Years of repeated incarceration in increasingly harsh prison conditions have failed to break Alexei Navalny. He has kept up an unceasing campaign against Vladimir Putin’s autocratic rule from behind bars, remaining the president’s most prominent opponent inside Russia.
For three weeks this month, there was silence from him. He could not be found by his legal team, family and friends despite an exhaustive search through the penal system. Officials across the country, from Mr Putin’s spokesman to prison authorities in both Moscow and far-flung provinces, claimed they did not know his whereabouts.
But as his supporters grew increasingly worried, the 47-year-old made a sudden reappearance from the brutal IK-3 penal colony in the Arctic Circle, known as Polar Wolf, 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow.
In a series of deeply ironic messages from his X account, Mr Navalny insisted he was fine, compared himself to Santa Claus and described the “beautiful fluffy sheepdogs” watching guard. No pictures of him have been seen in his new place of imprisonment.
Over 20 days, he said he had been taken on a highly circuitous journey from Moscow to the penal colony in Kharp, a journey that should take around 40 hours by train. Describing conditions inside the camp, a former inmate gave an interview in 2018 to the daily newspaper Novie Izvestiya where he described how he was beaten “from all sides with a truncheon” on arrival.
Navalny has kept up an unceasing campaign against Vladimir Putin’s autocratic rule from behind bars— (DPA)
Mr Navalny’s disappearance was not altogether an unusual event for those challenging the brutally powerful. Adversaries of Latin American military juntas, of organised crime gangs, of terrorist groups and of violent dictators around the world are among the disappeared. Some stay missing for ever; others turn up dead.
People like Boris Nemtsov, who was killed with four bullets to his back in Moscow in 2014, when he was organising protests against financial corruption and Russian intervention in Ukraine. Or, more recently, Yevgeny Prigozhin and his senior commanders, whose plane was blown out of the sky following the failed coup by their Wagner mercenaries.
But the fact that Mr Navalny went missing for so long became a matter of grave concern both at home and abroad.
Mariana Katzarova, the United Nations special rapporteur for human rights in the Russian Federation, expressed her fears: “Persistent ill-treatment in detention and lack of access to adequate medical care will cause further harm to his health and lead to great risks to his life.”
Kira Yarmysh, a member of Mr Navalny’s team, added: “No prisoner had ever simply disappeared for so long, especially not such an important prisoner.” Russians outside the country went to their embassies to protest, holding up posters asking “Where is Navalny?”
Ms Yarmysh said she believes the decision to move him to such a remote and inhospitable location was designed to isolate him, make his life harder, and render it more difficult for his lawyers and allies to access him. But the calls for his release grow only louder.
Navalny called Russian president Vladimir Putin a ‘madman’ and his ruling party ‘crooks and thieves’— (AFP/Getty)
Alexei Navalny came to fame and became a target for the Kremlin after accusing Mr Putin and the hierarchy around him of corruption and abuse. The president, he said, is a “madman” and his ruling party “crooks and thieves.”
Mr Navalny urged people not to simply complain about the malaise in Russia but to take action: “Everyone says corruption is everywhere but for me, it seems strange to say that and then not try to put the people guilty of corruption away.”
As support grew, he did not hesitate to aim at the top, accusing Mr Putin of running a system of “feudal patronage” with fabulous rewards. A documentary he presented – “Putin’s Palace: The Story of the World’s Biggest Bribe” – investigated the building of a £1.35bn luxury mansion, allegedly for the president, in the Krasnodar region. The Kremlin denied the claim but the video racked up more than 110 million views internationally.
Mr Navalny also pointed to the activities of the security apparatus and the plight of Russians pushing back against the state. “We have grown accustomed to injustice in Russia, people are constantly being arrested unlawfully,” he said. He also foresaw the inevitable retribution he would face: “I am in the very blackest part of the black list.”
The IK-6 penal colony where jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was last being held— (AFP/Getty)
Over the years, Mr Navalny has faced physical attacks, repeated arrests, investigations, and criminal proceedings. He faced one assassination attempt, via Novichok nerve agent poisoning in Russia three years ago, which resulted in him being evacuated to Germany in a coma for life-saving treatment.
His family and lawyers say he has been suffering from an acute, undiagnosed, stomach illness while in prison. That, and general deprivation, has led to alarming weight loss and fainting spells.
Mr Navalny’s current jail term began when he returned from medical treatment in Germany to Russia in 2021, despite warnings from allies and friends that it would be highly dangerous. He was arrested at the airport, put before a court, and sentenced to two and half years of a former suspended jail term for alleged fraud.
This was just a holding move by the government prosecutors. In August 2022 he was sentenced to nine years in prison after being found guilty of spending public donations to his Anti-Corruption Foundation on “extremism and personal needs”. In August this year, he was sentenced to a further 19 years of a raft of “extremism” charges. There were further charges, this time of “vandalism”, due earlier this month before he went missing.
If the authorities thought that prison would keep Mr Navalny quiet, they were mistaken. A lawyer himself, with a dedicated legal team backing him, he has filed suits to get adequate medical care, an end to the bugging of rooms where he met visitors, and no more broadcasts of Mr Putin’s speeches into his cell.
Protesters outside the Russian embassy in London in support of Alexei Navalny on his 47th birthday earlier this year— (AFP/Getty)
Mr Navalny has published, with the help of his legal team and political allies, articles and manifestos about current affairs and kept up regular postings on social media.
Russia’s most prominent inmate has also given interviews in prison laying out the conditions he has faced. Describing the violence and repression of a penal colony, he told The New York Times: “You might imagine tattooed musclemen with steel teeth carrying on with knife fights to take the best cot by the window. You need to imagine something like a Chinese labour camp, where everybody marches in a line and where video cameras are hung everywhere. There is constant control and a culture of snitching.”
On other occasions, Mr Navalny has spoken about the mistreatment he has suffered: “I now understand why sleep deprivation is one of the favourite tortures of the special services. No traces remain, and it’s impossible to tolerate.”
He had to cope with the lingering effect of the Novichok poisoning with barely any medical help in prison. “It [has] got to the point where it’s hard to get up from the bed, and it hurts a lot. The prison doctor saw me and started dispensing two ibuprofen pills but did not tell me what my diagnosis is … If I place my weight on my right leg, I fall right down. I’ve got used to my right leg lately, and I’d hate to lose it.”
Despite many obstacles, Mr Navalny’s foundation has also remained active. It recently put up billboards in Moscow, St Petersburg and several other cities wishing everyone a happy new year. The boards displayed a QR code which, when scanned, opened a website titled “Russia Without Putin”, which urged citizens to vote for anyone but Mr Putin in the coming presidential election next March.
Navalny is seen on a TV screen, as he appears in a video link provided by the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service in a courtroom in Moscow last year— (AP)
The notice of further charges against Mr Navalny, and then his three-week disappearance, came as Mr Putin launched his campaign for a fifth term in office, with the foregone conclusion of an election victory meaning that he would be emulating Joseph Stalin with 30 years in power.
Ivan Zhadnove, the head of Mr Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, is convinced there is a link between what happened to Mr Navalny and the coming election. “I don’t believe in such coincidences: that Alexei goes missing just as we are about to announce our electoral campaign, a day before Vladimir Putin announcing he would run for president for an infinite new term. It’s not a coincidence, it’s the Kremlin strategy,” he said.
The Russian president’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, denied that the Kremlin had anything to do with Mr Navalny’s ongoing persecution, adding that the central government has “neither the intention nor the ability to track the fate of convicts”.
Following Mr Navalny’s conviction in August, extending his sentence by 19 years, the court ordered that he be moved to a “special regime” penal colony. The 25 prisons with this form of particularly punitive treatment are scattered across the country, from the European part of Russia to the Arctic Circle and the Far East.
But no such move seemed to have taken place by December. Mr Navalny suggested in social media posts that the reason for this was that investigators were unwilling to travel to remote locations to pursue further cases against him.
The IK-6 penal colony— (AFP/Getty)
Mr Navalny was due to meet his defence team on 6 December in Kovrov, 162 miles northeast of Moscow. His lawyers waited for hours but were denied access. The same scenario played out over the next two days.
Mr Navalny was also due to appear at several court hearings around that time to answer the fresh tranche of charges. The prison authorities failed to produce him. The judge in one of the courts due to hear the case, Oktyabrsky in Vladimir region, suspended the hearings until the defendant’s “location is established”.
Vyacheslav Gimadi, a lawyer for Mr Navalny, pointed out that “there are no such grounds in the law to act in that fashion”.
“Instead of asking the Federal Penitentiary Service to ensure the plaintiff’s turnout, the court just wrote off the hearings for an indefinite period,” he said.
The Federal Penitentiary Service produced a certificate to Mr Navalny’s lawyers saying that their client was not in the penal colony IK-6, where he was last recorded to have been held. Mr Navalny’s lawyers sent requests for help to no fewer than 200 pre-trial detention centres in the search for him, without any joy.
It wasn’t until Monday that his spokesperson revealed he had been tracked to Polar Wolf, where temperatures plunge as low as -28C. It was founded in the Sixties, as part of the Soviet Gulag forced labour camps.
A spokesperson for the government told The Independent: “We have been clear that the continued imprisonment of Alexei Navalny on politically-motivated grounds further demonstrates the Russian state’s contempt for freedom of speech and international human rights obligations. Russia should immediately release him.”
David Lammy MP, Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary, said: “Alexei Navalny’s continued imprisonment is completely unjustified and an attack on the rights of the Russian people. He should be released immediately. His detention is a cruel emblem of Putin’s fear of criticism and dissent amid his illegal and barbaric war in Ukraine.”
