Alexei Navalny embodied and died for a Russian hope that relies on Christian faith

Hannah Glickstein• February 20, 2025

Alexei Navalny – like Alexander Solzhenitsyn – was schooled in atheism. But – also like Solzhenitsyn – Navalny was influenced and baptised during childhood by religious grandparents. Navalny become a believer after the birth of his first child. In his memoir, Patriot, he says: “Like anyone who grew up in the Soviet Union, I had never believed in God, but looking now at Dasha…I could not reconcile myself to the thought that this was only biology.”

It took imprisonment and cancer, alongside incessant debates with believers incarcerated in Stalin’s gulags, to finally convert Solzhenitsyn. Ultimately both men drew strength from their Orthodox faith inside the brutal labyrinth of Russian jails.

Navalny’s memoir begins with his early life and activism; after his arrest, it becomes a prison diary. In characteristic good humour he despairs of clichés, which are inevitable when keeping a journal in jail: “If I got a dollar for every ‘We didn’t get to say goodbye’ encountered in such literature, I’d be like Elon Musk.” The book’s chaotic structure initially bothers the author: until he embraces it – resolving to “outgonzo” Hunter S Thompson.

From the book we learn about his political work, which followed training as a lawyer and the aforementioned conversion. We also learn about the regime’s endless violent and weird – sometimes bungled – efforts to silence him, or at least relegate him to the side-lines. Navalny campaigned to become Mayor of Moscow in 2013: proving an outsider can win a large share of the vote; leaving open the possibility that the results might have been tweaked to prevent a run-off. In 2016 he announced he would run for President in the 2018 election, only to be barred by the Central Election Commission.

Navalny describes how Russian officials did not at first take the Internet seriously. Which meant that – unlike in China where online activism was immediately suppressed – Navalny and others were able to build a following in the early 2000s. By 2012, his blog was one of the most widely read in Russia. The Anti-Corruption Foundation he founded relied on two principles. The first was “transparency”. The second, “normality”: or proving that those willing to fight corruption were simply working Russians, rather than fringe figures the regime characterised as dissidents.

The support that his foundation received, and still receives, proves Navalny tapped into a need that many in his country feel for honest leadership.

Throughout the memoir, Navalny expresses belief in his colleagues and in ordinary Russian people. In an Instagram post marking the first anniversary of his arrest after returning to Russia from Germany – where he was treated for Novichok poisoning – he quotes Tolstoy’s observation that “the only suitable place for an honest Russian at the present time is in prison”. He then argues there are “tens of millions” of honest Russians alive now: “In Russia in 2022, even a ‘like’ can take courage.”

Navalny’s faith in people, and in women, is one of the striking aspects of his writing. He constantly praises his wife’s determination. He mentions the “force” and “bravery” of his “accomplice” in fighting corruption, Liliya Chanysheva, a political activist and Navalny’s former campaign leader, who was also imprisoned by the regime. In a post written by Navalny from punitive solitary confinement on International Women’s Day he predicts: “…someone will write the history of the opposition movement…and everyone will see that its best and most fearless, hardworking and principled members were women.”

As punishments handed down to him become ever more horrible and alienating, Navalny leans on his faith. In a speech after the failed appeal against the trumped-up Yves Rocher case used against him, Navalny explains to the courtroom that the Biblical verses “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness” are taken by him “pretty much as an instruction on how to act”.

During a three-week hunger strike, which he endured in order to win the right to medical attention for debilitating back pain, Navalny decides to memorise the Sermon on the Mount in “English, Russian, French and Latin”.

On the 19th day of his hunger strike, Navalny is shuffling up and down a long corridor lined by metal bunks. A fellow prisoner – a silent man who “suffers from religious mania” – hands him an icon of the Archangel “such as taxi drivers attach to their dashboards”. The presentation of this laminated icon, which follows a coincidental reading of the Sermon on the Mount during a religious service for prisoners, leaves Navalny feeling “morally and physically better”. The support of his fellow inmate convinces him that “the disapproval of the masses is fabricated”. He once again feels able to respond to abuse with a “knowing smirk”.

Navalny’s memoir closes with a prison-saying: “…good old Jesus and the rest of his family…will take the punches for me.” His optimism in the face of unimaginable oppression relies on faith. You could say the events of Navalny’s life bear out an observation Solzhenitsyn made in conversation with his biographer Joseph Pearce: “I am deeply convinced that God participates in every life.”

Navalny died on the 16th of February last year in an Arctic Circle prison and became a source of light: a teacher who shows us how to laugh at brutality. Navalny took up Solzhenitsyn’s struggle against Stalin (or “The Big Moustache” as Solzhenitsyn liked to call him, to distinguish him from “The Small Moustache”, Hitler).

Putin’s regime is rattled. Navalny’s team have said the memoir is available in Russian, but shipping to Russia or Belarus is not possible as they “cannot guarantee delivery and the absence of problems at customs”. With the anniversary of his death having just passed, similar regimes may also be uncomfortable. When questioned, the Chinese foreign ministry described Navalny’s death as “Russia’s internal affair”. According to China Digital Times, in February last year Chinese social media users shared written tributes and videos of mourners laying flowers for Navalny.

In October last year, Navalny’s widow, Yulia, announced she would run for president when the time is right. Like her husband she believes free elections will come to Russia. The hope they embody relies on Christian faith, which apparently runs deep in Russia despite Lenin and Stalin’s attempts to eradicate it totally.

RELATED: Those who suffer in the cause of ‘righteousness’: Alexei Navalny’s Christian conversion

Photo: A portrait of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is seen among flowers at his grave in the Borisovo cemetery, as people gathered to mark the first anniversary of his death, Moscow, Russia, 16 February 2025. (Photo by ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images.)