How Aleksei Navalny’s Prison Diaries Got Published

Aleksei A. Navalny knew he would likely die in prison.

In messages to his supporters posted on social media, Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, often struck a hopeful note about the future of his country, or a comic one, joking about the absurdities and indignities of prison life.

But in the journal entries he managed to write and smuggle out of prison, he was more introspective, and blunt: “I knew from the outset that I would be imprisoned for life — either the rest of my life or until the end of the life of this regime,” Navalny wrote in his diary in March 2022. “I will spend the rest of my life in prison and die here.”

He reflected on what that would mean: missing birthdays, anniversaries, his children’s graduations. Never meeting his grandchildren. The thought made him want to scream and smash things, he wrote. But then he thought of other Russian dissidents who had suffered similar fates. “I resigned myself and accept it,” he wrote.

Those passages appear near the end of “Patriot,” a posthumous memoir by Navalny that will be published on Tuesday, eight months after his death at age 47 in an Arctic penal colony.

“Patriot” is by turns funny, fiery, reflective and tragic, laced with Navalny’s trademark wry humor and idealism. Even from his prison cell, he takes obvious delight in attacking the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. It’s also a gutting personal account from a husband and father facing the reality that he will never be with his family again, that Putin might succeed in silencing him and that the sacrifices he made to oppose authoritarianism and corruption will have grave consequences for the people he loves most.

The memoir, which is being released in the United States by Knopf, was pieced together after his death with the help of Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny’s widow. It will be published in 22 languages, including Russian. For Navalnaya, releasing the memoir is a way to instill hope in the struggling Russian opposition movement, and to keep her husband present in the world.