Headline snaps up book on Alexei Navalny by journalist John Sweeney

Headline has snapped up a book on the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny from veteran journalist and documentary maker John Sweeney.

Non-fiction publisher Martin Redfern acquired world all-languages rights Murder in the Gulag: The Life and Death of Alexei Navalny from Humfrey Hunter, and the book is scheduled for publication in hardback in July 2024.

The title will tell the "dramatic" life story of Navalny, from "his meteoric rise to the top of opposition politics and his audacious success in exposing corruption in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to his poisoning by Novichok and his death in the Arctic Wolf penal colony in a remote part of Siberia".

Headline promised “a warts-and-all portrayal of… a highly charismatic but controversial figure who at one time flirted with Russian nationalists”.  

The book follows Sweeney’s Killer in the Kremlin (Transworld), published in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, covering the shifting power dynamic in the Ukraine war and the killing of Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin. 

Sweeney said: “In 2018, I reported a BBC Panorama called ‘Taking On Putin’ about what the Russian secret state was doing to Team Navalny: one man was tasered, then stabbed, another hit on the head with an iron bar, a third beaten black and blue. I was targeted too. I know that Navalny had darkness in his past and that many of my Ukrainian friends see him as just another Russian imperialist. But, for me, he stood up for ‘the Beautiful Russia of the Future’ as he called it. That’s why the killer in the Kremlin had him snuffed out. That’s why they hid his body from his mother for days. That’s why writing this book is so necessary.” 

Navalny died on 16th February in a Russian prison in the Arctic Circle after being jailed for three years. His wife blamed President Vladimir Putin for his death, but Moscow says he died of natural causes.

Redfern added: “The death of Alexei Navalny sent shock waves around the world. In his inimitable style, John Sweeney brings the complex character of Navalny alive on the page, and gets to the truth of what happened in that Siberian prison camp. He also considers the broader implications of Navalny’s death for Russia, Ukraine and the rest of the world.”