The tireless late Russian anti-corruption lawyer, protester, and would-be president starts this memoir with the harrowing experience of being poisoned by nerve gas and his slow recovery from that in hospital in Berlin. He then backtracks to his early life and proceeds in largely chronological order, detailing his life, documenting his efforts to improve the lives of ordinary Russians, and the many arrests and convictions, on trumped up charges, and the harsh life in prisons that he experienced, the last in remote Siberia.
“it is a banal thought, but the human brain is designed in a way that means you return in memory only to what was good in the past. Those who are nostalgic for the U.S.S.R. are in reality nostalgic for their youth-a time when everything was in the future.”
“Here in prison any psychologist would have a ball. You could write a hundred dissertations on the amazing capacity of human beings to adapt and derive pleasure from the most trivial things.”
One aspect of his very detailed recollections from his two weeks in coma troubled me a bit as a practitioner. It is well known that when someone is in a coma, they invariably experience ‘retrograde amnesia’ i.e loss of memory for events before the coma for a similar period of time as the coma. Yet he relates great detail of just such events. I can only conclude that these details must have been provided to him by friends.
The whole book may be interpreted by some as simply self-righteous justification for his actions, but to me he comes across as a brilliant, and indeed a righteous, altruistic, patriotic, humble, self-assured man. In a country run by ruthless autocrats, those traits eventually cost him his life. He even quite cheerfully, with his wife, predicted accurately that Putin’s henchmen would eventually kill him, urging others to continue his work.
But patriotism is, in some ways, simply the belief that your country is the best in the world because you were born there, usually a delusion. I am not sure he chose the name for the book as it is often the last decision to be made when writing a book.
A sobering important great read.
4.8/5
Thanks, Goodreads, The Economist.
The Passionate Reader 