Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny says he was immediately placed in a punitive solitary confinement cell after finishing a quarantine term at the so-called Polar Wolf prison in Russia’s Arctic region where he was transferred last month.
In a series of messages on X, formerly Twitter, Navalny said on January 9 a prison guard ruled that “convict Navalny refused to introduce himself according to format, did not respond to the educational work, and did not draw appropriate conclusions for himself” and therefore must spend seven days in solitary confinement.
Navalny added that unlike in a regular cell, where inmates are allowed to have a walk outside of the cell in the afternoon when it is a bit warmer outside, in the punitive cell, such walks are at 6:30 a.m. in a part of the world where temperatures can fall to minus 45 degrees Celsius or colder.
“I have already promised myself that I will try to go for a walk no matter what the weather is,” Navalny said in an irony-laced series of eight posts, adding that the cell-like sites for walks are “11 steps from the wall and 3 steps to the wall” with an open sky covered with metal bars above.
“It’s never been colder here than -32 degrees Celsius (-25 degrees Fahrenheit). Even at that temperature you can walk for more than half an hour, but only if you have time to grow a new nose, ears, and fingers,” Navalny joked, comparing himself with the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the Revenant film, who saved himself from freezing in the cold by crawling inside the carcass of a dead horse.
“Here you need an elephant. A hot or even 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 [here], especially at 6:30 in the morning? So, I will continue to freeze,” Navalny concludes in his sarcastic string of messages.
Navalny was transported in December to the notorious and remote prison, formally known as IK-3, but widely referred to as Polar Wolf.
Some 2,000 kilometers northeast of Moscow, the prison holds about 1,050 of Russia’s most incorrigible prisoners.
Human rights activists say the prison holds serial killers, rapists, pedophiles, repeat offenders, and others convicted of the most serious crimes and serving sentences of 20 years or more.
In some cases, like Navalny’s, the government sends convicts who are widely considered to be political prisoners there as well. Platon Lebedev, a former business partner of Mikhail Khodorkovsky who was convicted of tax evasion and other charges during the dismantling of the Yukos oil giant, spent about two years at IK-3 in the mid-2000s.
The prison was founded in 1961 at a former camp of dictator Josef Stalin’s Gulag network. The settlement of Kharp, with about 5,000 people, mostly provides housing and services for prison workers and administrators.
Navalny was sentenced to 19 years in prison in August 2023 on extremism charges, on top of previous sentences for fraud. He says the charges are politically motivated, and human rights organizations recognized him as a political prisoner.
He has posed one of the most-serious threats to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who recently announced he is running for reelection in March. Putin is expected to easily win the election amid the continued sidelining of opponents and a clampdown on opposition and civil society that intensified after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
Navalny survived a poisoning with Novichok-type nerve agent in 2020 that he says was ordered by Putin. The Kremlin has denied any role in Navalny’s poisoning.
