Blacklisted. Alexei Navalny’s memoir “Patriot” banned in Russia as “extremist” for inciting “hatred towards authorities”

The Leningrad Regional Court formally made the ruling on June 9, following the lawsuit filed in late April, but Russia’s Ministry of Justice only announced the book’s inclusion on the public blacklist on July 30. The full court documents explaining the decision were published today after an enquiry by Mediazona.

The case began after customs officials at the Ivangorod border point found the book among the personal belongings of a man named Alexei Mikhailov as he crossed into Russia on foot from Estonia. Mikhailov, named as the respondent in the civil case, did not attend the hearing.

According to court documents, the deputy head of the customs office sent the seized book for examination to a forensic service in Nizhny Novgorod, in another Russian region. The resulting expert report concluded that the book “contains a combination of linguistic and psychological signs of extremist meanings”.

Specifically, the experts found it was intended to incite “hatred and enmity” towards a social group defined as “the current government of the Russian Federation”.

The report also claimed the book contained “signs of information that could harm the political or economic interests of the member states of the Eurasian Economic Union, their state security, and the health and morality of their citizens”.

The court ruling named the regional divisions of the Ministry of Justice and Roskomnadzor, Russia’s state censorship watchdog, as interested parties in the case.

Alexei Navalny’s “Patriot” was published in Lithuania by One Book Publishing in October 2024 and has been translated into 26 languages. The book is split into two parts: an autobiography detailing the late opposition leader’s life before his arrest in January 2021, and a collection of his diary entries written during his imprisonment.

Navalny died in an Arctic penal colony in February 2024 under suspicious circumstances. While Russian authorities cited natural causes, they initially refused to release his body or provide a transparent investigation.