Free

In 2023, I watched “Navalny” with my family, just before it won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. “Navalny” is the story of the near-deadly poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and the independent investigation that proved Vladimir Putin’s direct involvement. As we now know, Navalny recovered from the poisoning in a hospital and rehab facility in Germany and then returned home to Russia knowing that he faced certain arrest and imprisonment. 

Patriot, Navalny’s memoir, picks up where “Navalny” left off. Navalny returns home to Russia, is promptly arrested, and spends the remaining years of his life in prison, battling escalating and ever more absurd criminal charges designed to justify his ongoing imprisonment. 

The book tells two different stories. In the first roughly half of Patriot, Navalny writes about his life as a free person - his childhood in an Army family, his education, his initial support of Boris Yeltsin and his eventual disillusionment with the post-Soviet regime in Russia, his marriage to Yulia, his early career as an anti-Putin dissident during the early years of the 21st century, and his first conviction. In the second half, he writes about his life in prison. 

Just as the criminal charges against Navalny accumulated, his prison conditions worsened. In the early days of his imprisonment, he is held in a normal Russian prison - terrible, but not unbearable. Navalny writes about the prison routine - exercise, meals, showers, reading, and work - and although he is lonely and isolated and sometimes fearful, he makes the best of his situation. As an inmate in a normal prison, he’s entitled to occasional visits, and is allowed to receive food parcels and other items. He accumulates so many books that he has a hard time moving them when he’s transferred to another prison. He spends his days reading and writing and maintaining his health as best he can. He finds ways to be happy. There is a particularly moving passage in which Navalny washes the dirty walls of a new cell, and then sits on his bed enjoying the results of his work, content for a moment. He’s surrounded by walls, but at least they’re clean and bright, and that is enough for that moment. 

*****

Alexei Navalny knew he was going to die in prison, and he jokes about how his eventual death will boost sales of the book that he’s writing a few words at a time, whenever he can get his hands on pen and paper. “The book’s author has been murdered by a villainous president; what more could the marketing department ask for?" He had to have been afraid, many times over, but he persisted in telling the truth. 

*****

Right now, I’m reading Timothy Snyder’s On Freedom. I read On Tyranny right after the election, just as its first rule, Do Not Obey in Advance, was gaining traction in the social media discourse. Sadly, lots of powerful people have been obeying in advance. Maybe Joe and Mika and Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos need to read Dr. Snyder’s books. 

On Tyranny is very short - just a list of rules for dealing with the imposition of tyranny, with short explanations for each. On Freedom is a full-length book that examines the notion of freedom through the idea of kӧrper vs. lieb: the former is the German word for the physical body, and the latter means something like the soul, or the whole person. On Freedom is about the difference between what Snyder calls “negative freedom” or freedom from and “positive freedom,” which is freedom to - to live and learn and love and travel and be human and fully alive; to be a person and not just a body. 

This doesn’t mean that the body is not important. We’re all bodies with bodily needs and we all have to engage with the physical world. Alexei Navalny writes beautifully about the life of the body, even in prison - the joy of a shower and clean clothes, the pleasure of bread and butter and instant coffee with milk on Sundays during his early imprisonment when he was still allowed such luxuries. But just as a person can be limited and imprisoned by an unhealthy body, a healthy person can also be imprisoned by fear of the physical consequences of standing up to a tyrant. You could be beaten, thrown in jail, tortured, or even killed. Or you could just lose your job and then be forced to live in poverty and discomfort. No one wants this to happen to them. I’m sure that Alexei Navalny didn’t want any of what happened to him. But what kind of life do you have if you limit your speech and your actions and even your thoughts to appease a tyrant’s whims? You might be physically free in the most limited sense, but you’re not truly free unless you know what the truth is and you’re not afraid to speak it and live by it. 

*****

Alexei Navalny never stopped telling the truth, no matter how many times Putin and his henchmen threw him in jail or moved him to ever more harsh and restrictive facilities. He decided not to be afraid of anything, and that is his advice to all of us: Don’t be afraid of anything. In daily life, of course, I’m afraid of everything; or rather, I worry about everything. Thankfully, courage (as no one knows better than I) is not the same as fearlessness. Courage is doing what you have to do even when you’re afraid - especially when you’re afraid. I’ll never be fearless but I hope to be courageous. And I’ll never be as courageous as Alexei Navalny but I hope and intend to be courageous enough for any moment that demands it. I don’t want to lose my job or go to prison or suffer any of the other consequences of speaking out in times of injustice and tyranny. But I want to live like a free person more than I want to avoid suffering.