Russia’s Alexei Navalny wrote secret memoir before his death, widow says
- Titled ‘Patriot’, Alexei Navalny’s posthumous memoir will be released in October
- Navalny, 47, died in an Arctic prison in February while serving a prison sentence
Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny wrote an autobiography before he died which will be published later this year, his widow Yulia Navalnaya said on Thursday, revealing the existence of a text his inner circle had kept secret for years.
Navalny, who died aged 47 in an Arctic prison in February, had wanted to become president of Russia and was Vladimir Putin’s fiercest domestic critic. His allies, branded extremists by the authorities, accused Putin of having him murdered and have said they will provide proof to back that allegation.
The Kremlin has denied any state involvement in his death and, when he was alive, dismissed Navalny, a former lawyer who oversaw corruption investigations into Russia’s political elite, as a marginal US-backed troublemaker out to destabilise Russia.
Navalnaya, his widow, said in a post on X from outside Russia that her late husband had started to write the memoir - titled Patriot - in 2020 after he had been poisoned by what Western doctors said was a nerve agent and had been flown to Germany for medical treatment.
She said the book would be released simultaneously in at least 11 different languages on October 22 and appear in Navalny’s native Russian.