Aleksei A. Navalny portrayed himself as invincible, persistently utilizing his hallmark humor to recommend that President Vladimir V. Putin couldn’t break him, regardless of how dire his situations grew to become in jail.
However behind the courageous face, the fact was plain to see. Since his incarceration in early 2021, Mr. Navalny, Russia’s most formidable opposition determine, and his employees often instructed his situations have been so grim that he was being put to loss of life in sluggish movement.
Now his aides consider their fears have come true.
The reason for Mr. Navalny’s loss of life in jail at 47 has not been established — actually his household has not but even been allowed to see his physique — however Russia’s harshest penal colonies are recognized for hazardous situations, and Mr. Navalny was singled out for significantly brutal therapy.
“Aleksei Navalny was subjected to torment and torture for 3 years,” the Russian journalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Dmitri A. Muratov wrote in a column after his loss of life was introduced on Friday. “As Navalny’s physician informed me: the physique can not face up to this.”
Greater than 1 / 4 of Mr. Navalny’s incarceration since 2021 was spent in freezing “punishment cells” and he was typically denied entry to medical care. He was transferred to ever crueler prisons. And at one level, he mentioned he was being given injections however was prevented from discovering out what was within the syringes. His workforce fearful he was once more being poisoned.
What particularly led to Mr. Navalny’s loss of life on Friday at a distant jail above the Arctic Circle could stay a thriller. The Russian jail service launched an announcement Friday afternoon saying that Mr. Navalny felt sick and abruptly misplaced consciousness after being exterior.
Russian state media reported that he had suffered a blood clot. However the story modified on Saturday, when Mr. Navalny’s mom and lawyer arrived on the jail. They have been informed he had suffered from “sudden loss of life syndrome,” which appeared to point sudden cardiac arrest, in response to Ivan Zhdanov, director of Mr. Navalny’s anti-corruption basis.
Investigators informed a lawyer for Mr. Navalny {that a} repeat examination was being carried out and the outcomes could be launched subsequent week. Mr. Navalny’s employees referred to as for the physique to be launched instantly in order that his household might order an unbiased evaluation, accusing Russian authorities of mendacity to hide the physique.
In response to his aides, Mr. Navalny had been put in a punishment cell on the Arctic jail within the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Area on Wednesday, two days earlier than Russian authorities introduced his loss of life.
His spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, mentioned that marked his twenty seventh time in such an inhumane area, often a roughly 7 toes by 10 toes concrete cell with insufferable situations — chilly, damp and poorly ventilated. His newest spherical of punishment, had he survived, would have taken his whole interval in such a cell to 308 days, greater than 1 / 4 of his time in incarceration, in response to Ms. Yarmysh.
As soon as a day at 6:30 a.m., prisoners within the punishment cells on the Arctic facility are allowed right into a coffin-like concrete enclosure open to the sky via a steel grate, Mr. Navalny mentioned in a message from the ability earlier this yr. It gave the impression to be after such a session on Friday that Mr. Navalny misplaced consciousness, in response to the Russian jail service’s account. It was about -20 Fahrenheit exterior.
In a letter from jail final month, Mr. Navalny described how he might stroll a complete of 11 steps from one finish of the open-air area to the opposite, noting that the coldest it had been to date on one in every of his walks was -26 Fahrenheit.
“Even at this temperature, you possibly can stroll for greater than half an hour, as long as you’ve gotten time to develop a brand new nostril, ears and fingers,” he wrote. “There are few issues as invigorating as a stroll in Yamal at 6:30 within the morning. And what a beautiful recent breeze blows into the yard, regardless of the concrete enclosure, wow!”
Whereas strolling there on a current day, he mentioned he was freezing and enthusiastic about how Leonardo DiCaprio climbed right into a lifeless horse to flee the chilly within the wilderness survival film “The Revenant.” A lifeless horse would freeze in that a part of Russia inside quarter-hour, Mr. Navalny surmised.
“Right here we want an elephant — a scorching, fried elephant,” he mentioned.
Mr. Navalny typically employed such wit within the face of his inhumane therapy. Nevertheless it had turn into more and more clear, over his three years of incarceration, that he won’t survive.
“The cumulative therapy of Navalny over a number of years in jail — in a method you possibly can say it was driving him near loss of life,” Mariana Katzarova, the United Nations Human Rights Council particular rapporteur on the human rights state of affairs in Russia, mentioned in an interview Saturday. “We don’t know but. We want an investigation.”
For a time, Mr. Navalny did appear virtually invincible.
In August 2020, he fell ailing on a flight from the Siberian metropolis of Tomsk to Moscow, after being poisoned with a nerve agent from the Russian-made Novichok household. He was put right into a medically induced coma for 2 weeks throughout therapy in Germany — and survived.
The U.S. authorities later attributed the poisoning to Russia’s Federal Safety Service, generally known as the F.S.B.
Regardless of the assassination try, Mr. Navalny returned to Russia in early 2021 to proceed his struggle towards Mr. Putin, who denied Russia’s involvement within the poisoning, and shortly discovered himself imprisoned. His well being started to deteriorate virtually instantly.
In March 2021, he complained about extreme again ache that later was an issue along with his leg.
He demanded that jail authorities present him with correct medical care and provides him medicine. As an alternative, they subjected him to sleep deprivation, he mentioned. On the finish of March 2021, he declared a starvation strike over his therapy, and Russian docs and Hollywood stars took up his trigger in open letters to Mr. Putin.
About three weeks later, Mr. Navalny was examined by an unbiased panel of docs. The assessments by the docs discovered that, “quickly sufficient, there gained’t be anybody to deal with,” Mr. Navalny mentioned in a message posted to Instagram.
Final yr, Mr. Navalny wrote from jail that his jokes concerning the punishment cell, shouldn’t normalize the setting. He lamented {that a} fellow political prisoner, who had spoken out towards the conflict in Ukraine, had been put in a punishment cell, regardless of being disabled and lacking a part of his lung.
Mr. Navalny described dire well being situations in jail, the place he mentioned many inmates suffered from tuberculosis. He additionally complained early final yr concerning the administration in his former jail inserting a mentally unwell particular person in a cell reverse his, as a type of torment, and an ailing prisoner in his small cell.
On the time, his lawyer, Vadim Kobzev, mentioned the jail intentionally contaminated him with a respiratory sickness, refused to provide him medication after which “handled” him with big doses of contraindicated antibiotics. Mr. Navalny suffered extreme abdomen ache and misplaced greater than 15 kilos consequently, Mr. Kobzev mentioned.
“These actions can’t be thought to be something apart from an open technique to destroy Navalny’s well being by any and all means,” Mr. Kobzev mentioned in an announcement on the time. “Clearly, the jail wouldn’t threat partaking on this stage of demonstrative unlawfulness with out approval from Moscow.”
Mr. Kobzev has since been arrested on extremism costs for associating with Mr. Navalny — a part of a broader roundup of the opposition chief’s attorneys late final yr.
Mr. Navalny suffered a dizzy spell and was placed on an IV drip in an unexplained medical episode in early December. However Russian authorities nonetheless transferred him later that month from a jail within the Vladimir area, about 130 miles east of Moscow, to the “particular regime” penal colony within the Arctic the place he died.
A number of docs contacted after his loss of life, together with one who was concerned in his preliminary therapy within the Siberian metropolis of Omsk, mentioned his loss of life was possible unrelated to his poisoning greater than three years earlier, given his strong restoration.
However he confronted many different well being hazards since then.
“A Russian jail is a spot the place it’s important to be ready to die day-after-day,” Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, a Russian tycoon who spent a decade in jail after difficult Mr. Putin, mentioned on Friday.
Within the interview, Mr. Khodorkovsky, who was launched in 2013, mentioned a prisoner should discover a option to deal with the burden as a check so as to survive mentally, and Mr. Navalny had performed that. However even then, he added, “this is not going to defend you from being killed.”
Anton Troianovski contributed reporting.
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