‘Nothing but lies’: New Navalny memoir foretells collapse of Putin’s regime

Russian dissident Alexey Navalny, who passed away earlier this year in a far-off place, predicted that Vladimir Putin’s rule would eventually “collapse” and that it would be based solely on “nothing but lies,” according to his posthumous memoir, which is scheduled to be released later this month.

The opposition politician, 47, was seen as Putin’s most fervent political adversary, who organized widespread anti-Kremlin protests against abuse of power and corruption in recent years.

Navalny also resigned that he would spend the rest of his life in prison and perish while he was in jail, as revealed in excerpts from his book, Patriot, which was published on Friday in The New Yorker magazine.

“I will spend the rest of my life in prison and die here”, he wrote on March 22, 2022.

“All anniversaries will be celebrated without me, there will be no one to say goodbye to.” I’ll never see my grandchildren”.

When Navalny passed away on February 16 while he was serving a 19-year prison sentence for “extremism” charges in an Arctic prison.

His imprisonment and eventual death drew widespread condemnation, with many blaming Putin.

His widow Yulia Navalnaya revealed in April that her late husband, who had been flown to Germany for treatment after being poisoned by what Western doctors claimed was a nerve agent, had started writing a memoir in 2020.

The Kremlin denied that the government was involved in his prison death. Putin and his political allies also criticized him as a marginal United States-backed troublemaker seeking to destabilize the nation when he was still alive.

After experiencing a significant health emergency as a result of his 2020 poisoning, Navalny was detained in January 2021 upon his return to Russia.

“The only thing we should fear is that we will surrender our homeland to be plundered by a gang of liars, thieves, and hypocrites”, he wrote on January 17, 2022 in his account of his last years.

Additionally, Navalny asserted that “the best way to elect leaders is through honest and free elections,” adding that corruption was destroying the state.

He claimed that the current rulers of Russia “have absolutely no ideas” and that their only goal is to maintain control.

“Lies, and nothing but lies”, he wrote of his country’s power structure under Putin, adding that “it will crumble and collapse”.

“The Putinist state is not sustainable”, he predicted in his book, which is set to be published on October 22.

“One day, we will look at it, and it won’t be there. Victory is inevitable”.

In a last entry dated January 17, 2024, about a month before his death, Navalny wrote: “It turned out that, in Russia, to defend the right to have and not to hide your beliefs, you have to pay by sitting in a solitary cell. Of course, I don’t like being there. But I’ll keep my country and my ideas separate.

New Yorker editor David Remnick called Navalny’s writing “inspiring, emboldening”, and wrote that it was impossible to read his prison diary “without being outraged by the tragedy of his suffering, and by his death”.

“Navalny writes with a fierce moral clarity about the inhumanity of Vladimir Putin’s regime, and about the power of its opposite force – the humanity of his fellow countrymen”, Remnick said, of the prose “that is direct, precise, and, in the face of unimaginable isolation, mordantly funny”.