{"id":31998,"date":"2024-02-27T20:36:35","date_gmt":"2024-02-28T04:36:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=31998"},"modified":"2024-02-27T20:36:35","modified_gmt":"2024-02-28T04:36:35","slug":"its-a-torture-regime-the-last-days-of-alexei-navalny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2024\/02\/27\/its-a-torture-regime-the-last-days-of-alexei-navalny\/","title":{"rendered":"‘It’s a Torture Regime’: The Last Days of Alexei Navalny"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Andrew Roth and Pjotr Sauer\/Guardian UK<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"'It'sAlexei Navalny is seen behind the bars in a police van. (photo: Sergey Ponomarev\/AP)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

26 february 24<\/strong> (RSN.org)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

The fiercest political opponent of Vladimir Putin understood he might never leave prison alive<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Each morning at 5am, Alexei Navalny<\/a> was roused with the words \u201cWake up!\u201d as the Russian national anthem played on the prison loudspeakers. It was always dark in the polar night above the Arctic Circle, and the temperature outside could fall below -30C (-22F). The convict would have a sheepskin coat and an ushanka<\/em> hat to keep warm in a prison colony better known by its nickname: the Polar Wolf.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, a second song began: I am Russian \u2013 a nationalistic anthem by the pro-Kremlin pop star Shaman that has become a favourite at patriotic rallies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSo imagine the scene,\u201d wrote<\/a> Navalny in one of his last accounts from a punishment cell in the Polar Wolf. \u201cA prisoner Alexey Navalny, who is sentenced to 19 years in prison, and whom Kremlin propaganda has tirelessly smeared for years because he participated in Russian protests, is exercising to the song I am Russian, which he is being given as an educational activity for correctional purposes.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inside a punishment cell, Navalny said, he could not see the sky. In the past, he had had to choose between eating his breakfast and writing letters to friends and acquaintances, as he had just 30 minutes for both. Just days before his death, his mother came for a rare visit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want to hear any condolences,\u201d she later wrote. \u201cWe saw our son in the colony on the 12th, we had a visit. He was alive, healthy and cheerful.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From late December until his death on 16 February, Navalny spent his last days in Russia\u2019s IK-3 prison, a harsh penal colony above the Arctic Circle that was built in 1961 on the site of the 501st gulag, one of the Stalin-era labour camps that housed millions of prisoners during the Soviet era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In descriptions by former prisoners, confidantes of Navalny, prison activists and journalists, as well as Navalny\u2019s own letters from the far north, the Guardian has put together an account of where and how the fiercest political opponent of Vladimir Putin<\/a> spent his last days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Navalny understood he might never leave prison alive. Yet there is little doubt his dispatch to IK-3 in the remote Yamalo-Nenets region hastened his demise, either due to the extreme conditions or a more direct act of foul play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis is one of the most remote and inaccessible areas of Russia, with extreme climatic conditions,\u201d says Olga Romanova, the founder and head of the Russian prisoner advocacy organisation Russia Behind Bars. \u201cOf course, there is no public oversight there \u2013 but that\u2019s like everywhere else.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Platon Lebedev, a former business partner of the ex-Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky, spent two years in the colony from 2005. In an interview<\/a> then, Lebedev complained about the relentless mosquitoes that thrive in the region in the spring, part of what experts say<\/a> is the \u201cuse of climate as a tool of repression\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI fight with traditional methods \u2013 I hit myself on the forehead,\u201d Lebedev told the Novaya Gazeta newspaper then. \u201cThey say midges will be worse than mosquitoes.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each morning, Navalny would brave the cold for a 30-minute walk, his only chance to be outside. A photo showed a small, rectangular concrete courtyard, with wire mesh as a roof, where he could pace 11 steps from wall to wall, and was just three steps wide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFew things are as refreshing as a walk in Yamal at 6.30 in the morning,\u201d he wrote. \u201cAnd what a wonderful fresh breeze that blows into the courtyard despite the concrete fence, it\u2019s just \u2013 wow!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shizo<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two days before his death, Navalny was sentenced to another term in a punishment cell. It would be his 27th time in a shtrafnoy izolyator<\/em>, or shizo<\/em> for short. Of the 1,126 days he was in confinement, 295 were spent in these cells.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a 2-by-2.5-metre cell in which there\u2019s a sink and a parasha<\/em> [a hole in the ground that serves as a toilet],\u201d says Dmitry Muratov, the Nobel peace prize-winning editor of Novaya Gazeta. The bed is folded up into the wall at 6am, meaning the convict spends all day standing up, and \u201cthe blood goes down into his feet\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou spend two weeks in the punishment cell, you\u2019re not allowed longer, and then two or three days later he would be sent back,\u201d says Muratov. \u201cThey did this in the Soviet Union \u2026 It was called \u2018sending someone into orbit\u2019, like a cosmonaut. You can\u2019t give someone two terms [in shizo<\/em>], but you can take him out and send him right back. People go completely insane. It\u2019s a torture regime.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Navalny was put in quarantine upon arrival at the Polar Wolf in late December, but as soon as he was released, the administration found a pretext to send him to a punishment cell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cShizo<\/em> is meant to break you,\u201d says Vladimir Pereverzin, who was a senior manager at Khodorkovsky\u2019s Yukos before he spent seven years in prison. \u201cYou feel completely exposed and unprotected in there. In the barracks, surrounded by dozens of prisoners, you feel a sense of safety, but in shizo<\/em> you are completely alone and at the mercy of your guards.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Books and gossip<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

During his time in prison, Navalny was sustained by the regular letters with friends and acquaintances, in which he discussed his daily life, his voracious reading habits and sought to keep up with the surrounding world even as the Kremlin tried to isolate him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In some letters, he considered his role as a political prisoner and a successor to the tradition of Soviet-era dissidents. \u201cI want to thank you for this book as it has helped me a lot and continues to help,\u201d he wrote to Natan Sharansky, a Soviet dissident and author of Fear No Evil who later became an Israeli politician. \u201cYes, I am in shizo<\/em> now, but when reading about your 400 days spent in the \u2018punishment cell\u2019 on decreased food rations, one understands that there are people who pay much higher prices for their convictions \u2026 I understand that I am not the first, but I really want to become the last, or at least one of the last, of those who are forced to endure this.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In others, he sought to stay connected with his old reality. Tatyana Felgengauer, a journalist, describes the letters they wrote until communication was cut off in early 2023. \u201cAside from gossip and infighting, we wrote about media,\u201d she says. \u201cHe and I discussed [the YouTube channel] Popular Politics, Echo of Moscow, where the journalists are, he was very interested in all of this. I told him about the media landscape and some of the big fights on Twitter, and some other stories \u2026 he was following it all.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Books were at the centre of Navalny\u2019s life in prison. In letters to Ilya Krasilshchik, a friend and media manager, described by the New York Times<\/a>, Navalny said he was reading 10 books simultaneously and liked to switch between them. They included political biographies and other books on prison life, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the Alexander Solzhenitsyn<\/a> novel about a gulag prisoner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Upon arriving at Polar Wolf in December, Navalny had fewer reading options.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among the choices were Chekhov\u2019s short stories and plays. One of them, In the Ravine, left him \u201cstaring at the wall for five minutes\u201d, he told the journalist Sergey Parkhomenko in a letter received five days before Navalny\u2019s death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Navalny wrote: \u201cWho would have told me that Chekhov is the most depressing Russian writer? We must read the classics. We don\u2019t know them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Navalny also corresponded with supporters around the country. In one of his last letters from February, he wrote to a woman named Irina: \u201cI haven\u2019t seen the northern lights yet and it\u2019s unlikely that I will \u2026 But there is hope. Happy new year!\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last days?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Navalny\u2019s last days are shrouded in mystery. Two months before his death, he was transferred on a circuitous route that led from IK-6, a correctional facility in the Vladimir region not far from Moscow, through the capital, and then through the cities of Ekaterinburg, Kirov, Vorkuta and finally to Kharp, where IK-3 is located. It took two weeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe transfer to the colony is a form of torture in itself,\u201d Pereverzin recalls of his experience. \u201cYou get shoved into a cramped train wagon where you spend days in the cold like cattle. Alexei will likely have been transferred on his own but the conditions would not be any better.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the time Navalny arrived at the Polar Wolf, the letters to most of his supporters had dried up. \u201cIt is almost impossible to get to this colony, it is almost impossible even to send letters there,\u201d wrote Leonid Volkov, a close ally of Navalny. \u201cThis is the maximum possible level of isolation from the world \u2013 that\u2019s why he was sent there.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet the associates who saw him in his last days said he looked healthy. Leonid Solovyov, one of Navalny\u2019s lawyers, said a colleague had visited the politician two days before his death and that \u201ceverything was normal\u201d. On that day, he was sent back to shizo<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On 15 February, the day before his death, Navalny appeared in a courtroom via video link, and joked with a judge: \u201cYour honour, I will send you my personal account number so that you can use your huge federal judge\u2019s salary to top up my personal account because I am running out of money.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That evening, says Romanova, her sources \u201cboth inside and outside the colony\u201d described unusual things happening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She says: \u201cThe prisoners were suddenly driven into barracks ahead of time, very serious searches took place, even the heaters were taken away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEveryone says that cars entered and left the colony, many cars, passenger cars (identified by sound). An external source is talking about an ambulance. This is all the day before,\u201d she says, suggesting the prison authorities were not being upfront over Navalny\u2019s time of death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Romanova says things went back to normal on 16 February, the day officials say Navalny died. The prison said he \u201cfelt ill after a walk and almost immediately lost consciousness\u201d. Officials later claimed his death was from natural causes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Yulia Navalnaya<\/a> vowed to expose those who killed him. \u201cPutin had a specific reason for killing Alexei three days ago, which we will reveal soon. We\u2019ll identify those responsible for this crime, naming them and showing their faces.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andrew Roth and Pjotr Sauer\/Guardian UK Alexei Navalny is seen behind the bars in a police van. (photo: Sergey Ponomarev\/AP) 26 february 24 (RSN.org) The fiercest political opponent of Vladimir Putin understood he might never leave prison alive Each morning at 5am, Alexei Navalny was roused with the words \u201cWake up!\u201d as… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1843],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31998"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31998"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31998\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31999,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31998\/revisions\/31999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}