The superhuman resilience of Alexei Navalny Putin simply cannot break

The FKU IK-3 penal colony is a Soviet-era jail camp situated deep within the Arctic Circle, 1,200 miles north-east of Moscow. Known because the Polar Wolf, it’s thought of to be one of many hardest prisons in Russia, with the temperature as a result of drop to minus 28c over the following week.

On Monday, it was revealed to be the brand new dwelling of President Putin‘s public enemy No 1 Alexei Navalny.

Now we all know the place he was throughout a interval of 20 days when he was reported lacking by his authorized workforce: in transit from his former dwelling, Penal Colony No 6 — a mere 150 miles from Moscow — to the frozen north.

Such transfers can take days, weeks and even months as prisoners are transported in specifically designed trains, which have caged compartments for inmates, with no showers, and strictly restricted provides of meals. Harsh guidelines relationship again to Soviet instances dictate that prisoners’ households and legal professionals are solely knowledgeable about their whereabouts after they’ve reached their vacation spot.

Former inmates have described how FKU IK-3 is designed to make prisoners really feel ‘fully hopeless’ and crush ‘any rebellious spirit’. If so, it is actually not having that impact on Navalny, not but at any charge.

In a sequence of posts on X/Twitter this week, he mentioned: ‘I’m your new Santa Claus… I do not say ‘Ho-ho-ho’ however I do say ‘Uh-oh-oh’ after I look out the window, the place I can see an evening, then a night, after which the night time once more. Unfortunately there aren’t any reindeer however there are enormous fluffy and really stunning shepherd canine.’

Even locked up in Siberia, Navalny is unimaginable to silence. Whenever he meets along with his legal professionals, he makes positive to inform them what he needs to tweet. The message is then handed to allies operating his X account. This degree of bravery within the face of relentless struggling is a testomony to his distinctive resilience.

At Penal Colony No 6, Putin’s up to date tackle the Stalinist Gulag, rape and violence involving inmates are commonplace, whereas the guards have been remorseless of their sadism — particularly relating to their most troublesome prisoner.

Since Russia’s most well-known dissident started serving a 19-year sentence for varied alleged crimes, together with extremism, the rehabilitation of Nazism and inciting kids to commit harmful acts, he has been systematically abused.

The jail authorities punish him for the slightest of supposed infractions — or for nothing in any respect.

On one event, he was punished for laundry his arms six minutes sooner than scheduled. On one other, for undoing the highest button of his shirt.

His each day life is a torment. He is allowed a pen and piece of paper for under half-hour per day, whereas his mattress is folded every morning in order that he can’t lie down on it.

He can be frequently put in solitary confinement. In September, Navalny’s press secretary Kira Yarmysh mentioned he had spent 207 out of the final one year in a punishment cell.

On one of many final events he was seen earlier this yr, Navalny had simply emerged from his eleventh separate interval of incarceration in a 10ft by 7ft ‘concrete kennel’, with solely a gap within the floor for a bathroom.

He regarded much more gaunt and unwell than common and was affected by a extreme lung an infection contracted after jail officers pressured him to share a cell with a tramp affected by a contagious respiratory situation — after which refused to deal with him when he obtained sick.

On one other event, they moved one other prisoner with psychological well being issues into the cell subsequent door. ‘He screams for 16 hours per day, typically he barks or howls,’ Yarmysh mentioned. ‘Sometimes he talks in several voices to himself.’

But it doesn’t matter what the authorities do to him he continues to withstand. Instead of being cowed, Navalny fights again through his now-exiled Anti-Corruption Foundation workforce.

Founded in Moscow in 2011, it was designated an ‘extremist’ organisation ten years later and greater than 1,000 of Navalny’s associates have been pressured to depart the nation to keep away from arrest.

Today, it operates from trendy workplaces within the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, the place Navalny’s identify is mounted on the workplace wall in neon lights.

While constantly supportive of her husband, Navalny’s spouse, Yulia Navalnaya, is believed to be residing in Germany — away from the relentless state surveillance and media highlight — with their son Zakhar, 14, whereas their 22-year-old daughter Daria is finding out at Stanford University in America.

The core workforce in Vilnius data each day information bulletins and dialogue streams, in addition to occasional main corruption investigations.

One of the newest of those targeted on Navalny’s former jailers at Penal Colony No 6. Aiming straight on the prime, it focused the jail’s governor, Colonel Dmitry Nozhkin, naming his mistress, and revealing his penchant, apparently together with that of his spouse, for threesomes.

It additionally detailed how Nozhkin receives orders from Moscow and holds prolonged conferences on tips on how to make ‘life worse for Putin’s fundamental enemy’.

And domestically, Putin’s fundamental enemy he undoubtedly is, to the purpose that Putin can’t convey himself to utter his identify.

So what makes Alexei Navalny so particular?

He certified as a lawyer in 2001, however politics was at all times his true ardour. He joined the United Democratic Party Yabloko in 2000, changing into chief of workers of their Moscow department in 2004. But he quickly discovered conventional politics too constraining — and the extra he noticed of Putin’s Russia, the extra it sickened him.

In 2011, he was arrested for protesting the results of that yr’s parliamentary elections however, as a substitute of being cowed by the expertise, as quickly as he was launched, he known as on Russians to unite in opposition to Putin.

His intense charisma had begun to win him a following among the many Russian citizens — and the regime started to take observe. When he ran for Mayor of Moscow in 2013, the authorities took no probabilities and arrested him on embezzlement fees.

But when 1000’s took to the streets of Moscow in protest, Putin’s nerve failed him and Navalny was launched a day later. The insurgent candidate finally obtained 27 per cent of the vote in a ballot he claimed was rigged.

Three years later, Navalny introduced he would stand within the 2018 presidential election.

During his presidential election marketing campaign, thugs attacked him in his Moscow workplace, spraying inexperienced dye in his face, an act Navalny claims price him 80 per cent of the sight in his proper eye. When the authorities finally banned him from standing, he known as for Russians to boycott the election.

The safety forces arrested him repeatedly over the following few years, primarily for ‘main anti-government protests’, however nothing may cease him.

Eventually the Kremlin snapped. In August 2020, within the metropolis of Tomsk in central Russia, FSB brokers broke into his lodge room and smeared the nerve agent Novichok on his underpants. On the flight again to Moscow, he was violently sick and fell right into a coma, prompting the pilot to divert the airplane to Omsk in Siberia for therapy.

From there, he was permitted to medically evacuate to Germany.

When he awoke, he realised the stakes had modified — irretrievably. ‘So Putin has determined to kill me in any case,’ he informed associates.

Putin has at all times denied any function on this episode, saying that had the safety providers wished to poison Navalny ‘we’d in all probability have completed the job’.

‘He [President Putin] will enter historical past as a poisoner,’ Navalny later responded.

‘We had Yaroslav the Wise and Alexander the Liberator. And now we may have Vladimir the Poisoner of Underpants.’

In January, 2021, he returned to Russia — realizing that, within the twisted world of Russian ‘justice’, there was an excellent probability he can be jailed for violating the phrases of his parole by leaving the nation.

He refused to be an exile, he mentioned, as a result of it made it simpler for Putin to discredit him.

‘Emigration shouldn’t be an choice for me, and it’s not an choice for 99 per cent of people that work with me,’ he added.

Once extra, the folks took to the streets. This time the demonstrations have been nationwide, with the authorities detaining greater than 8,700 folks in 86 cities. Several media shops reported that the turnout exceeded 100,000 in complete — the most important protest in Russia for seven years.

He has been in jail ever since.

Some attribute his choice to return to a want to be a martyr. After all, with a world community and popularity, he may have run an efficient opposition in Berlin.

‘But he began to assume he was like Ayatollah Khomeini,’ an professional aware of his story informed me. ‘Like Khomeini, who returned from exile to guide the 1979 Iranian Revolution, he thought he would return, and the revolution would occur.’

What is it that has made Putin so decided to persecute Navalny, personally?

Just like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn throughout the Soviet period, Putin faces in Navalny the corporeal embodiment of opposition to his rule. A single determine, who stands as a residing rebuke to all that’s unsuitable in regards to the regime.

In this sense, this can be a story about greater than politics. It is a story of two males — who’ve by no means met — into which is woven the broader story of Twenty first-century Russia.

In his personal early profession, Navalny was a nationalist identified for his racist feedback in the direction of Chechens and Central Asians — sentiments which he has since distanced himself from.

Putin himself used extra refined rhetoric when he got here to energy promising to finish the Chechen revolt and reassert Russian Slavic authority.

On assuming the presidency in 2000, he additionally vowed to root out corruption after the hypercapitalism of the Nineteen Nineties had turned Russia right into a gangster state riven with turf wars.

Asked when he was going to ‘waste’ the oligarch ‘leeches’, he mentioned: ‘Not a single clan, not a single oligarch… all must be equally distant from energy.’

But then in fact, Putin went on to turn into Russia’s greatest gangster, utilizing oligarchs to launder his cash and popularity, each at dwelling and overseas.

He is now value billions and controls the ‘Obshchak’ — the gang’s finances — to which all of the smaller gangsters beneath chip in.

Navalny, in the meantime, caught to the professed tenets of early Putinism and have become Russia’s greatest anti-corruption crusader. He turned himself, in essence, into what Putin promised (or reasonably pretended) to be. And he’s with out concern, unafraid to focus on Putin and his interior circle personally.

Next yr, Russia is about for an additional presidential election.

Putin will likely be standing for his fifth time period. But 1,200 miles away within the Polar Wolf jail camp the person who has been a thorn in his aspect for greater than ten years reveals no signal of giving up on his battle.