Confined to his cold concrete cell, often alone with his books, Alexeï Navalny sought comfort in correspondence. In July, he wrote to an acquaintance that no one could understand Russian prison life “without having been here,” adding, deadpan: “But you don’t need to come.”
“If we tell them to serve you caviar tomorrow, they will serve it to you,” wrote the opponent of the Russian regime to this same acquaintance, Ilia Krasilshchik, in August. “If we tell them to strangle you in your cell, they will strangle you. »
Many details about his final months and the circumstances of his death – announced Friday by Russian authorities – remain unknown. We don’t even know where his body is.
In shock, Mr. Navalny’s colleagues say little. But the final months of his life are described in detail in earlier statements, in court appearances, in interviews with relatives and in excerpts from letters that several friends, including Mr. Krasilshchik, showed to the New York Times.
These letters reveal the commitment, determination and curiosity of a leader who galvanized opposition to Vladimir Putin and who, his supporters hope, will remain the unifying symbol of their resistance. They also show how Mr. Navalny, armed with a strong ego and unceasing confidence in the correctness of his actions, strove to stay in touch with the outside world.
The harsh conditions of detention ravaged his health – he was often denied medical and dental care – but Navalny managed to maintain his clarity of mind, as evidenced by his writing.
He boasted that he had read 44 books in English in a year and methodically planned for the future: he refined his curriculum, studied political memoirs, talked with journalists, gave professional advice to his friends and gave his opinion on publications trend on social networks that his team communicated to him.
Mr. Navalny, who died at 47, described his imprisonment since January 2021 as a “space trip”. At the end of 2023, he was more alone than ever, often in prison isolation, and deprived of three of his lawyers, all arrested for “participation in an extremist group”.
Despite everything, he kept up to date with current events. To a friend, Russian photographer Yevgeni Feldman, he confided that former US President Donald Trump’s election platform seemed “really scary.”
“Trump will become president” if President Joe Biden’s health deteriorates, Mr. Navalny wrote from his maximum security prison. “Doesn’t this evidence concern the Democrats? »
A public life
Mr. Navalny was able to send hundreds of handwritten letters thanks to the curious digitalization of Russia’s prison system, remnants of a brief wave of liberal reforms during Mr. Putin’s rule. One website allowed people to write to him for 40 cents a page and receive a photo of his responses, usually a week or two after he sent them (everything was read by censors).
Mr. Navalny also communicated through his lawyers, in the glass visiting room: they showed each other documents after they had been prohibited from exchanging messages on paper. At one point, his jailers covered the window with aluminum foil, Mr. Navalny said in 2022.
Then there were the frequent court appearances, each time the Russian state added charges to prolong his imprisonment, or when Mr. Navalny challenged his conditions of detention. Mr. Navalny wrote to Mr. Krasilshchik, a media entrepreneur now in exile in Berlin, that he was having fun during his hearings, even knowing that the Russian justice system is subservient to the state.
PHOTO ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO, ARCHIVES ASSOCIATED PRESS
Opponent Alexeï Navalny in the dock, during his trial in February 2021, in Moscow
“It’s entertaining, it passes the time,” he wrote. In addition, they bring excitement and the feeling that we are fighting and not giving up. »
These appearances also allowed him to display his contempt for the system. In July, after a trial that resulted in another 19-year prison sentence, Mr. Navalny told the judge and officers in court that they were “crazy.”
“You have one life, given by God, and this is what you choose to devote it to? “, he said.
During one of his last teleappearances, in January, Mr. Navalny requested longer meal breaks to “down the two mugs of boiling water and two pieces of disgusting bread” to which he was entitled.
Backed by books
Books seem to have been at the center of Alexei Navalny’s prison life until his death.
In a letter to Mr. Krasilshchik in April 2023, Mr. Navalny explains that he preferred to read ten books simultaneously and “go from one to the other.” He says he came to love memoirs: “For some reason, I always despised them. But in fact, they are extraordinary. »
He often asked for reading recommendations and gave them too. Describing prison life to Mr. Krasilshchik in a letter dated July, he recommended nine books on the subject, including a 1,012-page, three-volume work by Soviet dissident Anatoly Marchenko.
Mr. Navalny adds in this letter that he reread A day of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s terrible novel about Joseph Stalin’s gulag. After surviving his hunger strike and spending months “thinking only about eating,” Mr. Navalny writes that he comes to understand how depraved the forced labor camps of the Soviet era were: “ We begin to realize the degree of horror,” he wrote.
Kerry Kennedy, a human rights activist and daughter of Democrat Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968, also corresponded with Mr. Navalny. He wrote to her that he cried “two or three times” while reading a book about his father recommended by a friend (after the death of Alexeï Navalny, Mme Kennedy posted the handwritten letter in English online).
Mr Navalny thanked Mrme Kennedy for sending him a poster bearing a quote from Bobby Kennedy, who said that a “wave of hope,” multiplied a million times, “can sweep away the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
“I hope to one day hang it on my office wall,” Mr. Navalny wrote.
To stay in contact
The friend who recommended Kennedy’s biography was Evguény Feldman, the Russian photographer who covered Mr. Navalny when he attempted to run for president in 2018. Feldman, now in exile in Latvia, says he written at least 37 letters to Navalny since his arrest in 2021 and received responses to almost all of them.
“I really like your letters,” Navalny wrote in the last message Feldman received, dated December 3, excerpts of which Feldman showed to the Times. “They contain everything I like to discuss: food, politics, elections, scandals and ethnic issues” (an allusion to their discussions on anti-Semitism and the war between Israel and Hamas).
PHOTO SAMAR ABU ELOUF, THE NEW YORK TIMES ARCHIVES
Palestinians returning to see the damage to their homes after an Israeli strike near Khan Younes last November
He closes his December letter with his thoughts on American politics. After warning of a possible Trump presidency, Mr. Navalny asks: “Name me a current politician that you admire. »
Three days after sending this letter, Navalny disappeared.
During 20 days of frantic searching, Mr. Navalny’s exiled allies sent more than 600 requests to prisons and other government agencies.
On December 25, Mr. Navalny’s spokesman said he had been found in a remote Arctic prison known as the Polar Wolf, the penal colony no 3.
A legacy that will endure
Mr. Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, flew to the Arctic after the news of his death and, on Saturday, received official notice that he had died at 2:17 p.m. the day before .
Mr. Navalny’s legacy will live on, friends and allies say, in part because of what he wrote in prison. According to Mr. Feldman, Mr. Navalny’s legal team indicated that the Russian political prisoner had responded to at least some of the letters sent by Mr. Feldman in recent weeks.
“Honestly, I think about it with horror,” Mr. Feldman said. If the censor lets them through, I will receive letters from him for several months. »
Mr. Krasilshchik, the media entrepreneur, said he keeps thinking about the last letter he received, in September. Mr Navalny concluded by saying that if South Korea and Taiwan could move from dictatorship to democracy, perhaps Russia could too.
“Hope. I have no problem with that, hope,” Mr. Navalny wrote.
He signed off: “Keep writing!” HAS. ”
This article was originally published in the New York Times.
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