If you are an avid support of Ukraine's effort to defeat Putin, as I am, this is a very important book. It is:
1. A simple rendition of Russia's slide back into authoritarianism from the heights of its 'fledgling democracy' moment of the 1990s. Navalny was there, on the hustings, he knows it all, and he understands the extraordinary wealth of the 2000's which Russia's Oligarchs and Plutocrats, harnessed by Putin, squandered for their vulgar enjoyment rather than transforming Russia into a modern European state.
2. The very sparse story of a man's deep love for country, for the God in which HE believed, for a vision of a free and democratic Russia governed by the rule of law, and for his beloved wife and children.
3. An excruciating detailing of the cruelty of Russia's gulag system, which is simply a cynically updated version of Soviet and Czarist incarceration – torture by a thousand cuts. You understand why Russian prison volunteers choose the high risk of death and maiming on the battlefield rather than the Black Hole of Siberia.
4. A political memoir of courage, sacrifice, and one man's pure vision of a better world for Russians, written by a man who might have led them instead of the millenarian and diabolical Putin. It is a last will and testament - sober, cheeky, humorous, and utterly stoic.
5. An augury of the current Russian moment. Navalny recognises the inherent fragility of the totalitarian state, while acknowledging that such states can continue for decades. Russia might splinter in an instant, or we might live with this lame and dangerously crazed state for a very long time.
My Ukrainian friends believe that violence, greed, imperial addiction, and disdain for other cultures is dyed into the Russia cardio-vascular system. I don't believe that, just as I have never thought it of the Germans. Give people a set of circumstances, and people will respond predictably. Russia was manhandled back into its current malignancy by cabals of venal, corrupt "crooks and thieves" (as was Navalny's war cry), who collectively set the tone for Russia Today - a violent, imperial, greedy, cynical, callous, nihilistic, frightened polity which is deeply and murderously disdainful of the Ukrainians, among many other nations.
Pity the Russians of today, who will be stained by their bloodwork for generations - and Slava Ukraini!!
