Nothing seemed to bother Alexeï Navalny more than this question: “why return to Russia?” » His editors did not fail to also ask him by videoconference when, at the end of 2020, the Russian opponent offered them his autobiography. He answers, in Patriotwhich appears in France on October 22 by Robert Laffont (528 pages, 25 euros): to defend his convictions. And, for him, that is not an issue for debate.
After five months of exhausting convalescence in Germany after being poisoned on Russian soil with Novichok, a powerful nerve agent, Alexei Navalny embarked, on January 17, 2021, for Moscow. As soon as you get off the plane, you will be arrested. Three years later, on February 16, 2024, he died in a penal colony beyond the Arctic Circle without being released.
The only thing left was to write. Banned from standing in the elections, pursued by countless trials, pursued by a team of agents tasked with assassinating him, his chances of mobilizing Russian society, in an increasingly violent repressive context, were diminishing. His powerful videos about the fate of the power elites, including the last one about “Putin’s palace” on the shores of the Black Sea, published in the hours following his return to Russia, were no longer enough for those who sought to embody an alternative. to the head of the Kremlin, master of the game for more than twenty years.
More intimate chapters.
Beginning in Germany, in a house in Freiburg, Alexeï Navalany’s story begins with the attempted poisoning of which he was subjected, on August 20, 2020, while he was on board a plane connecting the Siberian city of Tomsk with Moscow. . With the phlegm-tinged biting irony that characterizes him, he writes: “Actually, dying didn’t hurt. If I hadn’t been dying, I never would have done it. lying on the floor next to the bathroom. As you can imagine, the floor was not particularly clean. » “You”: everyone is challenged and will be throughout this Memoir.
Two other, more intimate chapters follow, about his childhood, in the garrison cities – his father was a liaison officer in the anti-aircraft forces, his mother, an accountant in civilian life or in military units – and about his commitment. Two very political parts too, because the opponent takes the opportunity to evoke the obsessive themes of contemporary Russia: Chernobyl, 700 kilometers from the garrison city where he was when he was 10 years old, a symbol of the lies of the State; Afghanistan, the embodiment of mismanagement of power with disastrous consequences; the role of Gorbachev, about which Alexei Navalny sketches a lenient review for a man immune to corruption; and that of Yeltsin, revisited downwards for opposite reasons.
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