# The Tomsk Flight *A Biography of Alexei Navalny* — Legendary Biographies No. 150 - **Subject:** Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny - **Written by:** Pavel Stepanov - **Shelf:** Power & Politics / World Politics - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 204 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 204 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **Hardcover:** $24.99 — 6 × 9 in · 204 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90470-016-4) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Sergei Markov (ISBN 979-8-90623-033-1) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/150-the-tomsk-flight.html ## About this book Berlin, August 2020. The flight crew of LH 1431 from Tomsk to Moscow makes an emergency descent over Omsk after the principal opposition figure of the Russian Federation collapses in the aisle. He is forty-four years old. The airport ambulance enters the words "metabolic disorder" in the duty log. Two days later, German specialists land with a sealed transport unit. The patient code on the Charité chart, when he is finally received, is Patient Three. Pavel Stepanov reconstructs the architecture of the case the regime never wanted opened — from the Yale Greenberg World Fellow back to the Yves Rocher conviction, through the regional governor races, the Smart Voting collapse, the YouTube uploads of palaces and shareholdings, the return flight to Sheremetyevo and the cell at IK-6 Pokrov. He follows the prison-letter samizdat that emerged from Polar Wolf, where Navalny died on 16 February 2024. Drawing on Memorial archive material, court files, ECHR transcripts, and several years of access to the Anti-Corruption Foundation in exile, Stepanov refuses both the martyrology and the Western cult-of-personality framings. What emerges is something harder: an account of how a single jurist with a camera became the most documented opponent in modern authoritarian history, and of the federal apparatus that could neither silence nor entirely contain him. ## Contents 1. The Shareholder 2. YouTube as Weapon 3. The Mayoral Race 4. The Flight from Tomsk 5. Novichok 6. The Phone Call 7. The Decision 8. Sheremetyevo 9. The Protests 10. The Glass Cage 11. The Penal Colonies 12. Nineteen Years 13. Polar Wolf 14. February Sixteenth 15. The Body 16. Epibatidine 17. Yulia 18. Patriot 19. Yulia Continues ## Questions **Who is The Tomsk Flight about?** Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Tomsk Flight — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,613 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 60,000 words, 19 chapters, 204 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Pavel Stepanov is a Russian-American journalist who emigrated to the United States in 2008. He has reported extensively on Russian politics and the silovik state, contributing to publications including The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and The Atlantic. Drawing on years of investigative research, his writing focuses on the intersection of state power and individual lives. In his book, The Tomsk Flight, he reconstructs complex political events through personal narratives and archival details. He lives in Washington, D.C., where he works as an independent researcher, translates historical documents, and walks his two dogs.