Putin’s most well-known opponent: How Alexei Navalnyj is tortured in the penal camp

RUssland’s situation is clouding over, Vladimir Putin’s sanctuary is growing. In the spring, the television show Direct Line, which put callers through to the president, was postponed indefinitely. This also followed for the “big press conference” in which Putin appeared in front of hundreds of media representatives every December. The apparatus even protects Putin from selected questions in the crisis, which must not be one. Even the state of the nation address required by the constitution is pending.

Nevertheless, Putin was now briefly bothered by reality. When the President appeared in front of his “press pool” during a visit to Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan last Friday, Andrei Kolesnikov from “Kommersant” (who enjoys special status as Putin’s companion from the very beginning) asked whether the eight-and-a-half years in prison “for words” for Ilya Yashin are not “bestial”. In addition, the opposition member was sentenced for “false information” about the Butscha murders. “Who is that?” Putin asked, lecturing on courts that shouldn’t be interfered with.

A pattern typical of Putin

Of course, at a meeting with his human rights council in 2015 (which was not as tame as it is now) the president was asked about the arrest of Yashins, who was then campaign manager – and he proved to be well informed about the details. The appearance fit into the pattern typical of Putin of pretending that he doesn’t know the people he’s being asked about. “Putin himself is taking care of all the key stories related to the repression of the opposition,” stressed Leonid Volkov, chief of staff to jailed anti-corruption fighter Alexei Navalny.

Putin never speaks his name. Since June, the prisoner has been held five hours’ drive east of Moscow, in the “strict” penal colony IK-6 in the village of Melekhovo, Vladimir region. In increasingly worse conditions. Navalny has received nine prison sentences since August; he received the youngest on Tuesday – one day after he had come out of the prison.

The “criminal isolator” is a two-and-a-half by three meter concrete building. The metal platform is folded up at five o’clock in the morning and only lowered again at 9 p.m. The toilet is a hole in the floor, two cameras are hanging from the ceiling. In the summer it was hot and stuffy there, now it’s cold and damp. Since November, Navalnyj has been kept in a comparable cell, when he is not in the “penal isolator”, in which two books are allowed instead of one. Navalnyj’s social media posts appear when his defense attorneys were able to speak to him in the penal camp. Which is hard enough.

Family visits are cancelled

Navalny received the most recent prison sentence because he used a swear word that prison guards use all the time. He had received it earlier because a guard saw him in the morning without the prescribed prison jacket. This is what Navalnyj reported when he was video-connected to a court hearing in Kovrov, a few kilometers from the penal colony, at the beginning of December. The prisoner appears emaciated on such occasions, but combative and unbroken.

Navalny’s long-awaited family visits are repeatedly cancelled. A man recently screamed in front of Navalnyj’s cell that he was being tortured. The Kovrov proceedings concern the creation of a trade union for prisoners. Navalnyj had the idea because he had to sew seven to eight hours a day on a sewing machine that was only 42 centimeters high. Navalnyj’s back is weakened from the 2020 Novichok poisoning. Only with a hunger strike in spring 2021 did he manage to be treated for his condition.

Navalnyj was arrested after returning from Germany at the beginning of last year. As soon as he presented the union project, the first prison sentence was imposed: the top button of his overall was undone. Before later penalties, it was said that Navalny did not keep his hands behind his back when walking or cleaned the yard poorly. Navalnyj always lodges a complaint. His arguments that he was given a uniform that was too small and that leaves were deliberately thrown in the yard could be substantiated by surveillance footage – which is said to have been lost. A recent complaint by Navalnyj is directed against the camp management’s decision not to give him winter boots, unlike other prisoners.

The complaints are rejected. Navalnyj is about the principle – and about the opportunity to speak. More and more criminal proceedings are being opened against him, and Navalny faces decades of imprisonment. It seems clear that he will not be released under Putin’s rule. When the most recent sentence to nine years in prison (about alleged fraud at his anti-corruption foundation) was confirmed in October, the prisoner described the Ukraine war as an “enormous crime” by Putin, which had been prepared with “small crimes”. Navalny warned that Putin would lose the war, but the question was how bad the consequences would be for Russia. He tries to remain a political figure, commenting – through lawyers and social media – on events such as the “recent unscrupulous and lawless Putin verdict” against Yashin.

As the system’s latest revenge, Navalnyj, a prisoner “with major hygiene problems”, was put in the prison cell. In the confines, life immediately becomes unbearable, said Navalnyj. The detainee had asked for a transfer himself. The camp management refused because Navalny did not beat him. The fact that a person is used as a means of exerting pressure makes him particularly angry, Navalny said. With a “combination of threats, screams and appeals of conscience” he finally “forced the cellmates to wash and brush their teeth”. As is often the case, Navalnyj ended with a smiley.