Alexei Navalny spent his final days in a hellish penal colony inside the arctic circle where prisoners are tortured with beatings and electric shocks.
The opposition leader died while serving a 19-year sentence at the FKU IK-3 facility, known as Polar Wolf, which houses more than 1,000 of the Russia’s worst criminals – along with a handful of political prisoners who dared to challenge the Putin regime.
Polar Wolf is a Soviet-era prison and considered to be one of the toughest in Russia.
Aside from the brutal treatment of inmates inside, the penal colony is located in the Arctic, 1,200 miles north east of Moscow, where temperatures plunge below -25F.
Navalny was transferred there in December from Penal Colony 6, which is 150 miles outside Moscow. He said that it took 20 days to reach FKU IK-3.
A view of the entrance of the prison colony in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenetsk region about 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow, Tuesday, January 23, 2024
Alexei Navalny (pictured) died at the brutal FKU IK-3 penal colony, a Soviet-era prison camp
A woman walks towards the entrance of the IK-3 penal colony, where Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny died while serving his jail term. The prison is in the settlement of Kharp in the Yamal-Nenets Region
The penal colony is located inside the arctic circle and temperatures in the region can plunge to -25F. Prisoners are forced to stand outside for extended periods of time as a torture method
Former inmates have described how FKU IK-3 is designed to make prisoners feel ‘completely hopeless’ and crush ‘any rebellious spirit’. The facility in Kharp, part of Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service, can hold up to 1,085 people.
Lawyers for Navalny recently claimed that guards at the penal colony had tried to ‘destroy Navalny’s health by all forces and means’.
Vadim Kobzev, a lawyer for Navalny, said he had lost 7kg in weight and was ‘deliberately infected’ with an unknown acute viral respiratory disease while in a hell-hole punishment cell.
Navalny ‘was not given proper medicines’ and was instead ‘treated with huge doses of antibiotics which should not have been used’, Kobzev said.
‘These actions cannot be regarded otherwise than as an open strategy to destroy Navalny’s health by all forces and means,’ the lawyer said.
Other forms of punishment and torture are said to include lining up prisoners in the freezing outdoors then blasting them with a powerful water cannon.
Prisoners’ rights activist Olga Romanova recounted one inmate’s claim that during the height of winter, they were forced to line up outside in ‘light clothing’ for up to 40 minutes.
They are ordered not to move and if a single person so much as rubs their hands together for warmth, ‘the whole group was doused with water’.
‘In the spring, there was a new torture. Mosquitoes and biting flies. If you moved a hand, the water came. They would just douse the whole group with a water cannon,’ Romanova said, according to Radio Free Europe.
About 60 km (40 miles) north of the Arctic Circle, Polar Wolf was founded in the 1960s as part of what was once the Gulag system of forced Soviet labor camps, according to the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper.
A group of officers visit the prison colony in the town of Kharp where the temperature is due to drop to minus 28C over the next week
A group of officers walk inside a prison colony in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenetsk region about 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow
Harsh rules dating back to Soviet times dictate that prisoners’ families and lawyers are only informed about their whereabouts after they have reached their destination
A group of prisoners sit during classes inside the prison colony where associates of Alexei Navalny say he has been located
Little has been reported about the general living arrangements for prisoners who are not held in solitary confinement. Conditions in other facilities suggest they sleep in cramped rooms filled with cot beds.
It’s also unlikely that prisoners are given clothing which is substantial enough to deal with the freezing temperatures.
In January, Navalny cracked jokes on the Telegram messaging app about the polar conditions as he quipped sarcastically: ‘Nothing quite invigorates you like a walk in Yamal at 6:30 in the morning.’
‘Even at this temperature, you can walk for more than half an hour only if you manage to grow a new nose, new ears and new fingers,’ he wrote of the -25F conditions.
Navalny mentioned a scene in the 2015 film, The Revenant, in which Leonardo DiCaprio shelters in the carcass of a horse.
‘I don’t think that would have worked here. A dead horse would freeze in 15 minutes,’ Navalny said. ‘We need an elephant here, a hot elephant, a fried one.’
The dark jokes were typical of Navalny’s refusal to break in the face of unimaginable adversity. He once described one of the colonies he was held in as like ‘a friendly concentration camp’.
The punishment cells where inmates are held in solitary confinement are said to be tiny – with only a hole in the ground for a toilet.
And the concrete-walled walking yards used by prisoners are about 11 steps long, three steps wide and topped with metal bars.
Former inmates at similar facilities have also recounted how electric shocks and beatings are frequently doled out by guards.
Ukrainian filmmaker Oleh Sentsov, who was jailed at the IK-8 ‘Polar Bear’ prison for five years, said: ‘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.
Navalny, pictured with his wife Yulia in happier times, crusaded against official corruption and staged massive anti-Kremlin protests – drawing the ire of the Kremlin
‘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 fetal 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.’
At Penal Colony No 6, where Navalny was previously held, rape and violence involving inmates are commonplace, while the guards were remorseless in their sadism.
While Navalny was held there, authorities punished him for tiny infractions.
He was once punished for washing his hands six minutes earlier than scheduled and, on another occasion, for undoing the top button of his shirt.
Since first being jailed in January 2021, Navalny had been in and out of solitary confinement, which is often used to punish rulebreakers in the Russian prison system, at both Penal Colony No 6 and the Polar Wolf facility.
Following his most recent court appearance on Thursday – hours before his death – a post by Navalny’s X account said he was again ordered into solitary confinement.
Jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is dead, the prison service of the Yamalo-Nenets region where he had been serving his sentence said on Friday
Russian news outlets announced Navalny’s death – citing the Siberian prison service where he was serving his sentence – sparking shock and anger around the globe, with world leaders quickly pointing the finger at Russian president Vladimir Putin (pictured in Russia today)
The online news outlet SOTA reported that the court session on Thursday was convened after an ‘argument’ with a prison officer who tried to confiscate Navalny’s pen.
Navalny wrote later on Thursday that he had been given 15 days in solitary confinement.
‘The Yamal prison decided to break Vladimir’s record of fawning and pleasing the Moscow authorities. They just gave me 15 days in solitary confinement,’ he wrote on X.
‘This is the fourth solitary confinement spell in less than 2 months that I have been with them,’ he added.
On one of the last occasions he was seen earlier in 2023, Navalny had just emerged from his 11th separate period of incarceration in a 10ft by 7ft ‘concrete kennel’, with only a hole in the ground for a toilet.
He looked even more gaunt and unwell than usual and was suffering from a severe lung infection contracted after prison officers forced him to share a cell with a tramp suffering from a contagious respiratory condition — and then refused to treat him when he got sick.