The security guards looked like they were in the movies. “With submachine guns, warm mittens and felt boots. And with beautiful, fluffy German Shepherds,” Alexei Navalny posted at Christmas after his arrival at reformatory colony No. 3. “Don’t worry about me.”
Alexei Navalny is dead. He survived less than two months in Colony No. 3, an institution with strict conditions in the Siberian polar settlement of Kharp. According to the Russian penal service FSIN, he collapsed dead after walking in the courtyard on Thursday, and the cause is completely unclear.
Navalny’s mother and his lawyer were told in the colony that Navalny had succumbed to “sudden death syndrome”, the state broadcaster RT spoke of a thrombosis, the Telegram channel Sota quoted two anonymous officials from the Russian Investigative Committee that Navalny had been slowly poisoned since last August. His body was nowhere to be found over the weekend, suggesting authorities may have something to hide. Apparently he will be taken to Moscow for a new autopsy.
Another 1000 prisoners
Human rights activists immediately blamed the Kremlin for Navalny’s death – and its notorious prison system, a network of over 700 so-called reformatory colonies and over 200 pre-trial detention centers. During Soviet times, Alexander Solzhenitsyn christened it the Archipelago Gulag (Russian abbreviation for camp headquarters). The population has shrunk from nearly 700,000 since 2013 to 266,000 inmates last October, which experts attribute to lower crime rates and alternative punishments for minor offenses. But since the summer of 2022, tens of thousands of prisoners have also been recruited for Putin’s Ukraine troops. And now there are over 1,000 political prisoners again; in the late Soviet Union there were around 700.
For the opening of the “Polar Wolf” in 1961, the buildings of the former “camp department” of the Gulag construction project number 501 were put into operation again. According to the blogger and historian Rustem Adagamov, Stalin had a railway line laid here and a total of 34 camps built. Thousands of their inmates died.
Cruelty has a tradition here. “The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who stood guard in the Gulag work here,” Mikhail, a former inmate, told the Noviye Izvestia newspaper in 2018. New arrivals are beaten up as a welcome. “They beat you from all sides with police batons, with all their might, on your head, neck or back.”
As in all camps, there is a wake-up call at six o’clock, physical exercises, breakfast, roll call, work, lunch break, work, dinner, educational measures or state TV, two checks, one hour of free time, bed rest from 10 p.m. According to the business portal RBK, a prisoner’s daily food ration costs the state 72 rubles, the equivalent of 72 cents.
There is a risk of imprisonment for open shirt buttons, as well as for complaints. The prison, called a penal isolator in Russia, is a 2 by 2.5 meter hole into which up to seven prisoners are crammed. The toilet is usually broken, there is a smell of feces and in winter temperatures are around ten degrees.
But unlike Stalin’s Gulag, prominent political prisoners often have an easier time in Putin’s colonies. Before Alexei Navalny, Platon Lebedev, business partner of the oil billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was arrested in 2003, sat in the “Polar Wolf”. He read several opposition newspapers that arrived from Moscow a few days late, the prison doctors treated him with respect, and even the director once gave him his office for a meeting with his lawyer. His health had suffered while in custody in Moscow, but it improved in Charp. “I always drink my tea alone,” he wrote to Novaya Gazeta in a letter interview.
“People are being humiliated”
For “political people” who are regularly visited by their defenders and human rights activists and correspond with journalists and supporters, arbitrariness and violence have so far mostly remained at a distance. At least if they avoid conflict.
The writer Maxim Gromov, who served as a “political” person for three years, repeatedly ended up in a penal isolation because he campaigned for better prison conditions. “It’s about humiliating people, breaking them,” he says. After his release, he started drinking and struggled for years with his self-esteem.
Alexei Navalny repeatedly filed lawsuits against the camp management through his lawyers, he used the video links from prison to the court hearings for ironic stand-ups and called on FSIN officials to vote against Putin in the presidential elections.
At least digitally, he repeatedly broke out of solitary confinement to attack the Kremlin. “These angry villains are obsessed with the idea of bringing the entire country to its knees,” he wrote on Telegram about the sentencing of a Siberian colleague to nine years in prison. “But they keep coming across people who make them cut their teeth.”
The Gulag’s teeth, however, are cast iron. Navalny repeatedly ended up in a penal isolation facility, usually due to exchanges of words with guards. In the end, out of over 1,120 days in prison, he had spent 308 days in the stinking cold of the prison, a murderous rhythm. “Navalny has thrown down the gauntlet to them,” Gromov said. “And the state has lifted the gauntlet: You want to go to the end, fine, then we’ll go to the end.” Navalny was also sent to prison three times in Charp, most recently two days before his death.
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Author
Stefan Scholl
Russia correspondent
Stefan Scholl
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