2024-02-17 16:19:00
Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny died in one of Russia’s worst prison camps. There are more than 700 such camps in the country. Breaking the will of inmates is the goal of the penal system.
Alexei Navalny appears on the video screen during a court hearing in January 2024, connected from the Charp penal colony.
Maxim Shemetov / X90156
The security guards look like they’re in the movies, he reported. «With submachine guns, warm mittens and felt boots. And with beautiful, fluffy German Shepherds.” Alexei Navalny posted this Christmas regarding intermediaries following his arrival at reformatory colony No. 3. “Don’t worry regarding me.”
Alexei Navalny is dead. Russia’s most famous political prisoner survived less than two months in Colony No. 3, an institution with strict conditions in the north-west Siberian polar settlement of Charp. According to the Russian penal service FSIN, he collapsed following walking in the yard on Thursday and might not be revived.
The cause of death is unclear. Human rights activists and opposition activists in exile blame the Kremlin. And its infamous prison system. As under Stalin, it consists largely of penal camps, a network of over 700 so-called reformatory colonies and over 200 remand prisons.
Occupancy is shrinking
Alexander Solzhenitsyn christened it the Gulag Archipelago during Soviet times. It is an abbreviation of the Russian “Glavnoje uprawlenie lagerej”, the “main camp administration”. The population of this prison world has shrunk from nearly 700,000 since 2013 to 266,000 inmates last October, which experts attribute to reduced 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 once more. In the late Soviet Union there were around 700.
The “Polar Wolf”, as the correctional colony No. 3 is also called, has something of an open-air museum of the Gulag: In 1961, buildings from the former “warehouse department” of the Gulag construction project number 501 were put into operation once more for the opening of the colony. According to the historian and blogger Rustem Adagamov, Stalin had a railway line laid here and a total of 34 camps set up for it. Thousands of their inmates died. And as in Stalin’s time, the five-meter barbed wire fences are still considered a formality today: the only place that awaits escapees is the tundra and wilderness.
The “Polar Wolf” penal colony to which Alexei Navalny was transferred in December 2023.
Stringer / X80002
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 newspaper “Noviye Izvestia” in 2018. New arrivals are beaten up when greeting them. “They beat you from all sides with police batons, with all their might, on your head, neck or back.”
Not an isolated case. In 2020, former prisoner Ruslan Vakhapov described how he was greeted by correctional officers with carpenter’s hammers at reformatory colony No. 1 in Yaroslavl, 250 kilometers northeast of Moscow. “They beat me for an hour and a half,” said Vakhapov, “breaking several of my joints.” And twice a year, emergency police were called in to beat up everyone who was on the prison management’s blacklist.
Brutality is routine. Rapes with broomsticks are now becoming public because the perpetrators – often violent criminals who work with the prison management – film the acts. The videos serve as evidence for official use or for blackmail. But there are also more or less non-violent correctional colonies. “It depends on what’s going on in the director’s head,” said civil rights activist Igor Kaljapin, who advocates for prisoners.
They are woken up at six or seven o’clock, followed by physical exercises, breakfast, roll call, work, lunch break, work, dinner, educational measures or state TV, two checks, an hour of free time, bed rest from 10 or 11 p.m. According to the business portal RBK, a prisoner’s daily food ration costs the state 72 rubles, the equivalent of almost 70 centimes. Those who can eat food that is difficult to eat eat from the prison shop or from the six food packages weighing 20 kilos that the family is allowed to send each year. In “stricter” camp confinement like in “Polar Wolf” there are only four.
Infamous punishment cell
There is a risk of imprisonment for open shirt buttons, as well as for complaints. The prison, known in Russia as a penal isolator, is a two-by-2.5-meter hole into which up to seven prisoners are crammed. The toilet is usually broken, there is a smell of feces without ventilation and temperatures around ten degrees in winter.
But unlike Stalin’s Gulag, prominent political prisoners often have an easier time in Putin’s camps. The thugs leave them alone – as a rule. 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 to meet 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.
“Political” people, who are regularly visited by their defenders and human rights activists and correspond with journalists and supporters, have so far mostly been spared from arbitrariness and violence. Navalny’s younger brother Oleg also told Deutsche Welle following three and a half years in prison: “About 15 minutes following I got out, I had forgotten everything.”
But these were people who avoided conflict. Putin critic Khodorkovsky, who was imprisoned in eastern Siberia, was attacked by a cellmate who injured his nose with a knife. The attacker later told the portal gazeta.ru that the guards had used violence and threats to force him to gouge out Khodorkovsky’s eye.
“It’s regarding humiliating people, breaking them,” says the writer Maxim Gromow, who himself spent three years as a “politician.” “Watchdogs are constantly barking at you, you have to take your hat off to every officer, not to mention being beaten.” After his release, he started drinking and struggled for years with his self-esteem.
Gromow had repeatedly ended up in a penal isolation facility because he had campaigned for better prison conditions. Alexei Navalny, however, repeatedly filed complaints once morest the camp management through his lawyers. He used the video links from prison to the court hearings for ironic standups and called on FSIN officials to vote once morest Putin in the presidential elections. The day before his death, he joked to the judge on video that he should transfer money to him.
At least digitally, he repeatedly broke out of solitary confinement to continue the political fight and mocked Putin’s state on Telegram as being unviable. “These angry villains are obsessed with the idea of bringing the entire country to its knees,” he wrote on Telegram regarding 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. They didn’t break Navalny’s will, but perhaps his body. He was repeatedly put in the 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. “The pressing continues,” Gromow said in December. “Navalny has thrown down the gauntlet to them. And the state power 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.
An article from “NZZ am Sonntag”
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