Patriot

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.

“I should have drunk my tea more elegantly, since there is a guy sitting three tables away furtively taking a video.”

Throughout the book, Navalny wraps his social criticism in irony and humor. He was poisoned, he claims, by Russian security services but uses this moment to make a comment about the nature of existing in a surveillance state. He can never escape the knowledge that he is being filmed, even when he is recollecting a near-death experience in The Battle Against Authoritarianism.

“No matter how fascinating and gripping the details of the failed attempt to murder me were, I was far more interested in how the elections in Tomsk and Novosibirsk had gone.”

After being poisoned, Navalny’s recovery helped to establish his credentials. The results of local elections were more important to him than his own health; the chance to politically rebuke his enemies took precedence over everything else. Early in the book, Navalny signals to his audience how invested he is in political change and The Enduring Hope for Democratic Reform in Russia.

“My mother pointed out, however, that even the fools in our town knew the real reason for the monitoring.”

Navalny remembers how, in the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the adults in his life were aware of the truth about what had happened but were forced to accept the official narrative of events. Such memories indicate the extent to which the society had become entrapped by The Normalization of Corruption, in which an entire society was trapped in a system that everyone knew was failing but imagining an alternative was almost impossible.