"The book’s first sentence now feels brutally prescient: 'Dying really didn’t hurt,' Navalny wrote."

He later described his decision to return to Moscow, knowing that he could be arrested and killed. 'There are 1,001 simple ways you can be killed in prison,' he wrote. When Navalny flew back to Moscow from Berlin in January 2021, he was arrested at the airport, and later faced a series of trials on charges of extremism and other offenses that his supporters say were manufactured by the state. He wrote the rest of the memoir in prison.... 'I had to devise a whole clandestine operation to bamboozle the guards, involving the substitution of identical notebooks bought specifically for the purpose.'..."

From "How Aleksei Navalny’s Prison Diaries Got Published/In his posthumous memoir, compiled with help from his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny faced the fact that Vladimir Putin might succeed in silencing him. The book will keep 'his legacy alive,' Navalnaya said" (NYT)(free-access link).