Patriot by Alexi Navalny

We must separate “a good people with a bad state.”

The defining representation of this is Alexi Navalny, the Russian lawyer turned good-government advocate that stood, and died, as the world’s most prominent anti-authoritarian activist — and foil to Russian despot Vladimir Putin.

In Patriot, his posthumous memoir that was published last fall, Navalny’s charm and commitment shone through. I admire him greatly. The book is rich with anecdotes about growing up under late-stage Soviet Communism, some of his tactics and his hopeful worldview.

“My family had a deep love of our country and was exceedingly patriotic,” he wrote. “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.”

More broadly, as the book cover itself aptly puts it:: “Life works in such a way that social progress and a better future can only be achieved if a certain number of people are willing to pay the price for their right to have their own beliefs. The more of them there are, the less everyone has to pay.”

Below my notes for future reference.

My notes:

• Leaders believe “it is in the interests of the population that they should be lied to endlessly.”
• Chernobyl: “ the health of tens of thousands of people was sacrificed in the cause of a grand cover-up that was ridiculous, because the radioactive fallout was so extensive it was registered by laboratories all over the globe.”
• Vasily Shukshin: “the whole of Russia was covered with lies, like a scab” 
• Tells the story of growing up and his parents and their friends and even his kid friends knew the “political work” staffers of the military jobs was just to tell lies. 
• The Grapes of Wrath (1939) was initially released in the Soviet Union to show how bad American capitalism was, but then was removed from wide release because the poor family could still own a car and be happier than the Soviet collective farmer
• As early as 1984, he remembers his parents over drinks at their homre with friends discussing leadership and “shortages”, and mother would put the phone under a couch cushion because she was afraid of the KGB (the “osobisty”) listening in  — they secretly had a copy of The Gulag Archipelago . But when Brezhnev died, his mother cried like so many others — they weren’t anti Soviet
• (((Books are part of the resistance)))
• His grandmother though was the only he knew critical of Lenin — she was one of 11 kids of a kulak family that wasn’t sent to Siberia but was removed from their prosperous farm after the revolution 
• He loved music, and would sit through the propaganda TV programs of western music because they’d play short samples of the music they criticized — he found the band KISS this way
• “Those who feel nostalgic for the USSR are in reality nostalgic for their youth-a time when everything was still in the future…”
• “Pelting your friends with potatoes out in the fields was, of course, fun, but still my own most enduring childhood memory of the U.S.S.R. is queueing for milk. My brother was born in 1983. A house with a small child in it needs a constant supply of milk, and for several years I was responsible for buying it. Every day after school I would go to the shop and wait in line for at least forty minutes to buy that damn milk. Often it had not been delivered yet, and you would stand in the company of dozens of glum adults waiting for it to arrive. If you were a bit late, all the milk might already have been sold, and that evening your parents would not be happy. That is why I have no wish to go back to the days of the U.S.S.R. A state incapable of producing enough milk for its citizens does not deserve my nostalgia.” 50
• Separate country and state: “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.”
• “A good people with a bad state”
• Recommends Alexie Yrchak’s “Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More“
• Gorbachev though rightly seen positively by history was disliked locally because of his rational attempts to reign in drunkenness: “appreciation of his having allowed freedom of speech was instantly overshadowed a hundredfold by indignation that he was not allowing it in”
• Perestroika 
• Glasnost
• Gorbachev, Yektsin and efforts to reform became associated with the cause of Communist shortage rather than the result 
• Gorbachev was seen as indecisive, and this author as young person was critical he wasn’t radical enough  — now Navalny called him “incorruptible”
• He mentions Regan saying Soviet jokes and shares some of his own — a colonel’s son can’t rise above the rank of colonel because a general has his own son
• Challenges Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1867) theme that individual actors in history don’t matter, by imagining what his life would have been if Gorbachev didn’t help open Soviet life: he would use his language learning to get some  job as a spy in the west: “having concocted my weekly quota of lies, I would buy jeans and a cassette recorder”
• “It turned out that being poor was much more bearable when everybody else was, but it was intolerable once you could see your neighbor was far richer.”
• Lenin in 1912: Terribly distant they are from the people
• The failed August 1991 putsch shifted power from Gorbachev to Yeltsin 
• Putin despises the Belovezha Accords (1991, end of USSR)
• “Yeltsin was devoid of genuine motivation and driven only by a lust for power “ 
• Navalny as young person defended Yeltsin and these early democratic reformers against old communists but he now sees how many of them robbed the state — were they the necessary tools for democracy or the wrong leaders that corrupted the system? He remembers yelling at a female classmate for supporting Grigory Yavlinsky as unrealistic but later joined his same party
• Putin was well liked upon ascension but was Yeltsin’s pick 
• Yabloko not critical enough and eventually Navalny was booted out 
• Media only focus on most repugnant members of a march or protest, and he tried to work with many various groups and so was called a nationalist
• Time serving briefly liberal governor Belykh: “Every time you wanted to do something good, you had to do something bad (maybe not for your own benefit, but for someone else’s ). Before you know it, you find yourself engaging in corrupt behavior from morning til night. And if you are behaving improperly for the benefit of someone else, why would it not be OK to do a little bit of the same for yourself? The system soon swallows you.”
• Later Belykh arrested when the Putin regime turned on him
• “It is fundamental to Putin’s power, however, that the rules can change any moment and be used against you.”
• Navalny’s Livejournal drew a community to expose corruption like a false Ministry of Health RFP for a social network; his 2011-era micro donations from tens of thousands of supporters allowed him to be an independent actor
• Anti corruption Foundation: “We are hybrids, somewhere between journalists, lawyers, and political activists. We come across a story involving corruption, examine the documents, collect evidence and publish it. In the first years, we did so as posts on my blog; later, as videos on YouTube. The most important thing we do, then, is spread the stories of millions hear about it”
• Like their famous Putin mansion discovery

• Tells the story of the timber company sham trial, and how his friend Pyotr Ofitserov went to prison with Navalny because Pyotr wouldn’t lie to incriminate Navalny. When Navalny asked him in the truck taking them to prison if he regretted it, Pyotr said. “Do you really think you’re the only one who wants to remain an honest man?”
• His moment with his wife when he tells her it’s likely he’ll either die there, or be killed if the regime fell
• Leo Tolstoy in his Resurrection: “the only place befitting an honest man in Russia at the present time is a prison” — though Navalny notes there are millions of honest Russians 
• Reappears in early 2024, joking that his exercise yard at -30 degrees “Even at that temperature you can walk for more than a half an hour, but only if you are sure you can grow a new nose, ears, and fingers.. what a wonderful breeze blows into the courtyard despite the concrete fence, it’s just wow”
• Last words written on January 17, 2024: “The Putin state is not sustainable. One day we will look at it, and it won’t be there. Victory is inevitable. But for now we must not give up, and we must stand by our beliefs.” 
• These prison diaries were smuggled out of prison
• Book ends with a broader epilogue from March 2022 he wrote comparing to Soviet dissidents (Anatoly Marchenko) who died in cause of battle