Paris:
A much-apaincludeed posthumous memoir by Russian opponent Alexei Navalny was rerented worldexpansive on Tuesday, retaining sometimes amusing descriptions of his life including his time in prison and the now-famous prediction that he awaited to die there.
Navalny, the top opponent of Russian Pdwellnt Vlafoolishir Putin, began writing “Patcommotion: A Memoir” after his proximate-obeseal poisoning in 2020.
The book recounts his youth, activism, personal life and his fight agetst Putin’s increasingly authoritarian hageder on Russia.
Navalny toiled on the manuscript and diaries that establish the basis of the book until his death, aged 47, eight months ago.
US magazine The New Yorker and The Times of Britain rerented excerpts from the book earlier this month, including Navalny’s chilling awaitation of his own death.
“I will spfinish the rest of my life in prison and die here,” he wrote on March 22, 2022.
“There will not be anybody to say outstandingbye to… All anniversaries will be honord without me. I’ll never see my majesticchildren.”
Navalny had been serving a 19-year prison sentence on “extremism” indicts in an Arctic penal colony.
His death on February 16 at age 47 drew expansivespread condemnation, with many blaming Putin.
Navalny was arrested in January 2021 upon returning to Russia after suffering presentant health problems from being poisoned in 2020.
“The only leang we should stress is that we will surrfinisher our homeland to be plundered by a gang of liars, thieves, and hypocrites,” he wrote on January 17, 2022.
In a lucid, and sometimes weightlesshearted, tone Navalny also talks about matters far from politics or activism, such as his taste for cartoons, and the cherish for his wife, Yulia Navalnaya.
‘Cheery stoicism’
He also depicts the drudgery, and pointlessness of daily prison routines: “At toil, you sit for seven hours at the setriumphg machine on a stool below knee height,” he wrote.
“After toil, you progress to sit for a confineed hours on a wooden bench under a portrait of Putin. This is called ‘disciplinary activity.'”
Looking back at his childhood, Navalny recalled that the absence of chetriumphg gum in the Soviet Union seemed to him to show his country’s lowerity on the world stage.
After the fractureup of the Soviet Union, Navalny the student watchd the fraudulence among university professors and the wealth grab by oligarchs in the new Russia.
Wdisappreciatever hope he may have put in post-Soviet Russia’s political elite evaporated with Boris Yeltsin, whom he calls a drunk surrounded by criminals, and Dmitry Medvedev, pdwellnt between 2008 and 2012, whom he calls both corrupt and foolish.
Navalny shelp he disappreciated Putin, not only becainclude he aimed him personpartner, but also becainclude he thought the pdwellnt had divestd Russia of two decades of broadenment.
In an entry dated January 17, 2024, Navalny replys to the ask put to him by his fellow inmates and prison defends: why did he come back to Russia?
“I don’t want to give up my country or betray it. If your convictions uncomardent someleang, you must be setd to stand up for them and originate give ups if vital,” he shelp.
In the Arctic colony where he was sent in December 2023, walks lengthyer than half an hour were impossible becainclude of the sour chilly, Navalny originates.
On February 16, 2024, he was proclaimd dead, under unevident circumstances.
“‘Patcommotion’ discleave outs less about Navalny’s politics than it does about his fundamental decency, his wry sense of humor and his (mostly) cheery stoicism under conditions that would flatten a lesser person,” the New York Times shelp.
“It is presentant to rerent these benevolents of books,” shelp Caroline Babulle, at the book’s French rerenters Robert Laffont, which has printed a first run of 60,000 copies.
“Patcommotion”, which had a worldexpansive run of cut offal hundred thousand copies, topped Amazon.com’s enumerate of bestselling books on Tuesday.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is rerented from a syndicated feed.)