Alexei Navalny, who died in February in a Russian penal colony, was murdered, directly or indirectly, by Russia’s thuggish, corrupt President Vladimir Putin. He was 47 years old. He left behind an equally courageous wife and two children.

Navalny’s posthumously released memoir, “Patriot,” chronicles his unwearied struggle against Putin’s dictatorship with awesome courage, vast wisdom and intellect, and irrepressible cheer. He was trained in law, was widely read, spoke and wrote with eloquence, yet remained humble throughout, a man for all seasons. The memoir’s curtain-raiser is gripping. A description of Navalny’s 2020 poisoning by Putin transfixes, shocks and horrifies. Navalny came within a hair’s breadth of dying in agony and delirium before his prolonged resuscitation in Germany under the care of doctors.

Navalny could have chosen exile and a comfortable life as a dissident celebrity as many others have done. But he signed his own death warrant without hesitation by choosing to return to Russia to fight the dictatorship knowing Putin and his gang of sordid crooks and thieves had him atop their kill list. Navalny dwarfed John F. Kennedy’s profiles in courage.

Putin charged Navalny with a multitude of concocted crimes beginning on the day he returned to Russia from Germany. What was criminal in the eyes of Putin and occasioned Navalny’s death was his work exposing the tyrant, his obsequious oligarchs and lickspittle party United Russia as crooks, thieves and killers. An aggravating factor from their viewpoint was Navalny’s impeccable character and limitless bravery that put Putin and his mobsters to shame.

Navalny’s unwavering goal was to oust them from power by peaceful means, not with Kalashnikov rifles or the manning of barricades. Navalny was convinced that justice would triumph over thievery or megalomania in Russia by an aroused public as granitic, selfless and principled as himself.

His tragic, fatal blind spot was failing to acknowledge that a thousand years of Russian culture, literature, tradition, habits and philosophy discredited his ambition as a fool’s errand. Think of the Grand Inquisitor in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov,” who understands that Russians prefer subjugation or a vade mecum in lieu of moral choice or freedom:

“In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, ‘Make us your slaves, but feed us.’ … Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.”

Russians have never experienced self-government, freedom of speech, freedom of association, due process, the rule of law or separation of powers. Executive tyranny has been their fate. Ivan the Terrible. Peter the Great. Catherine the Great. The later Romanovs. Lenin. Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Yeltsin, Putin, and after Putin, probably Stalin 2.0. Russians have never succeeded in architecting a constitution to safeguard the rule of law, justice and liberty through checks and balances and separation of powers.

Navalny’s memoir deftly exposes the infinite vices in the current Russian government that rewards venality, cowardice and stupidity but punishes integrity, brains and the courage to speak truth to power. But what is missing is a concrete plan to replace the Kremlin that promises to celebrate checks and balances, institutions over personalities, liberty and justice over power and domination and transparency over secrecy. Russia has never had a James Madison, who pitted ambition against ambition, sordid motives against sordid motives in the U.S. Constitution to arrest tyranny.

Even if Navalny had overthrown Putin and his party of crooks and thieves, who would have stepped into the breach? A new dictator in apostolic succession to Ivan the Terrible. Navalny’s noble, electrifying goal of self-government featuring a galaxy of constitutionally protected unalienable rights was doomed from the start. Most people do not believe in truth without ulterior motives like Navalny. Their opinions shift like a human weather vane depending on what’s in it for them. And even those who care about truth are ordinarily unwilling to risk or give that last full measure of devotion to defend it as Navalny was. William Butler Yeats lamented in his poem “The Second Coming,” “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

Despite the grim ending, Navalny’s memoir is well worth the price of admission for at least two reasons. It will inspire you to confront and overcome any hardship fearlessly and without complaint. It will also serve to convince you that Russia is doomed to backwardness and impoverishment because of the ubiquity of corruption, mercantilism, stupidity, and lawlessness that drives brains and investment abroad.

Russia will implode if we refrain from intervention, the same Fabian tactics that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Empire.

Bruce Fein (X: @brucefeinesq; www.lawofficesofbrucefein.com) was associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and is author of “American Empire Before the Fall.”