Alexei Navalny wrote an autobiography before he died which will be released this year, his widow has revealed.
The Russian opposition leader, who was considered President Putin’s most dangerous critic, died at the age of 47 in a remote Arctic penal colony in February after returning to his homeland having survived a previous assassination attempt.
His widow, Yulia Navalnaya, 47, has now said that her husband had been writing a book, which had already been translated into 11 languages, including Russian, and would be released on October 22.
“To be honest, I never really imagined that this is how Alexei would write his biography,” she posted on Twitter/X.
“I thought we would be about 80 years old, he would be sitting grandly in front of his computer, typing away next to an open window. I would be fussing around him, complaining that the grandchildren were arriving any second and he was busy with some rubbish.
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“But after the poisoning attempt in 2020, people kept telling him ‘Alexei, you should write a book’. He waved it all away. I mean, what sort of biography do you get from being 44 years old? That’s not much more than half a lifetime. He never felt like he was in a hurry, given that there was still so much ahead.
“And then everything that happened, happened. It was awful, unfair. There would be no second half.”
Navalny started writing the memoir, titled Patriot, in 2020 after he was poisoned with the nerve agent novichok. His widow is working with the American publisher Knopf to edit his manuscript, the publishing house said.
The publisher also said that the book would cover Navalny’s youth, his early rise as a political activist, his marriage and family, his political career as an opposition leader and the attacks on his life.
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Navalnaya added on Twitter/X: “He liked to link memories from his life to nationwide events. He really enjoyed describing his childhood.
“But no point in me carrying on. You will soon read it all yourselves.”
Navalnaya added: “This book is a testament not only to Alexei’s life, but to his unwavering commitment to the fight against dictatorship — a fight he gave everything for, including his life.”
Navalnaya, who lives in exile and was unable to attend her husband’s funeral in Moscow, has emerged as a powerful political figure, channelling her grief to campaign against Putin’s rule.
After choosing to return to Russia in 2021, Navalny was moved between prisons, eventually dying at the Polar Wolf penal colony, where temperatures can drop to -28C.
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His book is likely to invite comparison with other great works of Russian literature written by political dissidents and inmates of Siberian labour camps.
They include Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel prize-winning novelist of The Gulag Archipelago, and Varlam Shalamov, the author of Kolyma Tales. In the 19th century, Anton Chekhov also wrote about the dire conditions faced by Russian prisoners on Sakhalin, an island off Russia’s Pacific coast.
