Alexei Navalny Speaks From the Grave

Some of you know that for the better part of a year, I spent my afternoon reading sessions slowly reading the prison diary collected and published last year by Alexei Navalny’s widow, Julia Navalny (Alexei Navalny Patriot: A Memoir, Alfred A. Knopf, 2024). It’s a very big book and I only could read four or five pages at a sitting. At the end of the work, there is an Epilogue that I wanted to share with you — the essence of his final words.

If you remember the story beginning in 2020 on a plane headed for Russia, Alexei Navalny was suddenly stricken with the effects of poisoning that had been ordered and carried out by Vladimir Putin’s men. After nearly dying and then treated in a German hospital, Navalny decided nevertheless that he would return to Russia to fight against the unjust authoritarian government run by “thieves and rogues.” He was immediately arrested when his plane landed in Russia — his home country that he was determined to save.

He was placed in severe prison conditions for four years after trial after trial on trumped-up charges, and he finally died in a prison above the Arctic Circle on one cold day as he walked out to exercise. Apparently he knew he was going to die — he hadn’t been well for some time and could not receive any real medical care. So in the Epilogue, he describes two techniques he had worked out for living as well as he could to the end.

His first technique was to imagine the worst thing that could now happen. “The important thing is not to torment yourself with anger, hatred, fantasies of revenge, but to move instantly to acceptance. ... Instead of yelling, you need to think about the situation calmly. So what if that worst thing comes to pass. Worse things happen.”

The second technique is religion. Turns out Navalny was a devout Russian Orthodox, and he asserts that “faith makes life simpler.” He asks “do you believe in the immortality of the soul? If so, then don’t worry about the morrow. Because the morrow is perfectly capable of taking care of itself.”

And Navalny ends his memoir with these words from the grave: “My job is to seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of his family to deal with everything else. They won’t let me down and will sort out all my headaches. As they say in prison here, they will take my punches for me.”

And shortly after that, this courageous man took a walk in the arctic cold and died without family or friends, but sustained by Jesus and his family to the end. And so, let us pray that we all may be sustained at the end of our days in this life.