Alexei Navalny’s supporters said he was sent to hell before his death on Friday. They were referring to the dark, freezing, Gulag-style camp above the Arctic Circle which is among the several notorious inmate camps known for their torture using water and electric shocks.
Navalny was transferred to the IK-3 penal colony in remote Kharp, about 1,932 kms northeast of Moscow last year. The Russian dissident and the married dad of two was earlier kept in a prison which was 240 kilometres away from Moscow.
In the new prison, which is also known as the “Polar Wolf”, where Navalny was kept, he was given a tiny cell which was about 11 feet long. In the morning, he and his fellow inmates were woken up by a different sort of torture — the pro-Putin pop star Shaman’s song “I am Russian’’.
The song used to blare out of the loudspeakers at 5am every morning. “The singer Shaman appeared on stage when I was already imprisoned, so I could neither see nor listen to his music. Everyone knows [the song], parodies of it are recorded, and so on. Of course, I was certainly curious to listen, but where in the prison could I do it?” Navalny quipped in post on X last month.
It was in December that he first posted his message from prison colony in the Siberian region of Yamal-Nenets. “I am your new grandfather Frost,” Navalny said, in his usual tongue-in-cheek manner. “I have a tulup, an ushanka and I will have valenki soon,” he said, referring to traditional furry Russian winter coats, hats and boots.
“I now live above the Arctic Circle … But I don’t say ‘ho-ho-ho, I say ‘oh-oh-oh’ when I look out the window, where first there is night, then evening, then night again. Don’t worry about me, everything is well. I am so happy that I finally got here,” he said.
Thinking About Leonardo DiCaprio
Navalny in a post last month said he was thinking about the actor Leonardo DiCaprio and his film The Revenant.
“Today I was walking, freezing and thinking about Leonardo DiCaprio and his trick with a dead horse in The Revenant. I don’t think it would work here. A dead horse would freeze to death within 15 minutes,” he said, referring to a scene in which his character crawls into an animal carcass to keep warm.
Living Nightmare
Experts and former convicts speaking to the New York Post said life at the camp which was once a Soviet-era gulag (forced labour camps in the former Soviet Union) is a living nightmare. Outside temperature plumment to -40°C in winter and mosquitos and midges drive inmates insane in the summer.
Navalny was also placed in solitary confinement for 15 days as well because he introduced himself incorrectly to a guard. “As soon as you cross the threshold, they let you know that you are in purgatory, where you have no rights and there is no one to complain to,” Ukrainian filmmaker Oleh Sentsov, who spent five years in the same prison, was quoted as saying by Radio Free Europe.
“Beatings, humiliation, electric shocks, being kept in a cold cell naked or in wet clothes. But that is still not the worst. … You can be sealed in the foetal position in an iron box where you can hardly breathe and have to urinate on yourself. … They routinely threaten to rape you when they are bullying you,” he further added.
At IK-3, prisoners endured extreme winter conditions, forced to stand still in light clothing for up to 40 minutes in freezing temperatures. Any movement resulted in punishment by water dousing, another convict told news agencies.
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