Patriot: A Memoir
written in blood, sweat and tears ...
the battle
continues from Navalny's grave
as the Kremlin is cloaked in shadows
My Dear Friends:
A much-awaited posthumous memoir by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was published worldwide on Tuesday. He began writing Patriot: A Memoir after his near-fatal poisoning in 2020, and his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, helped piece together the book following his death in February.
The book recounts his youth, activism, personal life and his fight against Putin’s increasingly authoritarian hold on Russia. US magazine The New Yorker published excerpts from the book on October 11, titled Alexei Navalny’s Prison Diaries, an account of his last years and his admonition to his country and the world.
The book is set to be published in 22 languages; the English-language edition hit number one on Amazon’s bestselling book charts just hours after its release.
Now, I would like to share with you some of my published poems about Russian opposition against Putin and his war in Ukraine.
Un/Truth
"George Orwell's novel tops all of the Russian bestseller lists in 2022. Really?" Raising her voice on the last word, the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman reacts to the West’s latest report on what's happened in Putin's Russia.
"I remember in the 1990s within the public school system," the spokeswoman pauses to clear her throat, then continues, "we were drilled that Orwell was describing the horrors of totalitarianism, instead of how liberalism would lead humanity to a dead end."
"We now know that all the powers of liberal Europe had entered into an unholy alliance to corrupt the Russian youth who were hungry for truthful knowledge at the time. As Orwell wrote in his novel, 'There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.' This is our Russian stance." The volume of her last statement is amplified by the clicking of cameras.
a pink-haired teen
held face down in the mud
by plainclothes cops
her Nineteen Eighty-Four
torn apart page by page
Drifting Sands, 20, 2023
Russia Will Be Free
Putin's critic
given sentence after sentence --
inside the glass cage
he gestures to his wife
with hands shaping a heart
Prompted at the end of the documentary to deliver a message to his supporters outside the courthouse, Navalny emphasizes, “If they decided to kill me, then it means we are incredibly strong. We need to utilize this power to not give up.The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing." He flashes a smile at the end of the film.
He is moved from one prison to another to serve his 19-year sentence on charges of extremism. On one occasion, the contact with him is lost for three weeks; it is rumored that he is being denied food and kept in an unventilated cell. Finally he is located at a prison colony above the Arctic Circle, and he dies there months later.
a pink-haired teen
dragged and carried away
by policemen ....
Navalny's youthful face glows
in flickering candlelight
Drifting Sands, 26, 2024
FYI: "Russia will be free" is a century-old political slogan used by Russian dissents. And the documentary, "Navalny," won the Best Documentary Feature at the 95th Academy Awards.
To conclude's today's Special Feature post, I would like to share with you a video posted on Alexei Navalny’s YouTube channel by his widow, Yulia Navalnaya. In This 9-minute video, titled “I will continue the work of Alexei Navalny,”and the description read, “An appeal by Yulia Navalnaya. Alexei’s work will continue. The fight for a free Russia will not stop.”
By killing Alexei, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart and my soul. But I still have the other half, and it tells me that I have no right to give up...
But Putin also took Navalny away from you, where in a colony in the Far North, beyond the Arctic Circle, in eternal winter, Putin killed not just a man, Alexei Navalny, but together with him he wanted to kill our hopes, our freedom, our future...
I will continue the work of Alexei Navalny. Continue to fight for our country. And I invite you to stand next to me. To share not only the grief and endless pain that envelops us and does not let go. I ask you to share my rage. Rage and anger towards those who dared to kill our future. I address you with the words of Alexei, in which I believe. It’s not a shame to do little, it’s a shame to do nothing. It’s a shame to let yourself be intimidated.
