From newyorker.com
The Russian opposition leader’s account of his last years and his admonition to his country and the world
On August 20, 2020, during a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow, the Russian opposition leader and anticorruption campaigner Alexei Navalny thought he was dying––he was disoriented, and felt his body shutting down. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, and Navalny was hospitalized. Two days later, thanks to the persistence of his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, and international pressure, the Russian authorities allowed a German plane to take him to Berlin for treatment.
Navalny emerged from a coma on September 7th. A week later, he announced his intention to return soon to Russia, despite the obvious danger. Doctors concluded that Navalny had been poisoned with a deadly nerve agent called Novichok. While recovering in the German countryside, he began writing his memoir, “Patriot,” and investigating the attempt on his life. He had no doubt that it had been the decision of Vladimir Putin and the work of the F.S.B., the Russian security services, but he was determined to uncover the details. During an unforgettable telephone call, which was filmed for a documentary about his life, Navalny duped an F.S.B. agent into describing how agents had broken into his hotel room in Tomsk and dosed his clothing with the poison.
On January 17, 2021, Alexei and Yulia flew back to Moscow. Navalny was arrested at the airport. Despite international protests on his behalf, Navalny immediately entered a netherworld of trumped-up criminal charges (embezzlement, fraud, “extremism,” etc.), prison cells, and solitary confinement. By the end of 2023, he landed in the “special regime” colony known as Polar Wolf, north of the Arctic Circle. In captivity, he managed to keep a diary and even had his team post some entries on social media. In one Facebook post, he explained why he refused to live out his life in the safety of exile: “I have my country and my convictions. I don’t want to give up my country or betray it. If your convictions mean something, you must be prepared to stand up for them and make sacrifices if necessary.”
“We must do what they fear—tell the truth, spread the truth,” Navalny wrote. “This is the most powerful weapon.”Photograph by Martin Schoeller / AUGUST
2022 January 17th
Exactly one year ago today I came home, to Russia.
I didn’t manage to take a single step on the soil of my country as a free man: I was arrested even before border control.
The hero of one of my favourite books, “Resurrection,” by Leo Tolstoy, says, “Yes, the only suitable place for an honest man in Russia at the present time is prison.”
It sounds fine, but it was wrong then, and it’s even more wrong now.
There are a lot of honest people in Russia—tens of millions. There are far more than is commonly believed.
The authorities, however, who were repugnant then and are even more so now, are afraid not of honest people but of those who are not afraid of them. Or let me be more precise: those who may be afraid but overcome their fear.
There are a lot of them, too. We meet them all the time, in all sorts of places, from rallies to the media, people who remain independent. Indeed, even here, on Instagram. I recently read that the Ministry of the Interior was firing staff who had “liked” my posts. So in Russia, in 2022, even a “like” can take courage.
In every period, the essence of politics has been that a tin-pot tsar who wants to arrogate to himself the right to personal, unaccountable power needs to intimidate the honest people who are not afraid of him. And they, in turn, need to convince everyone around them that they should not be afraid, that there are, by an order of magnitude, more honest people than the mean little tsar’s security guards. Why live your whole life in fear, even being robbed in the process, if everything can be arranged differently and more justly?
The pendulum swings endlessly. Or the tug-of-war. Today you are brave. Tomorrow they seem to have scared you a bit. And the day after tomorrow they have scared you so much that you despair and become brave again.
I have no idea when my journey into space will end, if ever, but on Friday I was informed that another criminal case is being brought against me and going to court. And there is yet another coming up, in which I am supposedly an extremist and a terrorist. So I’m one of those cosmonauts who don’t count the days until the end of their term. What is there to count? People have been kept in prison for as long as twenty-seven years.
But I find myself in this company of cosmonauts precisely because I tried my utmost to tug my end of the rope. I pulled over to this side those among the honest people who would not be or could no longer bear to be afraid.
That is what I did. I don’t for a second regret it. And I will continue to do it.
Having spent my first year in prison, I want to tell everyone exactly the same thing I shouted to those who gathered outside the court when the guards were taking me off to the police truck: Don’t be afraid of anything. This is our country and it’s the only one we have.
The only thing we should fear is that we will surrender our homeland to be plundered by a gang of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. That we will surrender without a fight, voluntarily, our own future and the future of our children.
Huge thanks to all of you for your support. I can feel it.
I’d just like to add: This year has gone by incredibly quickly. It seems only yesterday I was boarding the plane to Moscow, and now I’ve already completed a year in prison. It’s true what they say in science books: time on earth and in space passes at different speeds.
I love you all. Hugs to everyone.
March 22nd
Nine years of strict regime. Today, on March 22nd, a new sentence was announced. Before that, I ran a sweepstakes with my lawyers. The losers would have to buy whoever won a drink. Olga reckoned eleven to fifteen years. Vadim surprised everyone with his prediction of precisely twelve years and six months. I guessed seven to eight years and was the winner.
I decided to record my feelings right away, because all year I had been training for situations like today, developing what I call my “prison Zen.”
Whatever way you look at it, nine years, especially in “strict” conditions, is an extremely long sentence. In Russia, the average punishment for murder is seven years.
A prisoner sentenced to an extra term of nine years is going to be upset, to say the least. When I got back to the prison, everyone—who of course already knew about the sentence—furtively gave me a particular kind of look. How was I taking it? What was the expression on my face? It is, after all, intriguing to see someone’s reaction when they have just been told they will be serving the longest sentence of anyone in the entire prison complex. And that they are going to be sent somewhere especially grim and usually reserved for murderers. Nobody is going to come over and ask how I feel, but everyone is curious to see how this plays out. It’s an occasion when a person might hang themselves or slash their wrists.
But I am completely fine. Even “my” jailer said in the course of a really annoying full strip search, “You don’t look to me to be all that upset.” I am really O.K. I am writing this not because I am willing myself to keep up a pretence of being carefree and blasé but because my prison Zen has kicked in.
I knew from the outset that I would be imprisoned for life—either for the rest of my life or until the end of the life of this regime.
Regimes like this one are resilient, and the most foolish thing I could do is pay attention to people who say, “Lyosha, sure, the regime is going to last at least another year, but the year after that, two at most, it will fall apart and you will be a free man.” And everything along those lines. People write that to me frequently.
The U.S.S.R. lasted seventy years. The repressive regimes in North Korea and Cuba survive to this day. China, with a whole bunch of political prisoners, has lasted so long that those prisoners grow old and die in prison. The Chinese regime does not relent. It releases no one, despite all the international pressure. The truth of the matter is that we underestimate just how resilient autocracies are in the modern world. With very, very rare exceptions, they are protected from external invasion by the U.N., by international law, by the rights of sovereignty. Russia, which right now is waging a classic war of aggression against Ukraine (which has increased tenfold the predictions of the regime’s imminent collapse), is additionally protected by its membership in the U.N. Security Council and its nuclear weapons.
Economic collapse and impoverishment await us most likely. But it is far from obvious that the regime will come crashing down in such a way that its falling debris breaks open the doors of its prisons.
My approach to the situation is certainly not one of contemplative passivity. I am trying to do everything I can from here to put an end to authoritarianism (or, more modestly, to contribute to ending it). Every single day, I ponder how to act more effectively, what constructive advice to give my colleagues who are still at liberty, where the regime’s greatest vulnerabilities lie. As I said, giving in to wishful thinking (about when the regime will collapse and I will be released) would be the worst thing I could do. What if I’m not free in a year? Or three years? Would I lapse into depression? Blame everyone else for not trying hard enough to get me released? Curse world leaders and public opinion for having forgotten me?
Relying on being released anytime soon, waiting for it to happen, is only a way of tormenting myself.
I decided from the beginning that if I was going to be released as a result of pressure or a political scenario it would happen within six months of my arrest, “while the iron was hot.” And, if it didn’t, I was up the creek for the foreseeable future. I needed to adjust my thinking so that when they did extend my sentence I would feel even more sure I was doing the right thing when I boarded that plane back to Moscow.
Here are the techniques I worked out. Perhaps others may find them helpful in the future (but let’s hope they are not needed).
The first is frequently to be found in self-help books: Imagine the worst thing that can happen, and accept it. This works, even if it’s a masochistic exercise. I can imagine that it’s not suitable for people suffering from clinical depression. They might do it so successfully that they end up hanging themselves.
It’s a fairly easy exercise, because it involves a skill everyone developed in childhood. You may remember crying your eyes out in your bed and exultantly imagining you are going to die right then and there just to spite everyone. Imagine the look on the faces of your parents! How they will cry when it finally dawns on them who they have lost! Choked with tears, they’ll beg you, as you lie quiet and still in your little coffin, to get up and come and watch TV, not just until ten o’clock but until eleven, if only you would be alive. But it is too late, you are dead, which means you are unrelenting and deaf to their pleas.
Well, mine is much the same idea.
Get into your prison bunk and wait to hear “Lights out.” The lights are switched off. You invite yourself to imagine, as realistically as possible, the worst thing that could happen. And then, as I said, accept it (skipping the stages of denial, anger, and bargaining).
I will spend the rest of my life in prison and die here. There will not be anybody to say goodbye to. Or, while I am still in prison, people I know outside will die and I won’t be able to say goodbye to them. I will miss graduations from school and college. Tasselled mortarboards will be tossed in the air in my absence. All anniversaries will be celebrated without me. I’ll never see my grandchildren. I won’t be the subject of any family stories. I’ll be missing from all the photos.
You need to think about this seriously, and your cruel imagination will whisk you through your fears so swiftly that you will arrive at your “eyes filled with tears” destination in next to no time. The important thing is not to torment yourself with anger, hatred, fantasies of revenge, but to move instantly to acceptance. That can be hard.
I remember having to stop one of my first sessions at the idea that I will die here, forgotten by everybody, and be buried in an unmarked grave. My family will be informed that “in accordance with the law the burial site cannot be disclosed.” I had difficulty resisting an urge to start furiously smashing everything around me, overturning bunks and bedside tables and yelling, You bastards! You have no right to bury me in an unmarked grave. It’s against the law! It isn’t fair! I actually wanted to shout that out.
Instead of yelling, you need to think about the situation calmly. So what if that comes to pass? Worse things happen.
I’m forty-five. I have a family and children. I’ve had a life to live, worked on some interesting things, done some things that were useful. But there’s a war on right now. Suppose a nineteen-year-old is riding in an armoured vehicle, he gets a piece of shrapnel in his head, and that’s it. He has had no family, no children, no life. Right now, dead civilians are lying in the streets in Mariupol, their bodies gnawed at by dogs, and many of them will be lucky if they end up in even a mass grave—through no fault of their own. I made my choices, but these people were just living their lives. They had jobs. They were family breadwinners. Then, one fine evening, a vengeful runt on television, the President of a neighbouring country, announces that you are all “Nazis” and have to die because Ukraine was invented by Lenin. The next day, a shell comes flying in your window and you no longer have a wife, a husband, or children—and maybe you yourself are also no longer alive.
And how many guiltless prisoners there are here! While you are sitting with your bagful of letters, other prisoners have never had a letter or package from anyone. Some of them will get sick and die in the prison hospital. Alone.
The Soviet dissidents? Anatoly Marchenko died from a hunger strike in 1986, and a couple of years later the satanic Soviet Union fell to pieces. So even the worst possible scenario is not actually all that bad. I resigned myself and accept it.
Yulia has been such a help in this. I didn’t want her to be tormented by all that “perhaps they’ll let him out after a month” stuff. Most important, I wanted her to know I was not suffering here. On her first extended visit, we walked down a corridor and spoke at a spot as far removed as possible from the cameras wired for sound that are tucked in all over the place. I whispered in her ear, “Listen, I don’t want to sound dramatic, but I think there’s a high probability I’ll never get out of here. Even if everything starts falling apart, they will bump me off at the first sign the regime is collapsing. They will poison me.”
“I know,” she said with a nod, in a voice that was calm and firm. “I was thinking that myself.”
At that moment I wanted to seize her in my arms and hug her joyfully, as hard as I could. That was so great! No tears! It was one of those moments when you realize you found the right person. Or perhaps she found you.
“Let’s just decide for ourselves that this is most likely what’s going to happen. Let’s accept it as the base scenario and arrange our lives on that basis. If things turn out better, that will be marvellous, but we won’t count on it or have ill-founded hopes.”
“Yep. Let’s do it.”
As usual, her voice sounded as if it belonged to a character in a cartoon, but she was dead serious. She looked up at me and batted her eyes with those big eyelashes, at which point I swept her up in my arms, hugging her in delight. Where else could I ever have found someone who could discuss the most difficult matters with me without a lot of drama and hand-wringing? She entirely got it and, like me, would hope for the best, but expect and prepare for the worst.
Yulia laughed and broke free. I kissed her on the nose and felt much better.
There is, of course, a hint of trickery and self-deception in all this. You have accepted the worst-case scenario, but there is an inner voice you can’t stifle: Come off it, the worst is never going to happen. Even as you tell yourself your direst fate is unavoidable, you’re hoping against hope that someone will change your mind for you.
The process going on in your head is by no means straightforward, but if you find yourself in a bad situation, you should try this. It works, as long as you think everything through seriously.
The second technique is so old you may roll your eyes heavenward when you hear it. It is religion. It is doable only for believers but does not demand zealous, fervent prayer by the prison barracks window three times a day (a very common phenomenon in prisons).
I have always thought, and said openly, that being a believer makes it easier to live your life and, to an even greater extent, engage in opposition politics. Faith makes life simpler.
The initial position for this exercise is the same as for the previous one. You lie in your bunk looking up at the one above and ask yourself whether you are a Christian in your heart of hearts. It is not essential for you to believe some old guys in the desert once lived to be eight hundred years old, or that the sea was literally parted in front of someone. But are you a disciple of the religion whose founder sacrificed himself for others, paying the price for their sins? Do you believe in the immortality of the soul and the rest of that cool stuff? If you can honestly answer yes, what is there left for you to worry about? Why, under your breath, would you mumble a hundred times something you read from a hefty tome you keep in your bedside table? Don’t worry about the morrow, because the morrow is perfectly capable of taking care of itself.
My job is to seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of his family to deal with everything else. They won’t let me down and will sort out all my headaches. As they say in prison here: they will take my punches for me.
March 26th
The ghastliest days in prison are the birthdays of close family, especially children.
What sort of pathetic greeting is it to send a letter to your son on his fourteenth birthday? What kind of memory will that be of being close to his father?
“For my birthday my dad took me on a hike.”
“Well, on my birthday, my dad taught me how to drive a car.”
“For my birthday my dad sent me a letter from prison on a piece of notepaper. He promised that when he gets out he’ll teach me how to boil water in a plastic bag.”
Let’s face it, you don’t get to choose your parents. Some kids get stuck with jailbirds.
But it is on my children’s birthdays that I am particularly aware of why I’m in jail. We need to build the Beautiful Russia of the Future for them to live in.
Zakhar, happy birthday!
I really miss you and love you very much!
April 3rd
It’s a real Russian spring day. That is, the snowdrifts are up to my waist, and it’s been snowing all weekend. Snow is something prisoners hate, because what do they do when it snows and after it snows? That’s right, they clear the snow away. Arguing that it is, after all, April, and in at most ten days it will all just melt anyway, not only doesn’t work but draws heartfelt indignation from the prison administration. If anything is lying anywhere in violation of the regulations and the normal routine of doing things, it must be shovelled up, scraped off, and removed. That said, clearing snow actually is one of the most meaningful activities in prison life, because most of the others are an inane response to the need to generate work at all costs. The prisoners have a saying: “It doesn’t matter where what gets chucked, as long as the con feels completely fucked.”
This describes my feeling every weekend, because, although you can find at least an inkling of sense in shovelling snow in April, the work is genuinely exhausting. Because I am classified as a nontrusted prisoner, they don’t allow me to shovel the snow like everyone else and to break the ice on the “main line,” the camp’s principal street, along which the commandant walks. In my local area and with my own squad, though, I have to shovel.
We all have that classic labour-camp look that belongs in a movie about the Gulag. The heavy jackets, fur hats, and mittens, the enormous wooden shovels, each of which is so heavy you would think it was made of cast iron, especially after it gets saturated with water, which freezes. They are the self-same shovels used by the soldiers who cleared the streets of my military home town when I was a child. You might have thought that in the thirty years that have passed since then shovel technology would have progressed toward production of lighter shovels, but in Russia, as with so many other things, we didn’t hack it. We were brought a couple of lightweight shovels that immediately broke. The response was the usual “Oh, well, what the hell, let them use the wooden shovels. We’ve used them for shovelling snow all our lives. They are reliable.” As if to say, Our grandfathers invented these shovels and far be it from us to doubt their wisdom by trying to improve something that is already ideal.
So there I was, scowling, wearing a heavy winter jacket, and wielding a wooden shovel with snow frozen to it. The only thing that amused me, and at least partly enabled me to accept this reality, is that on these occasions I feel like the hero of my all-time favourite joke. It is a Soviet joke, but has a certain relevance today.
A boy goes out for a stroll in the courtyard of his apartment block. Boys playing soccer there invite him to join in. The boy is a bit of a stay-at-home, but he’s interested and runs over to play with them. He eventually manages to kick the ball, very hard, but unfortunately it crashes through the window of the basement room where the janitor lives. Unsurprisingly, the janitor emerges. He is unshaven, wearing a fur hat and quilted jacket, and clearly the worse for a hangover. Infuriated, the janitor stares at the boy before rushing at him.
The boy runs away as fast as he can and thinks, What do I need this for? After all, I’m a quiet, stay-at-home sort of boy. I like reading. Why play soccer with the other boys? Why am I running away right now from this scary janitor when I could be lying at home on the couch reading a book by my favourite American writer, Hemingway?
Meanwhile, Hemingway is reclining on a chaise longue in Cuba, with a glass of rum in his hand, and thinking, God, I’m so tired of this rum and Cuba. All this dancing, and shouting, and the sea. Damn it, I’m a clever guy. Why am I here instead of being in Paris discussing existentialism with my colleague Jean-Paul Sartre over a glass of Calvados?
Meanwhile, Jean-Paul Sartre, sipping Calvados, is looking at the scene in front of him and thinking, How I hate Paris. I can’t stand the sight of these boulevards. I’m sick and tired of all these rapturous students and their revolutions. Why do I have to be here, when I long to be in Moscow, engaging in fascinating dialogue with my friend Andrei Platonov, the great Russian writer?
Meanwhile, in Moscow, Platonov is running across a snow-covered courtyard and thinking, If I catch that little bastard, I’ll fucking kill him.
Although, of course, I am no Andrei Platonov, I have the quilted jacket and the fur hat, and I, too, am writing a book. Next, I’ll finish the chapter about how I met Yulia.
July 1st
I live like Putin and Medvedev.
At least I think so when I look at the fence around my barracks. Everyone has the usual fence, and inside there are rods to dry the laundry on. But I have a six-metre-high fence, the kind I have only seen in our investigations of Putin’s and Medvedev’s palaces.
Putin both lives and works in such a place—in Novo-Ogaryovo or Sochi. And I live in a similar place. Putin lets ministers sit in the waiting room for six hours, and my lawyers have to wait five or six hours to see me. I have a loudspeaker in my barracks that plays songs like “Glory to the F.S.B.,” and I think Putin has one, too.
That’s where the similarities end, though.
Putin, as you know, sleeps until 10 a.m., then swims in the pool and eats cottage cheese with honey.
But, for me, 10 a.m. is lunchtime, because work starts at 6:40 a.m. 6:00—Wake up. Ten minutes to make my bed, wash, shave, and so on.
6:10—Exercise.
6:20—Escorted to breakfast.
6:40—Searched and escorted to work.
At work, you sit for seven hours at the sewing machine on a stool below knee height.
10:20—Fifteen-minute lunch break.
After work, you continue to sit for a few hours on a wooden bench under a portrait of Putin. This is called “disciplinary activity.”
On Saturday, you work for five hours and sit on the bench under the portrait again.
Sunday, in theory, is a day off. But in the Putin administration, or wherever my unique routine was set up, they are experts at relaxation. On Sunday, we sit in a room on a wooden bench for ten hours.
I don’t know who can be “disciplined” by such activities, except a cripple with a bad back. But maybe that’s their goal. But you know me, I’m an optimist and look for the bright side even in my dark existence. I have as much fun as I can.
While sewing, I’ve memorized Hamlet’s soliloquy in English. However, the inmates on my shift say that when I close my eyes and mutter something in Shakespearean English, like “in thy orisons be all my sins remembered,” it looks as if I were summoning a demon.
But I have no such thoughts: summoning a demon would be a violation of the prison regulations.
2023
January 12th
In my two years behind bars, my only truly original story is the one about the psycho. Everything else has been told and described numerous times. If you open any book by a Soviet dissident, there will be endless stories of punishment cells, hunger strikes, violence, provocations, lack of medical care. Nothing new. But my story about the psycho is fresh; at least, I’ve never seen or heard anything like it.
So, let me give you an idea about the SHIZO, the place where I sit all the time. It is a narrow corridor with cells on either side. The metal doors offer little to no soundproofing, plus there are ventilation holes above the doors, so two people sitting in opposite cells can have a conversation without even raising their voices. This is the main reason there has never been anyone in the cell opposite mine, or in my entire eight-cell section. I am the only one there, and I have never seen any other punished convicts the whole time.
And then, about a month ago, they put a psycho in the cell across from mine. At first, I thought he was faking it. He was very active. If you tell a kid to act like a madman, that’s what he’ll come up with. Screaming, growling, hitting, barking, arguing with himself in three different voices. But, in the case of my psycho, seventy per cent of the words are obscene. There are a lot of videos online of people who think that they’ve been possessed by demons. This is very similar—the growling wail (my favourite of his three personas) comes on periodically and doesn’t cease for hours. That’s why I stopped thinking he was a faker; no normal person can yell for fourteen hours every day and three hours at night for a month. And, when I say “yell,” I mean the kind of yelling that makes your neck veins swell up.
For the past month, I’ve been going nuts and starting every check-up by demanding this lunatic be transferred elsewhere. It’s impossible to sleep at night or read during the day. They don’t transfer him, and they go out of their way to emphasize that he is a convict just like me.
And then I find out a wonderful detail: this nutcase was incarcerated (he got twenty-four years for killing someone) in another place, and a month ago they moved him here, and now they keep him in a punishment cell so that he can, so to speak, keep me entertained.
I have to admit that this plan is working: I never get bored, nor do I ever get a good night’s sleep. Being ill here is something else: during the day you suffer in a cell with a fever and long for it to be night, when they lower your bunk bed and give you a mattress, but at night you listen to the cheerful barking of your neighbour. As you know, sleep deprivation is one of the most effective tortures, but formally I can’t complain: he’s an inmate like me, he was also put in a punishment cell, and it’s up to the administration to decide who gets put into which cell.
But as usual in such situations I am amazed at something else.
This was all planned. Someone thought of this and implemented it at the regional or federal level. You can’t transfer a convict for no reason at all; there’s a rule about serving your whole term in one camp. So there was an order from above: Put pressure on him. And the generals and colonels at lower levels held a meeting: So, how shall we put pressure on him? And someone wanting to distinguish himself said, We have a madman in such-and-such prison; he screams day and night. Let’s take him to Navalny.
What a great idea, fellow-officers. Comrade Colonel, proceed and report on it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that they took a raving madman from a prison hospital and declared him sane, just to keep him in a cell across from mine.
The moral of this story is simple: The Russian prison system, the Federal Penitentiary Service, is run by a collection of perverts. Everything in their system has a sick twist: the infamous mop rapes, sticking things up people’s anuses, and so on. It wouldn’t occur to a bad-but-sane person to do such a thing. Everything you read about the horrors and fascist crimes of our prison system is true. There’s just one correction needed: the reality is even worse.
January 17th
It has been exactly two years since I returned to Russia. I have spent these two years in prison. When you write a post like this, you have to ask yourself: How many more such anniversary posts will you have to write?
Life and the events around us prompt the answer: However many it may take. Our miserable, exhausted motherland needs to be saved. It has been pillaged, wounded, dragged into an aggressive war, and turned into a prison run by the most unscrupulous and deceitful scoundrels. Any opposition to this gang—even if only symbolic in my current limited capacity—is important.
I said it two years ago, and I will say it again: Russia is my country. I was born and raised here, my parents are here, and I made a family here; I found someone I loved and had kids with her. I am a full-fledged citizen, and I have the right to unite with like-minded people and be politically active. There are plenty of us, certainly more than corrupt judges, lying propagandists, and Kremlin crooks.
I’m not going to surrender my country to them, and I believe that the darkness will eventually yield. But as long as it persists I will do all I can, try to do what is right, and urge everyone not to abandon hope.
Russia will be happy!
June 4th
It’s my birthday today. When I woke up, I joked to myself that I can now add the SHIZO to the list of places where I’ve celebrated it over the years. And then, like many other people who reach a certain age (I turned forty-seven today, wow), I thought about my accomplishments over the past year and my plans for the next.
I haven’t accomplished much, and this was best summed up the other day by the psychologist at our penal colony. The procedure requires that before you are sent to the SHIZO you must be examined by a medical officer (to check whether you will be able to withstand it) and a psychologist (to make sure you don’t hang yourself). Well, after our meeting, the psychologist said, “This is the sixteenth time we’ve put you in the SHIZO, but you keep cracking jokes, and your mood is much better than that of the commission members.” That’s true, but on the morning of your birthday you have to be honest with yourself, so I ask myself the question, Am I really in a good mood, or do I force myself to feel that way?
My answer is, I really am. Let’s face it, of course I wish I didn’t have to wake up in this hellhole and could, instead, have breakfast with my family, receive kisses on the cheek from my children, unwrap presents, and say, “Wow, this is exactly what I dreamed of!” But life works in such a way that social progress and a better future can be achieved only if a certain number of people are willing to pay the price for their right to have their own beliefs. The more of them there are, the less everyone has to pay. And the day will come when speaking the truth and advocating for justice will be commonplace and not dangerous in Russia.
But, until that day comes, I see my situation not as a heavy burden or a yoke but as a job that needs to be done. Every job has its unpleasant aspects, right? So I’m going through the unpleasant part of my favourite job right now.
My plan for the previous year was not to become brutalized and bitter and lose my laid-back demeanour; that would mean the beginning of my defeat. And all my success in this was possible only because of your support.
As always, on my birthday, I want to thank all the people I’ve met in my life. The good ones for having helped and still helping me. The bad ones for the fact that my experience with them has taught me something. Thanks to my family for always being there for me!
But the biggest thank-you and biggest salute I want to give today goes to all political prisoners in Russia, Belarus, and other countries. Most of them have it much harder than me. I think about them all the time. Their resilience inspires me every day.
June 19th
Some people collect stamps. Some collect coins. And I have a growing collection of amazing court trials. I was tried in the Khimki police station, where I was sitting under the portrait of Genrikh Yagoda. I was tried in a standard regime penal colony, and they called it an “open trial.”
And now they’re trying me in a closed trial in a maximum-security penal colony.
In a sense, this is the new sincerity. They now say openly, We are afraid of you. We are afraid of what you will say. We are afraid of the truth.
This is an important confession. And it makes practical sense for all of us. We must do what they fear—tell the truth, spread the truth. This is the most powerful weapon against this regime of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. Everyone has this weapon. So make use of it.
August 4th
Nineteen years in a maximum-security penal colony. The number of years does not matter. I understand perfectly well that, like many political prisoners, I am serving a life sentence. Where “life” is defined by either the length of my life or the length of the life of this regime.
The sentencing figure is not for me. It is for you. You, not I, are being frightened and deprived of the will to resist. You are being forced to surrender your country without a fight to the gang of traitors, thieves, and scoundrels who have seized power. Putin must not achieve his goal. Do not lose the will to resist.
November 13th
When you are looking for a wife, be sure to check the potential spouse to see whether she has been registered as a juvenile delinquent. I didn’t do that and here I am.
On a daily basis, the administration informs me that they are unable to deliver another letter from Navalnaya Y. B. The correspondence was seized by the censor because it contained evidence of preparation for a crime. It applies to all recent correspondence.
I wrote to her, saying, “Yulia, stop preparing crimes! Instead, cook some borscht for the kids.”
However, she can’t stop. She carries on inventing new crimes and keeps writing to me about them in her letters.
Once upon a time, about a hundred years ago, she told me that in her school days, she, along with her friends, conspired to steal a briefcase from a classmate and study the trajectory of an object flying out of a second-floor window. Just to clarify, the flying object was the briefcase, not the classmate. Although, actually, I’m not so sure now.
Even back then, her criminal inclinations were evident. Not a spouse, but more like some kind of outlaw.
December 1st
I have no idea which word to use to describe my latest news. Is it sad, funny, or absurd?
I am brought letters and the conversation begins:
“Any letters from my wife?”
“Censored.”
“Any papers from my lawyer?”
“Censored.”
“So what do you have?”
“There’s one from the investigator.”
I open the letter from the State Investigative Committee: “We inform you that a criminal case has been opened against you for a crime under Part 2 of Article 214 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. Two episodes.”
They initiate a new criminal case against me every three months. Rarely has an inmate in solitary confinement for more than a year had such a vibrant social and political life.
I have no idea what Article 214 is, and there’s nowhere to look. You’ll know about it before I do.
Nevertheless, this seems to be a case of positive feedback, as the scientists might say. If this Kremlin gang of corrupters, traitors, and occupiers does not like what I (we) are doing, we must be on the right path.
December 26th
I am your new Santa Claus.
Well, I now have a sheepskin coat and an ushanka fur hat, and soon I will get felt boots. I have grown a beard during the twenty days of my travels under escort. Unfortunately, there are no reindeer, but there are huge, fluffy, and very beautiful German shepherds.
And the most important thing: I now live above the Arctic Circle in the village of Kharp, on the Yamal Peninsula. The nearest town has the delightful name of Labytnangi.
I don’t say, “Ho ho ho,” but I do say, “Oh oh oh,” when I look out the window, where I can see night, then evening, and then night again.
The twenty days of my trip were pretty exhausting, but I’m in a good mood, as befits a Santa Claus.
They brought me here on Saturday night. I was transported with such precautions and by such a strange route (Vladimir—Moscow—Chelyabinsk—Yekaterinburg—Kirov—Vorkuta—Kharp) that I didn’t expect anyone to find me here before mid-January.
So I was very surprised when the cell door was opened yesterday with the words “A lawyer is here to see you.” The lawyer told me that you had lost track of me, and some of you were quite worried. Thanks very much for your support!
I can’t regale you with stories about polar exotica yet, because I can only see the fence, which is very close.
I also went for a walk. The “exercise” yard is a neighbouring cell, a bit bigger, with snow on the ground. And I saw guards, not like in central Russia, but like in the movies, with machine guns, warm mittens, and felt boots. And with the same beautiful fluffy German shepherds.
Anyway, don’t worry about me. I’m fine. I’m totally relieved that I’ve finally made it here.
Thanks again to everyone for your support. And happy holidays!
Since I’m Santa Claus, you’re probably wondering about the presents. But I am a special-regime Santa Claus, so only those who have behaved really badly get presents.
December 31st
This is the third New Year’s Eve. I have taken the traditional family New Year’s Eve photo using Photoshop. I am trying to keep up with the times, and on this occasion I asked to be drawn by artificial intelligence. I hope it turned out fantastic; I won’t see the picture myself until the letter reaches Yamal.
“I miss you terribly” is kind of incorrect from the point of view of Russian syntax. It’s better to say, “I miss you a lot,” or “I miss you so much.”
But, from my point of view, it is more accurate and correct. I miss my family terribly. Yulia, my children, my parents, my brother. I miss my friends, my colleagues, our offices, and my work. I miss you all terribly.
I have no feelings of loneliness, abandonment, or isolation. My mood is great and quite Christmassy. But there is no substitute for normal human communication in all its forms: from jokes at the New Year’s feast to correspondence on Telegram and comments on Instagram and Twitter.
I miss being able to argue with people who send stupid, identical greetings and pictures via their WhatsApp list on New Year’s Eve. It used to annoy me, but now I just think it’s cute. Imagine someone sitting down and sending everyone a couple of kittens with hats under a Christmas tree.
Happy New Year to everyone.
Don’t miss anyone. Not terribly, not much, or very much. Don’t miss your loved ones, and don’t let your loved ones miss you. Continue to be a good, honest person, and try to be a little better and more honest in the coming year. That’s pretty much what I wish for myself. Don’t get sick, and take care of yourself.
Arctic hugs and polar greetings. Love you all.
2024
January 9th
This idea I had, that Putin would now be satisfied with the simple fact of having me in a cell in the far north rather than just keeping me in the SHIZO, was not only overoptimistic but also naïve.
I had just come out of quarantine when it was reported that “the convict Navalny refused to present himself according to the regulations, did not respond to the educative work, and did not draw appropriate conclusions for himself.” I got seven days in a SHIZO.
A wonderful detail: in a punishment cell, the daily routine is slightly different. In a normal cell, your “exercise” takes place in the afternoon. Even though it is a polar night, it is still a few degrees warmer in the afternoon. In the SHIZO, however, “exercise” starts at six-thirty in the morning. But I have already promised myself that I will try to go for a walk no matter what the weather is.
My “exercise” yard is eleven steps from one wall and three to the other; not much of a walk, but at least there’s something, so I go outside.
It hasn’t gotten colder than −32°C [−25.6°F]. Even at that temperature you can walk for more than half an hour, but only if you are sure you can grow a new nose, ears, and fingers.
Few things are as refreshing as a walk in Yamal at six-thirty in the morning. And what a wonderful breeze blows into the courtyard despite the concrete fence, it’s just wow!
Today I went for a walk, got frozen, and thought of Leonardo DiCaprio and his character’s dead-horse trick in “The Revenant.” I don’t think it would work here. A dead horse would freeze in about fifteen minutes.
Here you need an elephant. A hot or even a roasted elephant. If you cut open the belly of a freshly roasted elephant and crawl inside, you can keep warm for a while. But where am I going to get a hot, roasted elephant in Yamal, especially at six-thirty in the morning? So I will continue to freeze.
January 17th
Exactly three years ago, I came back to Russia after treatment following my poisoning. I was arrested at the airport. And for three years I’ve been in prison.
And for three years I’ve been answering the same question.
Prisoners ask it simply and directly.
Prison officials inquire about it cautiously, with the recording devices turned off.
“Why did you come back?”
Responding to this question, I feel frustrated in two ways. First, there’s a dissatisfaction with myself for failing to find the right words to make everyone understand and put an end to this incessant questioning. Second, there’s frustration at the political landscape of recent decades in Russia. This landscape has implanted cynicism and conspiracy theories so deeply in society that people inherently distrust straightforward motives. They seem to believe, If you came back, there must have been some deal you made. It just didn’t work out. Or hasn’t yet. There’s a hidden plan involving the Kremlin towers. There must be a secret lurking beneath the surface. Because, in politics, nothing is as straightforward as it appears.
But there are no secrets or twisted meanings. Everything really is that simple.
I have my country and my convictions. I don’t want to give up my country or betray it. If your convictions mean something, you must be prepared to stand up for them and make sacrifices if necessary.
And, if you’re not prepared to do that, you have no convictions. You just think you do. But those are not convictions and principles; they’re only thoughts in your head.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that everyone who’s not currently in prison lacks convictions. Everyone pays their price. For many people, the price is high even without being imprisoned.
I took part in elections and vied for leadership positions. The call for me is different. I travelled the length and breadth of the country, declaring everywhere from the stage, “I promise that I won’t let you down, I won’t deceive you, and I won’t abandon you.” By coming back to Russia, I fulfilled my promise to the voters. There need to be some people in Russia who don’t lie to them.
It turned out that, in Russia, to defend the right to have and not to hide your beliefs, you have to pay by sitting in a solitary cell. Of course, I don’t like being there. But I will not give up either my ideas or my homeland.
My convictions are not exotic, sectarian, or radical. On the contrary, everything I believe in is based on science and historical experience.
Those in power should change. The best way to elect leaders is through honest and free elections. Everyone needs a fair legal system. Corruption destroys the state. There should be no censorship.
The future lies in these principles.
But, for the present, sectarians and marginals are in power. They have absolutely no ideas. Their only goal is to cling to power. Total hypocrisy allows them to wrap themselves in any cover. So polygamists have become conservatives. Members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union have become Orthodox. Owners of “golden passports” and offshore accounts are aggressive patriots.
Lies, and nothing but lies.
It will crumble and collapse. The Putinist state is not sustainable.
One day, we will look at it, and it won’t be there. Victory is inevitable.
But for now, we must not give up, and we must stand by our beliefs.
Alexei Navalny died on February 16, 2024. ♦
This is drawn from Patriot: A Memoir.
Published in the print edition of the October 21, 2024, issue, with the headline “Prison Diaries.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/21/alexei-navalny-patriot-memoir
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