Russian dissident Alexey Navalny, who died earlier this year in a remote penal colony, predicted that President Vladimir Putin's reign would eventually “collapse,” describing it as based on “nothing but lies,” according to his posthumous memoirs. They will be published later. this month.
The 47-year-old opposition politician was seen as Putin's fiercest political enemy, who managed to galvanize the country and organize massive anti-Kremlin protests against abuse of power and corruption in recent years.
In excerpts from his book Patriot, published Friday in The New Yorker magazine, Navalny had also given up the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison and dying in detention.
“I will spend the rest of my life in prison and die here,” he wrote on March 22, 2022.
“There will be no one to say goodbye to… All anniversaries will be celebrated without me. “I will never see my grandchildren.”
Navalny was serving a 19-year prison sentence on “extremism” charges in an Arctic prison when he died on February 16.
His imprisonment and eventual death sparked widespread condemnation, with many blaming Putin.
In April, his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, revealed that her late husband had begun writing a memoir in 2020 after being poisoned with what Western doctors said was a nerve agent and being flown to Germany for treatment. doctor.
The Kremlin denied any state involvement in his death while in prison. When he was alive, Putin and his political allies also dismissed him as a US-backed fringe troublemaker seeking to destabilize the country.
Navalny was arrested in January 2021 upon his return to Russia after suffering a major health emergency due to being poisoned in 2020.
“The only thing we have to fear is that we will hand over our homeland to be plundered by a band of liars, thieves and hypocrites,” he wrote on January 17, 2022 in his account of his final years.
Navalny also insisted that corruption was destroying the state, adding that “the best way to elect leaders is through honest and free elections.”
He said that those who currently govern Russia “have absolutely no concept” and that “their only goal is to hold on to power.”
“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 will be published on October 22.
“One day we will see it and it will no longer 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 hide your beliefs, you have to pay by sitting in a solitary cell.” . Of course, I don't like being there. But I will not give up either my ideas or my country.”
New Yorker editor David Remnick called Navalny's writings “inspiring and encouraging” and wrote that it was impossible to read his prison diary “without feeling outraged by the tragedy of his suffering and his death.”
“Navalny writes with fierce ethical clarity about the inhumanity of Vladimir Putin's regime and about the power of its opposing force: the humanity of his compatriots,” Remnick said, of prose “that is direct, precise and, in the most expensive sense of unimaginable isolation, mordantly funny.”
“Some people collect stamps. Some collect coins. And I have a growing collection of amazing court judgments,” Navalny wrote.