle between good and neutrality, is also a battle between integrity and moral relativism. The system he opposed has a twisted kind of integrity: one based not on consistency between ideals and practice, but on their shocking and overwhelming contradiction. It’s a system where elites, in almost openly flaunting their wealth, don’t weaken their own power but legitimize it.

Navalny writes that he despised the Soviet party system for its hypocrisy, lies, and incompetence. But at least Soviet leaders were expected not to show off their privileges. In the 1990s, everyone understood: the more luxury a top official or church figure had, the more “successful” they were in their role. And who doesn’t want to be successful? Money became intertwined with power, and soon, the cult of wealth fused with the cult of a strong state. Meanwhile, contempt for “losers” who failed to gain either persisted. This may be why many Russians don’t truly hate the corrupt figures exposed in the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s videos.

The same applies to corruption itself, which Navalny made central to his mission. Corruption became normalized in the 1990s, and today, 54% of Russians are fairly tolerant of it. Why? Because demanding ethical behavior from the authorities also implies demanding it from ourselves, and few are ready for that.

There’s another thing society and the authorities share: a deep emphasis on family. For most Russians, family and close friends make up the entire world.
It’s no coincidence that the “Yeltsin family” and “Putin’s friends” have been the most stable forces in Russian politics for over three decades. But how does this emphasis square with record-high divorce rates and widespread domestic violence? Following Father Uminsky’s earlier framework — the less warmth in real families, the more emphasis on official patriotism — we might conclude that Russians treasure “family values” because they represent unrealized potential. We may sincerely believe in them because we can’t or don’t actually live by them.

The same goes for the kind of patriotism embraced by most Russians: it rarely intersects with daily life. People live ordinary lives full of petty arguments, betrayals, everyday compromise, and still yearn for ideals of family, nation, and faith to cast a noble light on their existence. State ideology, broadcasting “traditional values” as supposedly innate to the Russian soul, only widens the gap between aspiration and reality, leaving no space for real politics. After all, if Russians are already inherently just and collectivist, why bother putting those values into practice?

The Zone of Solidarity and the Middle Class

There’s nothing particularly unique about how Putinism tries to impose ideological dominance. Every bourgeois nation legitimizes itself by projecting a romanticized version of its past, offering citizens a basis for collective pride and imagined unity. But between this ideological superstructure and the reality of everyday life, there must exist a zone of practical solidarity, a space where civil society lives, where people fight for their personal interests and, at the same time, for the common good.

It’s this fragile space that activists have been trying to inhabit, even as apolitical society suspects them of selfish motives or pathological complaining. Navalny tried to activate this zone. His book convinces us that he was a happy man who wanted Russia to be happy too. And his life shows that to achieve both personal and collective happiness here and now, you have to go all the way.

Mass opposition politics in the 1990s belonged largely to those pushed to the margins of the new system: members of the intelligentsia, workers from shuttered factories, impoverished pensioners. In the 2000s, when Vladimir Putin reignited Navalny’s political interest, there was a sense that the emerging middle class, with its double potential for both protest and conformity, should become the agent of modernization. Navalny positioned himself as both representative and battering ram of this discontented middle class: first, as a minority shareholder challenging Rosneft from within; later, as a political figurehead for urban Russians unwilling to trade democracy for comfort.

In 2014, part of the middle class accepted the annexation of Crimea as a substitute for protest. A new generation of youth emerged, new protests flared across the country, and Navalny sought to build a broad populist front that extended beyond the middle class. He became the regime’s primary target. Support grew, but in the end, he stood alone in his decision to return to Russia. Then came the war. The street movement faded. Navalny seems to have realized, at least judging by his prison diaries, that only a miracle could save him. And so, his personal and political theology began to take its final form.

The Navalnyism of the Future?

Religious and ethical language often surfaces when political language fails. Today, some opposition voices, struggling to connect with their fellow citizens, resort to moral or religious rhetoric. The idea of repentance has entered public discussion. Navalny, too, wrote of repentance in the context of the 1990s: 

“Nevertheless, this sort of public recanting seems to me to be very important from a practical point of view. We must not repeat the same mistake” (p. 124).

This fusion of religious vocabulary with political meaning is a tragically risky, and therefore powerful, move on Navalny’s part. He was trying to extract himself from the 1990s, a decade in which he once hoped to succeed, participating in corporate drinking binges aboard private planes, one of which he now describes with disgust. Surely some of his former colleagues, now respectable lawmakers, bankers, or security officials, are still flying on that metaphorical plane. And many opposition-leaning citizens who supported Yeltsin in 1993 and 1996, or Putin in 1999, are still unwilling to reassess that era, or themselves along with it.

A deep love of country, a serious attitude toward the ideals of perestroika, shaped by 1990s TV shows like Vzglyad, the music of DDT and Nautilus Pompilius, a taste for real political competition: perhaps something in this mix nudged Navalny in a different direction. He sparked a new generation of activists. He awakened political courage in many — future campaign managers at the ACF, future dissidents, some of whom are now in prison. But ultimately, this is the story of how a political struggle for a moderate, “bourgeois” agenda, one associated with civic virtues in the best sense, led a man to prison and then to death. It’s the story of a politician who, not long ago, was building a wide base by speaking to all kinds of people, only to find himself isolated in a prison cell, left alone with his convictions. The biblical drama of his final months, despite Alexei’s own efforts to downplay it with humor, only deepens the divide between Navalny the populist and Navalny the tragic martyr.

Could the Russian opposition have pursued politics without it turning into inevitable martyrdom? That’s a question worth separate consideration. Another pressing question: Is a depoliticized bourgeois normalcy possible in Russia? One that demands no sacrifice or repentance, only a functional state, technocratic competence, and a mild, unifying patriotism? Sociologists suggest the demand for such a model is growing. But perhaps a love for family and friends, a desire to live with dignity and cohesion, an interest in grand ideas, and a belief in higher justice can still give rise to the radical democratic project dreamed of by revolutionaries and opposition leaders alike.

This project could take many forms. It’s by no means certain that Navalny’s legacy will pass directly to his closest allies. But one thing is clear: as a real politician and the central figure in Patriot, he has already entered both the banned and the unwritten textbooks of Russian history. He will continue to appear at every moral crossroads and historical rupture, frightening some, inspiring others, and offering future generations powerful lessons in political struggle.

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