RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksSo Navalny is dead. I find I have to keep reminding myself of that fact, such is the sheer vivacity of Patriot and the immediacy with which Navalny’s voice speak ... Navalny is an engaging storyteller, interspersing the absurdities of 20th-century Russian life with the absurdities that dog all human lives ... There is indeed a sameness to prison writing, because there is a sameness to prison life. If Patriot strays into cliché, that reflects a want of originality not on the part of Navalny but his jailers ... Patriot does more than challenge Vladimir Putin’s right to define what Russia and Russianness are; the book is a challenge to every fevered nationalism and every ideology that brooks no disagreement.
