Navalny, victim of the Russian jailer

Martyred in a punishment cell within a harsh regime prison in the Arctic Circle, the Russian Alexei Navalny showed his unwavering will to resist his executioners, those officials in the penitentiary service or security bodies that constitute the so-called “ vertical of power”, at whose apex is Vladimir Putin.

Navalny, who had been imprisoned several times since political protests over electoral irregularities in 2011, was sentenced to 19 years of severe prison in 2023 for extremism.

Of the time spent in prison, Navalny was in punishment cells at least 27 times (a total of 300 days), for things like not fastening the last button of a narrow shirt (three days), to cite a decision of the Human Rights Court of Strasbourg (seven days) or to read a decision of the same court (15 days).

The surprising thing, then, was that Navalni, physically weakened by the punishments imposed on him, had not already perished, and also that he had miraculously been saved from the attempted poisoning of which he was a victim in the summer of 2020 when he was in Siberia. .

The politician recovered in Germany and then insisted on returning to his homeland in January 2021. He was immediately imprisoned.

Representatives of Russian justice dissolved their organization (the Anti-Corruption Fund) and continue to persecute the members of this organization, which revealed the shady dealings of Russian state leaders and businessmen.

Navalny's followers are accused today in Russia as suspected of extremism, terrorism and other crimes with which the Kremlin has provided itself in recent years to better punish dissent.

In view of his long and severe sentence and the news that threatened him, many doubted that that rebellious spirit would manage to get out of prison alive, unless a revolution occurred (of which there are no signs), and the regime decided to exchange him. in the West by some Russian individual who could be useful to him or who decided to pardon him as a gesture of good will, which was not likely in a system dominated by revenge and resentment.

In vulgar terms, Navalny stopped being a bargaining chip or an element of blackmail for the Kremlin and became a toxic asset, one more, for Vladimir Putin, who never uttered the name of his most charismatic rival.

Navalny's body joins those of Ana Politkovskaia, a journalist murdered on the porch of her Moscow home in October 2006;

Boris Nemtsov, former first head of the Russian Government in the 1990s and assassinated near the Kremlin in February 2015;

the deputy and soldier Sergei Yushenkov, co-president of the Liberal party murdered in 2003, and other informed and active figures who denounced the repression in Russia.

Today other politicians, journalists, citizens, and prestigious scientists accumulate in the prisons of that country, all of them trampled by a judicial mechanism that is simply a pure disguise for arbitrariness.

This is the sad reality of today's Russia.

The cruelty with which the system treated Navalni and treats other prisoners who can be considered political - the human rights organization Memorial, dissolved by the regime, gives a figure of 604 as of October 2023 - has nothing to do with the interests of Russia.

The treatment of dissidence in Putin's time incorporates characteristics of perversity, sadism and total indifference to human life that seem to go beyond what is rational, including in this concept the "degree of repression necessary" to maintain an authoritarian regime.

In late Soviet times, in the years preceding Mikhail Gorbachev's

perestroika

or reform, political persecutions in general, although harsh and gruesome, did not seem to have such systematic cruelty.

Nothing can be done for Navalni, although it can be done for his memory.

But maybe we can still help in some way people who are rotting today in Russian prisons due to sinister accusations.

Among them are the liberal politician Vladimir Kara-Murza (sentenced to 25 years of severe imprisonment last April for treason);

Ilia Yashin (liberal politician sentenced to eight and a half years in prison in December 2022 for spreading alleged hoaxes about the army);

journalist Iván Safrónov, sentenced to 22 years in a harsh regime for treason;

Aleksei Gorinov, Moscow neighborhood councilor, sentenced to seven years in 2022 for his anti-war views.

This week, the respected sociologist Boris Kagarlitski, sentenced to five years, for a comment about the bridge that connects the annexed Crimea to the territory of Russia, joined the list.

He adds and continues.

Follow all the international information on

Facebook

and

X

, or in

our weekly newsletter

.

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I am already a subscriber

_