Alexei Navalny – like Alexander Solzhenitsyn – was schooled in atheism. But – also like Solzhenitsyn – Navalny was influenced and baptised during childhood by religious grandparents. Navalny become a believer after the birth of his first child. In his memoir, Patriot, he says: "Like anyone who grew up in the Soviet Union, I had never believed in God, but looking now at Dasha…I could not reconcile myself to the thought that this was only biology."
It took imprisonment and cancer, alongside incessant debates with believers incarcerated in Stalin’s gulags, to finally convert Solzhenitsyn. Ultimately both men drew strength from their Orthodox faith inside the brutal labyrinth of Russian jails.
