Inside the hellhole Russian prison where Putin rival Alexei Navalny lived his final days
Alexei Navalny was sent to hell two months before his reported death Friday.
The long-suffering 47-year-old Russian dissident and married dad of two disappeared from prison about 150 miles east of Moscow early that month — only to resurface three weeks later at a dark, freezing, Gulag-style camp above the Arctic Circle, one of several notorious inmate camps known for their water torture and electric-shock abuse.
Navalny’s new digs, dubbed the “Polar Wolf,’’ were where he could only pace back and forth about 11 feet in a tiny cell and was woken up by a different sort of torture — the pro-Putin pop star Shaman’s song “I am Russian’’ — at 5 a.m. every day.
“The singer Shaman appeared on stage when I was already imprisoned, so I could neither see nor listen to his music,’’ Navalny wrote on X on Jan. 22, a little more than three weeks before his death was announced by Russia.
“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 I could do it?” said the inmate, who was serving 19 years on “extremism” charges.
“And then I was taken to Yamal,’’ the lawyer said, referring to the icy isolated region of Russia where he ended up in the IK-3 penal colony, built on the site of a former Soviet era gulag, about 1,200 miles from Moscow.
When Navalny first got to the infamous prison, he was allowed to occasionally post on X — and seemed to keep his sense of humor.
“I don’t say ‘Ho-ho-ho,’ but I do say ‘Oh-oh-oh’ when I look out of the window,’’ wrote the famous prisoner, who once did a fellowship through Yale University.
“The 20 days of my transportation were pretty exhausting, but I’m still in a good mood, as befits a Santa Claus,” he said.
But life at the infamous Russian hellhole — where outside temps could plummet to 40 degrees below zero in winter and mosquitos and midges drive inmates insane in the summer — would have been a living nightmare, experts and former convicts say.
Navalny said he was once placed in solitary confinement for 15 days — because he supposedly incorrectly introduced himself 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 told Radio Free Europe after spending five years there at IK-8, a k a the “Polar Bear,” in the same area.
“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.”
Another man who stayed at IK-3 told a human rights activist, “In the winter, prisoners would be hastily assembled in the courtyard in light clothing.
“They were held in formation and not allowed to clap or rub their hands together. They had to stand for 30 or 40 minutes without moving when it was minus [49 degrees Fahrenheit] or colder,’’ the activist said, according to the site. “If one person moved, 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.”
