Alexei A. Navalny portrays himself as invincible and consistently uses his characteristic humor to show that no matter how dire the conditions in prison, Vladimir V. Putin The president suggested he could not be defeated.
But behind that brave face, the reality was clear. Since being imprisoned in early 2021, Navalny, Russia’s most feared opposition figure, and his staff have regularly raised concerns that his conditions are so severe that he could be executed in slow motion. It was suggested that
Now his aides believe those fears have become a reality.
The cause of Navalny’s death in prison at the age of 47 is still unknown – in fact, his family has not even been allowed to see his body yet – but the conditions in Russia’s harshest penal colony are dangerous. Mr. Navalny is known for his work, and Mr. Navalny has been criticized. Particularly cruel treatment.
“Mr. Alexei Navalny was subjected to torture and torture for three years,” Russian journalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Dmitri A. Muratov wrote in a column after his death was announced on Friday. “As Mr. Navalny’s doctors told me, his body can’t handle this.”
More than a quarter of Navalny’s prison term since 2021 has been spent in frozen “punishment cells”, where he was often denied access to medical care. He was transferred to an even crueler prison. And at one point, he said, he was getting an injection, but he had no way of knowing what was in the syringe. His team feared he had been poisoned again.
The exact cause of Navalny’s death on Friday in a remote prison high above the Arctic Circle may remain a mystery. Russian prison authorities issued a statement Friday afternoon saying that Navalny felt unwell after leaving the prison and suddenly lost consciousness.
Russian state media reported that he had suffered from a blood clot. But things changed on Saturday when Navalny’s mother and lawyer arrived at the prison. Ivan Zhdanov, chairman of Navalny’s anti-corruption foundation, said Navalny was reportedly suffering from “sudden death syndrome,” which refers to sudden cardiac arrest.
Investigators told Navalny’s lawyers that retesting was being carried out and the results would be announced next week. Navalny’s staff accused Russian authorities of lying to hide the body and called for it to be released immediately so the family can order an independent analysis.
Navalny was in a punishment cell at the Arctic prison in the Yamalo-Nenets autonomous region on Wednesday, two days before Russian authorities announced his death, aides said.
His spokeswoman, Kira Yarmis, said it was the 27th time he had entered such an inhumane space. They are typically approximately 7 feet by 10 feet of concrete cells with cold, damp, poorly ventilated, and unbearable conditions. Had he survived, his latest sentence would have taken his total time in such solitary confinement to 308 days, more than a quarter of his time in prison, Yarmysh said.
Navalny said in a message from the facility earlier this year that prisoners in the Arctic facility’s punishment cells enter once a day at 6:30 a.m. into a coffin-like concrete enclosure that is opened to the sky through a metal grate. He said that he would be allowed to do so. Russian prison authorities said it was after one of these sessions on Friday that Navalny apparently lost consciousness. It was about -20 degrees Fahrenheit outside.
In a letter from prison last month, Navalny explained how he was able to walk a total of 11 steps from one end of the outdoor space to the other, noting that it was the coldest walk he had ever taken. 26 degrees Fahrenheit.
“Even at these temperatures, you can walk for more than 30 minutes as long as your new nose, ears, and fingers have time to grow,” he wrote. “There is nothing more refreshing than a walk in Yamal at 6:30 in the morning. And what a wonderful fresh breeze blows into the garden, despite the concrete enclosure!”
As he walked there the other day, he said he froze, remembering how Leonardo DiCaprio climbs onto a dead horse to escape the cold in the wilderness survival movie “The Revenant.” Navalny estimated that in that part of Russia, a dead horse would freeze within 15 minutes.
“We need an elephant here, a hot, fried elephant,” he said.
Navalny often used such resourcefulness even in the face of inhumane treatment. However, during three years of imprisonment, it had become increasingly clear that he might not survive.
Mariana Katsalova, the UN Human Rights Council special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Russia, said in an interview that “Mr. Navalny’s cumulative treatment over the years in prison was, in some ways, bringing him closer to death.” Ta. Saturday. “We don’t know yet. We need to investigate.”
For a while, Mr. Navalny seemed almost invincible.
In August 2020, he became ill after being poisoned with a Russian Novichok-type nerve agent while on a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow. He was placed in a medically induced coma for two weeks during treatment in Germany, but he survived.
The US government later determined that Russia’s Federal Security Service, known as the FSB, was responsible for the poisoning.
Despite the assassination attempt, Navalny returned to Russia in early 2021 to continue his fight against Putin, who denied Russia’s involvement in the poisoning, and was immediately imprisoned. His health quickly began to deteriorate.
In March 2021, he complained of severe back pain, which later turned into leg problems.
He requested the prison authorities to provide him with proper medical care and medicine. Instead, he said, they subjected him to sleep deprivation. At the end of March 2021, he declared a hunger strike over his treatment, and Russian doctors and Hollywood stars took up his claims in open letters to Putin.
About three weeks later, Navalny was examined by an independent panel of doctors. Navalny said in a message posted on Instagram that tests by his doctors revealed that “soon there will be no one left to treat him.”
Last year, Navalny wrote from prison that jokes about punishment cells should not normalize the environment. He lamented that a fellow political prisoner who spoke out against the war in Ukraine was placed in a punishment cell despite being disabled and missing part of a lung.
Navalny described the dire health conditions in prisons, saying many inmates were suffering from tuberculosis. He also complained that early last year, former prison authorities placed people with mental problems in cells across from him as a form of torture, and sick prisoners in smaller cells.
At the time, his lawyer Vadim Kobzev said the prison had deliberately infected him with a respiratory disease, denied him medicine and “treated” him with large doses of contraindicated antibiotics. Kobzev said Navalny suffered from severe abdominal pain, which caused him to lose more than 15 pounds.
“These actions are nothing but an open strategy to destroy Mr. Navalny’s health by any means possible,” Kobzev said in a statement at the time. “Clearly, the prison would not risk engaging in this level of demonstrable misconduct without Moscow’s approval.”
Mr. Kobzev has since been arrested on extremist charges for his ties to Mr. Navalny, as part of a broader roundup of opposition leaders’ lawyers late last year.
In early December, Navalny suffered dizziness due to an unexplained medical attack and was on an intravenous drip. But later that month, Russian authorities transferred him from a prison in the Vladimir region, about 130 miles east of Moscow, to a “special regime” penal colony in the Arctic, where he died.
Several doctors contacted after his death, including those who were involved in his initial treatment in the Siberian city of Omsk, said his death was not related to the poisoning more than three years ago, given his smooth recovery. He said there is a high possibility.
But since then, he has faced many other health problems.
“Russian prisons are places where you have to prepare to die every day,” Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, a Russian tycoon who spent 10 years in prison after speaking out against Mr. Putin, said Friday.
Khodorkovsky, who was released in 2013, said in an interview that for prisoners to survive mentally, they must find a way to treat their burden as a challenge, and Navalny did just that. But still, he added, “this does not prevent people from being killed.”
anton troyanovsky Contributed to the report.
