‘It’s a torture regime’: the last days of Alexei Navalny

Each morning at 5am, Alexei Navalny was roused with the words “Wake up!” as the Russian national anthem played on the prison loudspeakers. It was always dark in the polar night above the Arctic Circle, and the temperature outside could fall below -30C (-22F). The convict would have a sheepskin coat and an ushanka hat to keep warm in a prison colony better known by its nickname: the Polar Wolf.

Then, a second song began: I am Russian – a nationalistic anthem by the pro-Kremlin pop star Shaman that has become a favourite at patriotic rallies.

“So imagine the scene,” wrote Navalny in one of his last accounts from a punishment cell in the Polar Wolf. “A prisoner Alexey Navalny, who is sentenced to 19 years in prison, and whom Kremlin propaganda has tirelessly smeared for years because he participated in Russian protests, is exercising to the song I am Russian, which he is being given as an educational activity for correctional purposes.”

Inside a punishment cell, Navalny said, he could not see the sky. In the past, he had had to choose between eating his breakfast and writing letters to friends and acquaintances, as he had just 30 minutes for both. Just days before his death, his mother came for a rare visit.

“I don’t want to hear any condolences,” she later wrote. “We saw our son in the colony on the 12th, we had a visit. He was alive, healthy and cheerful.”

From late December until his death on 16 February, Navalny spent his last days in Russia’s IK-3 prison, a harsh penal colony above the Arctic Circle that was built in 1961 on the site of the 501st gulag, one of the Stalin-era labour camps that housed millions of prisoners during the Soviet era.

In descriptions by former prisoners, confidantes of Navalny, prison activists and journalists, as well as Navalny’s own letters from the far north, the Guardian has put together an account of where and how the fiercest political opponent of Vladimir Putin spent his last days.

Navalny understood he might never leave prison alive. Yet there is little doubt his dispatch to IK-3 in the remote Yamalo-Nenets region hastened his demise, either due to the extreme conditions or a more direct act of foul play.

“This is one of the most remote and inaccessible areas of Russia, with extreme climatic conditions,” says Olga Romanova, the founder and head of the Russian prisoner advocacy organisation Russia Behind Bars. “Of course, there is no public oversight there – but that’s like everywhere else.”

Platon Lebedev, a former business partner of the ex-Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky, spent two years in the colony from 2005. In an interview then, Lebedev complained about the relentless mosquitoes that thrive in the region in the spring, part of what experts say is the “use of climate as a tool of repression”.

“I fight with traditional methods – I hit myself on the forehead,” Lebedev told the Novaya Gazeta newspaper then. “They say midges will be worse than mosquitoes.”

Each morning, Navalny would brave the cold for a 30-minute walk, his only chance to be outside. A photo showed a small, rectangular concrete courtyard, with wire mesh as a roof, where he could pace 11 steps from wall to wall, and was just three steps wide.

“Few things are as refreshing as a walk in Yamal at 6.30 in the morning,” he wrote. “And what a wonderful fresh breeze that blows into the courtyard despite the concrete fence, it’s just – wow!”

Two days before his death, Navalny was sentenced to another term in a punishment cell. It would be his 27th time in a shtrafnoy izolyator, or shizo for short. Of the 1,126 days he was in confinement, 295 were spent in these cells.

“It’s a 2-by-2.5-metre cell in which there’s a sink and a parasha [a hole in the ground that serves as a toilet],” says Dmitry Muratov, the Nobel peace prize-winning editor of Novaya Gazeta. The bed is folded up into the wall at 6am, meaning the convict spends all day standing up, and “the blood goes down into his feet”.

“You spend two weeks in the punishment cell, you’re not allowed longer, and then two or three days later he would be sent back,” says Muratov. “They did this in the Soviet Union … It was called ‘sending someone into orbit’, like a cosmonaut. You can’t give someone two terms [in shizo], but you can take him out and send him right back. People go completely insane. It’s a torture regime.”

Navalny was put in quarantine upon arrival at the Polar Wolf in late December, but as soon as he was released, the administration found a pretext to send him to a punishment cell.

“Shizo is meant to break you,” says Vladimir Pereverzin, who was a senior manager at Khodorkovsky’s Yukos before he spent seven years in prison. “You feel completely exposed and unprotected in there. In the barracks, surrounded by dozens of prisoners, you feel a sense of safety, but in shizo you are completely alone and at the mercy of your guards.”

During his time in prison, Navalny was sustained by the regular letters with friends and acquaintances, in which he discussed his daily life, his voracious reading habits and sought to keep up with the surrounding world even as the Kremlin tried to isolate him.

In some letters, he considered his role as a political prisoner and a successor to the tradition of Soviet-era dissidents. “I want to thank you for this book as it has helped me a lot and continues to help,” he wrote to Natan Sharansky, a Soviet dissident and author of Fear No Evil who later became an Israeli politician. “Yes, I am in shizo now, but when reading about your 400 days spent in the ‘punishment cell’ on decreased food rations, one understands that there are people who pay much higher prices for their convictions … I understand that I am not the first, but I really want to become the last, or at least one of the last, of those who are forced to endure this.”

In others, he sought to stay connected with his old reality. Tatyana Felgengauer, a journalist, describes the letters they wrote until communication was cut off in early 2023. “Aside from gossip and infighting, we wrote about media,” she says. “He and I discussed [the YouTube channel] Popular Politics, Echo of Moscow, where the journalists are, he was very interested in all of this. I told him about the media landscape and some of the big fights on Twitter, and some other stories … he was following it all.”

Books were at the centre of Navalny’s life in prison. In letters to Ilya Krasilshchik, a friend and media manager, described by the New York Times, Navalny said he was reading 10 books simultaneously and liked to switch between them. They included political biographies and other books on prison life, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the Alexander Solzhenitsyn novel about a gulag prisoner.

Upon arriving at Polar Wolf in December, Navalny had fewer reading options.

Among the choices were Chekhov’s short stories and plays. One of them, In the Ravine, left him “staring at the wall for five minutes”, he told the journalist Sergey Parkhomenko in a letter received five days before Navalny’s death.

Navalny wrote: “Who would have told me that Chekhov is the most depressing Russian writer? We must read the classics. We don’t know them.”

Navalny also corresponded with supporters around the country. In one of his last letters from February, he wrote to a woman named Irina: “I haven’t seen the northern lights yet and it’s unlikely that I will … But there is hope. Happy new year!’

Navalny’s last days are shrouded in mystery. Two months before his death, he was transferred on a circuitous route that led from IK-6, a correctional facility in the Vladimir region not far from Moscow, through the capital, and then through the cities of Ekaterinburg, Kirov, Vorkuta and finally to Kharp, where IK-3 is located. It took two weeks.

“The transfer to the colony is a form of torture in itself,” Pereverzin recalls of his experience. “You get shoved into a cramped train wagon where you spend days in the cold like cattle. Alexei will likely have been transferred on his own but the conditions would not be any better.”

By the time Navalny arrived at the Polar Wolf, the letters to most of his supporters had dried up. “It is almost impossible to get to this colony, it is almost impossible even to send letters there,” wrote Leonid Volkov, a close ally of Navalny. “This is the maximum possible level of isolation from the world – that’s why he was sent there.”

Yet the associates who saw him in his last days said he looked healthy. Leonid Solovyov, one of Navalny’s lawyers, said a colleague had visited the politician two days before his death and that “everything was normal”. On that day, he was sent back to shizo.

On 15 February, the day before his death, Navalny appeared in a courtroom via video link, and joked with a judge: “Your honour, I will send you my personal account number so that you can use your huge federal judge’s salary to top up my personal account because I am running out of money.”

That evening, says Romanova, her sources “both inside and outside the colony” described unusual things happening.

She says: “The prisoners were suddenly driven into barracks ahead of time, very serious searches took place, even the heaters were taken away.

“Everyone says that cars entered and left the colony, many cars, passenger cars (identified by sound). An external source is talking about an ambulance. This is all the day before,” she says, suggesting the prison authorities were not being upfront over Navalny’s time of death.

Romanova says things went back to normal on 16 February, the day officials say Navalny died. The prison said he “felt ill after a walk and almost immediately lost consciousness”. Officials later claimed his death was from natural causes.

But Yulia Navalnaya vowed to expose those who killed him. “Putin had a specific reason for killing Alexei three days ago, which we will reveal soon. We’ll identify those responsible for this crime, naming them and showing their faces.”