Russian political prisoner Alexei Navalny died in the Siberian prison IK-3, also known as the Polar Wolf, where he was serving his sentence, one of the most isolated and cruel prisons in the country.
According to the prison service the 47-year-old Russian opposition leader began to feel unwell after a walk and lost consciousness. He died north of the Arctic Circle, almost 2,000 kilometers from his birthplace.
At -30ºC
Polar Wolf was built in 1961 and was part of the gulag prison system, the forced labor camps where the USSR sent political opponents and prisoners.
This prison had the Gulag number 501 and retains certain features “dating back to the Stalinist era”, Emilia Coustova, a professor at the University of Strasbourg, explained to France 24. One of the elements retained is the use of weather “as a tool of repression”. The prison is located in the Harp municipality in the far north of Russia, where temperatures can reach -30ºC.
Being north of the Arctic Circle, the municipality of Harp has only six months of daylight a year, and in summer it is very common to get bitten by mosquitoes and sandflies, explained Marc Elie, a researcher in Soviet history at the Center for Russian, Caucasian and of Central European Studies (CERCEC) in France.
Polar Wolf is a very isolated place. According to Kustova, by sending a prisoner so far away there is an attempt to “sever the ties between the prisoners and their loved ones”. Navalny was sent there from a prison in the Vladimir region, near Moscow. For several weeks, the Russian prison service and the Kremlin refused to explain the whereabouts of the 47-year-old, who at the time was on his way to his new prison in Siberia.
“They give me two cups of boiling water and two pieces of disgusting bread. I want to drink this water normally and eat this bread. I have 10 minutes to eat. And they are forcing me to swallow boiling water,” Navalny said in January.
Poor medical care
The Indepedent takes a look at the prison conditions Navalny said he has been forced to endure since being jailed on his return to Russia in 2021 from Germany, where he was treated for nerve agent poisoning.
He first complained about his deteriorating health in March 2021, immediately after he was transferred from a pre-trial detention center to the penal colony. He was experiencing debilitating back pain and numbness in his legs. In addition, he said he was subjected to intrusive hourly night controls that effectively deprived him of uninterrupted sleep for several weeks.
The prison administration refused to provide him with adequate health care. Finally, after an international campaign in his favor and a hunger strike, the Authorities provided him with some decent medical care and allowed him to access information about his health.
Since December 2022, prison authorities have repeatedly placed Navalny in a cell with another prisoner who, according to the Putin critic, was seriously ill, but without taking measures to protect his health.
During that time he contracted a respiratory infection and despite the constant deterioration of the condition of both prisoners who shared the cell. the prison administration refused to take him or his fellow inmate to a medical ward. According to Navalny’s lawyer, he was eventually given the wrong type of antibiotics, which allegedly worsened his condition.
Mariana Katzarova, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Russian Federation, expressed fears about Navalny’s health late last year. “The mistreatment and lack of access to adequate medical care will cause further damage to his health and lead to great risks to his life,” it said.
His family and lawyers have said Navalny suffers from an acute, undiagnosed stomach ailment which, along with general deprivation, has led to alarming weight loss and fainting spells.
Isolation
In January, Navalny’s spokesman said the opposition leader had been placed in solitary confinement for 10 days for introducing himself to a guard.
Kira Yarmysh told X that it was the 25th time Navalny had been placed in solitary confinement and that he had spent 283 days in such conditions.
Injections with unknown drugs
In December, Navalny said he had been suffering from back pain since his previous imprisonment. In a post on Twitter, he also alleged that he was injected with unknown drugs.
“See how the system works when you’re not allowed to hit someone, but your leadership ordered you to hit them badly,” the post on Twitter said. “For example, I have a problem with my spine. It’s clear what one should do to make the problem worse: keep me as still as possible,” he said.
“If you lock a person in a punishment cell, where he can either stand or sit on an iron stool for 16 hours a day, after a month in such conditions even a healthy person will undoubtedly have back pain. I spent the last 3 months like this. Of course, my back hurts a lot,” he pointed out.
Navalny claimed that he had been insisting, for a month, to see a doctor. When one finally came he examined him for only five minutes and refused to tell him the diagnosis or what he was prescribing. As the 47-year-old claimed, he was injected with unknown drugs.
In the dark
Arctic Wolf is surrounded by mountains and tundra, with freezing dark winters giving way to short, mosquito-infested summers.
Navalny had joked in December about the conditions. “I don’t say ‘Ho-ho-ho,’ but I say ‘Oh-oh-oh’ when I look out the window. Where I see is night, then night, then night again.”
Former inmates of the IK-3 penal colony have also described cases of torture there. In a 2018 interview with the Novie Izvestiya news agency, an ex-convict said that upon his arrival at the colony he was beaten “from all sides with a globe,” adding that prison guards used “collective punishment” on inmates. Russian authorities have denied these allegations.
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