Showed what Alexei Navalny’s last day looked like: “It’s a torture regime”

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Every morning at 5 o’clock Alexei Navalny was woken up by the words “Wake up!” as the Russian national anthem played over the prison loudspeakers. The temperature outside could reach 30 degrees. The prisoner had to wear a hat with ears and a sheepskin coat to keep from freezing. It is not for nothing that this colony is called the “Polar Wolf”.

After that, the second song is played – “Ja Ruskij” (Russian: “I’m Russian”) performed by the singer SHAMAN. The song itself is nationalist and pro-Kremlin pop music played at patriotic rallies.

“Imagine that image,” A. Navalnas wrote in one of his last stories from the “Polar Wolf” prison. – Prisoner Alexei Navalny, who has been sentenced to 19 years in prison and has been relentlessly vilified by Kremlin propaganda for years because he participated in Russian protests, is exercising to the song “Ja Ruskij”, which is allowed as an educational activity for correctional purposes.

According to A. Navalny, he cannot see the sky in the prison cell. Previously, he had to choose between eating breakfast and writing letters to friends and acquaintances, because he had only 30 minutes to do these things. A few days before his death, his mother came for a rare visit.

“I don’t want to hear any sympathy. February 12 we saw the son in the colony. He was alive, healthy and cheerful,” A. Navalno’s mother wrote.

Alexei Navalny

(10 photos)

A. Navalnas (photo by SCANPIX)

Protest (for A. Navalny) (photo by SCANPIX)

A. Navalnas (photo by SCANPIX)

He understood that he would not stay alive

A. Navalny realized that he might never get out of prison alive. However, there is no doubt that the oppositionist’s death could have been accelerated either by harsh conditions or by something from within.

“This is one of the most remote and difficult-to-access areas of Russia, where extreme climatic conditions prevail. Of course, there is no public supervision there, as everywhere,” said Olga Romanova, the founder and director of Russia Behind Bars, a Russian prisoner rights organization.

Platon Lebedev, a former business partner of former Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky, has been living in the colony since 2005. spent two years. In an interview at the time, Mr. Lebedev complained about the mosquitoes rampaging in the region in the spring, which experts say is the use of the climate as a tool of repression.

“I fight with traditional methods – I punch myself in the forehead. Although they say that flies will be worse than mosquitoes”, P. Lebedev told the independent Russian newspaper “Noavaya Gazeta”.

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Every morning, A. Navalny bravely went for a 30-minute walk in the cold – it was his only chance to be outside. Where he could walk was a small rectangular concrete yard with a wire mesh roof where he could walk 11 steps from wall to wall and was only three steps wide.

“Few things are as refreshing as a walk in Jamal at 6.30am.” morning And what a wonderful fresh wind, which, despite the concrete fence, blows into the yard, simply – wow!” – wrote A. Navalnas.

The reality of prison

Two days before his death, A. Navalnas was sentenced to another prison sentence. It would have been the 27th time he was in the pen, nicknamed “Shizo”. Of the 1,126 days he spent in captivity, 295 were spent in this isolation cell.

“It’s 2×2.5 m. size chamber containing a sink and a hole in the ground used as a toilet. Prisoners stay in the solitary confinement cell for two weeks, as they are not allowed to stay longer. After two or three days, the person is sent back. This was done in the Soviet Union.

This was called “de-orbiting”. You can’t give a person a double dose of Shizo, but you can pull it out and send it back immediately. People are going absolutely crazy. This is a regime of torture,” said Dmitriy Muratov, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and editor of the Novaya Gazeta newspaper.

Navalny was placed in quarantine when he arrived at “Polar Wolf” at the end of December, but as soon as he was released, the administration found an excuse to send him to solitary confinement.

“Prison is meant to break you. You feel completely unsafe and unprotected there. In the barracks, when you are surrounded by prisoners, you feel safer, but in “Shize” you are completely alone and depend on the mercy of the guards,” said Vladimir Perevezins, who was the senior manager of M. Khodorkovsky’s “Yukas” seven years ago.

Books and rumors

In prison, A. Navalny was supported by constant correspondence with friends and acquaintances, in his letters he discussed his daily life, reading and tried to keep up with the world around him, although the Kremlin tried to isolate him.

In some of the letters, A. Navalny considered his role as a political prisoner and a continuation of the Soviet-era tradition of dissidents.

“I want to thank you for this book, because it helped me a lot and continues to help me. Yes, I’m in jail now, but when I read about your 400 days in Shize with reduced food supplies, I realize that there are people who pay a much higher price for their beliefs. I understand that I am not the first, but I very much want to be the last, or at least one of the last to have to endure this,” he wrote to Natan Sharansky, the Soviet dissident, author of the book “Fear No Evil”, who later became an Israeli politician.

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Media and comfort

He also sought to maintain contact with his old reality. Journalist Tatjana Felgengauer describes the letters he wrote up to 2023. connection lost.

“We wrote about the media without gossip. We talked with him about his YouTube channel and where the journalists are. He was very interested in all this. I told him about the media image, about the struggles on platform X and some other stories. He followed all this,” said the journalist.

Books were the axis of Navalny’s life in prison. In a letter to his friend and media manager Ilya Krasilshchiks, described by the New York Times, A. Navalnas wrote that he reads 10 books at a time and likes to change them. These included political biographies and other books about prison life, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, about a gulag prisoner.

Navalny also corresponded with supporters across the country.

“I haven’t seen the northern lights yet, and I’m unlikely to ever see them… But there is hope.” Happy New Year”, he wrote to a woman named Irina in one of the last letters of February.

Last days

Navalny’s last days are shrouded in mystery. Two months before his death, he was transferred by a circuitous route that led from IK-6, a correctional institution in the Vladimir region near Moscow, through the capital, then through the cities of Yekaterinburg, Kirov, Vorkuta, and finally to Kharp, where IK-3 is located – that is, “Polar Wolf”. The entire trip took two weeks.

“Transfer to a colony is torture in itself,” V. Pereverzin recalls his experience. -You are pushed into a cramped wagon where you spend days in the cold like cattle. Aleksei would probably have been transferred himself, but the conditions would not have been better.”

When Navalny arrived at “Polar Wolf”, the letters to most of his supporters were already silent.

“This colony is almost impossible to get into. It is almost impossible to even send letters there. This is the highest possible level of isolation from the world – that’s why he was sent there,” wrote Leonidas Volkov, a close ally of Navalny.

People gathered to honor the memory of Alexei Navalny

(21 photos)

People gathered to honor the memory of Alexei Navalny (photo by SCANPIX)

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People gathered to honor the memory of Alexei Navalny (photo by SCANPIX)

Unusual activity

However, people close to Mr Navalny who saw him in his final days said he appeared healthy. Leonid Solovyov, one of Navalny’s lawyers, said a colleague visited the politician two days before his death and that everything was normal. He was sent back to Shizo that day.

On February 15, the day before his death, A. Navalny appeared in the courtroom via video link and joked with the judge:

“Your honor, I will send you my personal account number so that you can deposit your huge federal judge’s salary into my personal account because I am short on cash.”

That evening, O. Romanova says, her sources both inside and outside the colony described unusual events.

“Prisoners were suddenly sent to the barracks ahead of time, very serious searches took place, even the heaters were taken away. Everyone says cars, lots of cars, have come and gone in and out of the colony. An outside source is talking about an ambulance. All this happened the day before,” she says, implying that the prison authorities were not telling the truth about the time of A. Navalny’s death.

O. Romanova says that everything returned to normal on February 16. – on the day when, according to the officials, A. Navalnas died. The jail said he felt ill after the walk and lost consciousness almost immediately. Officials later said he died of natural causes.

However, A. Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, promised to expose those who killed him.

“Putin had a specific reason for killing Alexei three days ago, which we will soon reveal. We will identify the persons responsible for this crime by naming them and showing their faces,” said the deceased’s wife.