Today there is news about Alexei Navalny, and about the prison camp in which he is being held. That he is alive and keeping his spirits up, is the good news. The rest is . . . well, judge for yourselves.

Below is a picture of Prison Camp IK-3, known as “Polar Wolf,” located 40 miles above the Arctic Circle in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District — a frozen wasteland that once was part of Stalin’s infamous GULAG Archipelago, and now serves the same purpose for Vladimir Putin. The sign on the wall at left reads: “Sector No. 1. Strict Conditions for Serving of Sentence.” The well-dressed people in the picture are clearly officials, four of them in uniform, and not inmates. I don’t know whether the Russian Orthodox Church in the background is actually open to the prisoners . . . but it does dress the place up rather nicely for photo ops.

Thanks to Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), first-hand information on the conditions existing in the camp has been obtained from former inmates who survived sentences much shorter than Navalny’s, and gave testimony following their release. One survivor, released in 2018, told prisoners’ rights activist Olga Romanova:

“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 -45 degrees Celsius or colder. If one person moved, the whole group was doused with water.”

Ms. Romanova added that in the spring, a new form of torture consisted of mosquitoes and biting flies. If an inmate moved, the whole group was again doused with water from a water cannon.

Ukrainian filmmaker Oleh Sentsov spent five years in the IK-8 prison (“Polar Bear”), in the same Arctic region. He revealed:

“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. 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.” [RFE/RL, Dec. 27, 2023.]

IK-3, Navalny’s new “home,” holds about 1,050 of Russia’s most incorrigible prisoners — serial killers, rapists, pedophiles, repeat offenders, and others convicted of the most serious crimes and serving sentences of 20 years or more . . . plus the occasional political prisoner, like Platon Lebedev, a businessman convicted of tax evasion — in the United States, a “white-collar” crime.

According to RFE/RL, there are no flights to the area during most of the year, and only limited train service. The only communication is by the normal Russian postal service, and the sender never knows whether a letter was received at the other end.

Apparently, there is a prison cell phone service, which had been working but — by the strangest of coincidences — was out of service around the time of Navalny’s arrival.

Human rights activist Sergei Davidis wrote on December 25th in a post on X, concerning the prison camps in that region: “There is no point in their existence except to make convicts suffer and to waste budgetary funds.” [RFE/RL, Dec. 27, 2023.]

And that is where they are holding this man, who has done nothing more than speak the truth.

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Whatever prisons have been chosen for Evan Gershkovich (Lefortovo Prison, Moscow); Paul Whelan (IK-17 prison camp in Mordovia, 350 miles southeast of Moscow); Vladimir Kara-Murza (IK-6 in Omsk, Siberia); or Alsu Kurmasheva (a remand prison in Kazan, about 520 miles east of Moscow), it hardly matters — every prison in Russia is like a vision from Dante’s Seventh Circle of Hell. They must not be abandoned there.

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Please . . . bring them home!

Brendochka
12/28/23