Ivan Nechepurenko
The writer is a Russian writer and journalist
Alexei Navalny portrayed himself as invincible, consistently using his hallmark humour to suggest that President Vladimir Putin couldn’t break him, no matter how dire his conditions became in prison.
But behind the brave face, the reality was plain to see. Since his incarceration in early 2021, Navalny, Russia’s most formidable opposition figure, and his staff regularly suggested his conditions were so grim that he was being put to death in slow motion.
Now his aides believe their fears have come true.
The cause of Navalny’s death in prison at 47 has not been established — in fact his family has not yet even been allowed to see his body — but Russia’s harshest penal colonies are known for hazardous conditions, and Navalny was singled out for particularly brutal treatment.
“Aleksei Navalny was subjected to torment and torture for three years,” Russian journalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Dmitry Muratov wrote in a column after his death was announced. “As Navalny’s doctor told me: the body cannot withstand this.”
More than a quarter of Navalny’s incarceration since 2021 was spent in freezing “punishment cells” and he was often denied access to medical care. He was transferred to ever crueler prisons. And at one point, he said he was being given injections but was prevented from finding out what was in the syringes. His team worried he was again being poisoned.
What specifically led to Navalny’s death at a remote prison above the Arctic Circle may remain a mystery. The Russian prison service released a statement saying that Navalny felt sick and suddenly lost consciousness after being outside.
Russian state media reported that he had suffered a blood clot.
But the story changed the next day, when Navalny’s mother and lawyer arrived at the prison. They were told he had suffered from “sudden death syndrome,” which appeared to indicate sudden cardiac arrest, according to Ivan Zhdanov, director of Navalny’s anti-corruption foundation.
Investigators told a lawyer for Navalny that a repeat examination was being conducted and the results would be released this week. Navalny’s staff called for the body to be released immediately so that his family could order an independent analysis, accusing Russian authorities of lying to conceal the body.
According to his aides, Navalny had been put in a punishment cell at the Arctic prison in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region on Wednesday, two days before Russian authorities announced his death.
His spokesperson, Kira Yarmysh, said that marked his 27th time in such an inhumane space, usually a roughly 7-by-10-foot concrete cell with unbearable conditions — cold, damp and poorly ventilated. His latest round of punishment, had he survived, would have taken his total period in such a cell to 308 days, more than a quarter of his time in incarceration, according to Yarmysh.
Once a day at 6:30 am, prisoners in the punishment cells at the Arctic facility are allowed into a coffin-like concrete enclosure open to the sky through a metal grate, Navalny said in a message from the facility this year. It appeared to be after such a session that Navalny lost consciousness, according to the Russian prison service’s account. It was about minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit outside.
In a letter from prison last month, Navalny described how he could walk a total of 11 steps from one end of the open-air space to the other, noting that the coldest it had been so far on one of his walks was minus 26 degrees Fahrenheit.
“Even at this temperature, you can walk for more than half an hour, so long as you have time to grow a new nose, ears and fingers,” he wrote. “There are few things as invigorating as a walk in Yamal at 6:30 in the morning. And what a wonderful fresh breeze blows into the yard, despite the concrete enclosure, wow!”
Navalny often employed such wit in the face of his inhumane treatment. But it had become increasingly clear, over his three years of incarceration, that he might not survive.
“The cumulative treatment of Navalny over several years in prison — in a way you could say it was driving him close to death,” Mariana Katzarova, the United Nations Human Rights Council special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Russia, said in an interview Saturday. “We don’t know yet. We need an investigation.”
For a time, Navalny did seem almost invincible. In August 2020, he fell ill on a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow, after being poisoned with a nerve agent from the Russian-made Novichok family. He was put into a medically induced coma for two weeks during treatment in Germany — and survived. - The New York Times
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