Alexei Navalny wrote he knew he would die in prison in new memoir
Visit our website:
http://www.france24.com
Like us on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/FRANCE24.English
Follow us on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/France24_en
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, who was Vladimir Putin's top political opponent before
00:04his death at a penal colony in February, believed he would die in prison.
00:09That is according to his posthumous memoir, which will be released on October 22nd.
00:15America's New Yorker magazine and the British Times newspaper have published excerpts from
00:19the book.
00:20It's a record of Navalny's final years, including those he spent imprisoned.
00:24Earlier, we spoke to our former Russia correspondent, Nick Holdsworth, to find out more.
00:30Alexei Navalny was poisoned in Russia in the autumn of 2020 and was air evacuated out and
00:40treated at Berlin's Charity Hospital, where he was treated for nerve poisoning, apparently
00:47a military-grade nerve poisoning of the sort that Russian special services are known to
00:52have used many times in the past.
00:54He subsequently recovered during that time.
00:58He began writing his memoirs, and then he decided to go back to Russia, and he explains
01:02in his memoirs that one of part of the decision to go back to Russia was that he felt that
01:08if you've been convicted of a crime, you need to serve the sentence to demonstrate your
01:15moral superiority.
01:17He talked to fellow prisoners.
01:18They said, you know, why on earth would you return knowing that you're going to be sent
01:21down?
01:22And, indeed, he was sent down for a total of 19 years in this prison colony far in the
01:28Arctic North, about 1,900 kilometers north of Moscow, and that's where he subsequently
01:33died.
01:34And it's a very powerful book from the excerpts we have seen so far.
01:37It's a really powerful political testament to a man who may have been a future leader
01:44of democratic Russia if he'd lived, if, as many say, many believe, Putin hadn't murdered
01:51him.