I have long admired Alexei Navalny. I loved his wit and sharp, wonderfully Russian sense of humour. I admired his determination and fearlessness. And, admittedly, he was not difficult to look at either.

​

For years, I followed his career from afar — reading social media posts and watching his YouTube investigations into corruption. He was magnetic. The sort of person who drew others into action almost against their better judgement. Which, of course, made him profoundly dangerous.

​

I still find myself writing about him in the present tense, despite the fact he has now been dead for several months. Having recently finished his memoir, Patriot, he feels very much alive to me.

​

I remember the protests in Moscow in 2011, when Navalny was beginning to emerge as a major opposition figure. I phoned a friend in Russia to ask what she thought about the demonstrations, but she dismissed him almost immediately.

​

“He’ll be a crook too. They’re all the same. Better the devil you know.”

I can still imagine the shrug on the other end of the line.

Later, when Navalny was convicted of fraud and embezzlement — along with countless other accusations — she took it as confirmation of her view.

​

I was initially hesitant to read Patriot. I thought I already knew his story. I was wrong.

​

The memoir is extraordinary. Part time capsule, part political testimony, it traces his childhood in closed military towns and summers spent with his grandmother in Zalissia, Ukraine. It follows a young man coming of age just as the Soviet Union collapses around him.

​

What struck me most was remembering how much momentum the anti-corruption movement once had — not only in Moscow and St Petersburg, but across Russia itself. That period already feels strangely distant.

​

Navalny had imagined writing a memoir in old age. Instead, he began it while recovering in Germany after the Novichok poisoning attempt. Much of the book was written contemporaneously, under extraordinary circumstances. It is often harrowing — and yet also unexpectedly funny. Entirely Navalny.

​

A few weeks ago, my husband and I joined the March for Clean Water protest in London. Water. What could be more basic?

​

Decades of privatisation and chronic underinvestment have left Britain’s waterways polluted and its infrastructure failing. As we marched along the Thames, across Westminster Bridge and into Parliament Square, sightseeing buses rolled slowly beside us, tourists leaning out to take photographs.

​

This is what democracy looks like.

​

Around that time, I was midway through Patriot, and Navalny was very much in my thoughts. It may sound sentimental, but I felt his presence there among the marchers.

​

I had no fear of arrest. No fear that I would lose my job, be targeted by the authorities or punished for attending a protest. The right to dissent felt ordinary — almost mundane.

​

How many of the tourists photographing us could say the same?

Only a few days later, democracy itself suddenly seemed far more fragile. I swing constantly between despair and reassurance — certainty that everything is falling apart, followed by the conviction that perhaps things will somehow steady themselves after all.

​

Democracy is messy. Often ugly. The temptation to shut it all out and retreat into private life has rarely felt stronger.

​

But if reading Patriot reminded me of anything, it is that democracy survives only because ordinary people continue to participate in it — however imperfectly, however anxiously.

​

I suspect we all need to find a little of Navalny within ourselves.