TALLINN – When Alexei Navalny turns 47 on Sunday, he will wake up in a bare concrete cell with almost no natural light.
He will not be able to see or speak to any of his loved ones. Phone calls and visits are prohibited for those in “punishment isolation” cells, a 2-by-3-meter (6 1/2-by-10-foot) space. Guards often sing him patriotic songs and speeches by President Vladimir Putin.
“Guess who is the champion of listening to Putin’s speeches? Who listens to them for hours and falls asleep? Navalny recently said in a typically sardonic social media post through his lawyers from Penal Colony No. 6 in the Vladimir region, east of Moscow.
He is serving a nine-year term ending in 2030 on charges widely considered false and faces another trial with new charges this could keep it closed for another two decades. On Sunday, rallies were called in Russia to support him.
Navalny has become Russia’s most famous political prisoner, and not just because of his prominence as Putin’s fiercest political foe, his poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin, and the fact that he was the subject of an award-winning documentary an Oscar.
He chronicled his arbitrary placement in solitary confinement, where he spent almost six months. He eats a meager prison diet, limits the time he can spend writing letters, and is sometimes forced to live with a cellmate with poor personal hygiene, making life even more miserable.
Most of the attention is directed at Navalny and others high-profile figures such as Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was sentenced last month to 25 years on treason charges. But there is a growing number of less famous prisoners serving time under equally harsh conditions.
Memorial, Russia’s oldest and most prominent human rights organization and laureate of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, had 558 political prisoners in the country in April, more than three times the number in 2018, when there were 183.
The Soviet Union’s extensive system of gulag prison camps provided inmates with labor to develop industries such as mining and logging. Although conditions vary between current penal coloniesRussian law still allows prisoners to work in jobs such as sewing uniforms for soldiers.
In a 2021 report, the US State Department said conditions in Russian prisons and detention centers “were often harsh and life-threatening. Overcrowding, abuse by guards and inmates , limited access to health care, food shortages, and inadequate sanitation were common in prisons, penal colonies, and other detention facilities.”
Andrei Pivovarov, an opposition figure sentenced last year to four years in prison, has been isolated in Penal Colony No. 7 in the Karelia region of northern Russia since January and is likely to remain there for rest of this year, said his partner, Tatiana Usmanova. The institution is known for its harsh conditions and reports of torture.
The 41-year-old former head of the pro-democracy group Open Russia spends his days alone in a small cell in a “strict detention” unit and is not allowed any calls or visits from anyone but his lawyers , Usmanova told The Associated. press He can get a book from the prison library, can write letters for several hours a day and is allowed 90 minutes outside, he said.
Other inmates are prohibited from making eye contact with Pivovarov in the hallways, contributing to his “maximum isolation,” he said.
“It was not enough to sentence him to an actual prison term. They are also trying to ruin her life there,” Usmanova added.
Pivovarov was removed from a Warsaw-bound flight just before takeoff from St. Petersburg in May 2021 and transferred to the southern city of Krasnodar. Authorities charged him with association with an “undesirable” organization, a crime since 2015.
Several days before his arrest, Open Russia had disbanded after being labeled “undesirable”.
After his trial in Krasnodar, the St. Petersburg native was convicted and sentenced in July, when Russia’s war on Ukraine and Putin’s forceful crackdown on dissent were in full swing.
He told the AP in a letter from Krasnodar in December that authorities moved him there “to hide me further away” from his hometown and Moscow. That interview was one of the last Pivovarov was able to give, and he described prison life there as “boring and depressing”, with his only diversion being an hour’s walk around a small yard. “Lucky” inmates with cash in their account can shop at a prison store once a week for 10 minutes, but otherwise must stay in their cells, he wrote.
He said the letters from supporters lift his spirits. Many people wrote that they were not interested in Russian politics before, according to Pivovarov, and that “only now are they beginning to see it clearly.”
Now, any letter takes weeks to arrive, Usmanova said.
Conditions are easier for some less famous political prisoners like Alexei Gorinov, a former member of a Moscow city council. He was convicted of “spreading false information” about the military in July for anti-war comments he made at a council session.
Criticism of the invasion was criminalized a few months earlier, and Gorinov, 61, became the first Russian to be sent to prison for it, receiving seven years.
He is housed in barracks with about 50 others in his unit at Penal Colony No. 2 in the Vladimir region, Gorinov said in written responses to the AP in March.
The long sentence for a low-profile activist surprised many, with Gorinov saying “the authorities needed an example they could show others (of an ordinary person) rather than a public figure”.
Prisoners in your unit can watch TV and play chess, backgammon or table tennis. There is a small kitchen to make tea or coffee between meals, and they can eat with personal supplies.
But Gorinov said prison officials still carry out “enhanced monitoring” of the unit, with him and two other inmates receiving special checks every two hours as they have been labeled as “escape-prone”.
There is little medical help, he said.
“Right now, I’m not feeling very well as I can’t recover from bronchitis,” he said, adding that he needed treatment for pneumonia last winter in the hospital ward of another prison, because in Penal Colony number 2, the most they can do is “bring out the fever”.
Also suffering from health problems is artist and musician Sasha Skochilenko, who is in custody amid his ongoing trial following his April 2022 arrest in St. Petersburg, also accused of spreading false information about the military. Their crime was to replace supermarket price tags with anti-war slogans as a protest.
Skochilenko has a congenital heart defect and celiac disease, which requires a gluten-free diet. She receives weekly food parcels, but there is a weight limit, and the 32-year-old can’t eat “half the stuff they give her there,” said her partner, Sophia Subbotina.
There is a big difference between detention centers for women and men, and Skochilenko has it easier in some ways than male inmates, Subbotina said.
“Interestingly, the staff is very nice. Most of them are women, they are quite friendly, they will give useful advice and they have a very good attitude towards Sasha,” Subbotina told the AP by phone.
“They often support Sasha, they tell her, ‘You’re definitely going to get out of here soon, this is so unfair here.’ They know our relationship and they’re fine with it. They’re very human,” she said.
There is no political propaganda in the prison and dance music plays from a radio. Cooking shows are playing on the TV. Skochilenko “wouldn’t look at them in normal life, but in prison it’s a distraction,” Subbotina said.
She recently requested that an outside cardiologist examine Skochilneko, and starting in March he will be allowed to visit her twice a month.
Subbotina gets emotional when he remembers his first visit.
“It’s a complex and strange feeling when you live with a person. Sasha and I have been together for over six years — waking up, falling asleep with them — and then not being able to see them for a year,” she said. “I was nervous when I went to visit her. I didn’t know what I was going to say to Sasha, but it went really well in the end.”
Still, Subbotina said a year behind bars has been tough for Skochilenko. The trial is moving slowly, unlike the usually fast-paced proceedings for high-profile political activists, with guilty verdicts almost certain.
Skochilenko faces up to 10 years if convicted.
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