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4,613 words · no email, no account
No. 150 · Power & Politics · World Politics
The Tomsk Flight
a biography of Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny
What the book is
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.
At a glance
- Subject
- Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny
- Shelf
- Power & Politics · World Politics
- Written by
- Pavel Stepanov
- Chapters
- 19 across 204 pages
- Narrated by
- Sergei Markov
- Editions
- Paperback · Hardcover · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
Contents · 19 chapters
- 01The ShareholderRead free
- 02YouTube as Weapon3,984 words
- 03The Mayoral Race3,562 words
- 04The Flight from Tomsk3,660 words
- 05Novichok2,530 words
- 06The Phone Call3,270 words
- 07The Decision3,226 words
- 08Sheremetyevo2,785 words
- 09The Protests2,579 words
- 10The Glass Cage2,614 words
- 11The Penal Colonies3,266 words
- 12Nineteen Years2,575 words
- 13Polar Wolf2,997 words
- 14February Sixteenth2,529 words
- 15The Body3,028 words
- 16Epibatidine2,288 words
- 17Yulia2,489 words
- 18Patriot2,868 words
- 19Yulia Continues3,288 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- 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
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who 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.
02Is 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.
03Can 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.
04How long is it?
About 60,000 words, 19 chapters, 204 pages in the paperback.
05What 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.
