Upbeat Navalny talks prison life in 1st interview from Russian jail
MOSCOW — Russia’s most famous prisoner, the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, spends much of his time tidying his cellblock, reading letters and visiting the mess for meals, with porridge often on the menu.
But perhaps the most maddening thing, he suggested, is being forced to watch Russian state TV and selected propaganda films for more than eight hours a day in what the authorities call an “awareness-raising” program that has replaced hard labor for political prisoners.
“Reading, writing or doing anything else,” is prohibited, Navalny said of the forced screen time. “You have to sit in a chair and watch TV.” And if an inmate nods off, he said, the guards shout, “Don’t sleep, watch!”
In an interview with The New York Times, his first with a news organization since his arrest in January, Navalny talked about his life in prison, about why Russia has cracked down so hard on the opposition and dissidents, and about his conviction that “Putin’s regime,” as he calls it, is doomed to collapse.
Navalny started a major opposition movement to expose high-level corruption and challenge President Vladimir Putin at the polls. He was imprisoned in March after he returned to Russia from Germany knowing he was facing a parole violation for a conviction in a case seen as politically motivated. As was well chronicled at the time, he was out of the country to receive medical treatment after being poisoned by Russian agents with the chemical weapon Novichok, according to Western governments.
Navalny has not been entirely mute since his incarceration in Penal Colony No. 2, just east of Moscow. Through his lawyers, who visit him regularly, he has sent out occasional social media posts.
Nor is he being actively muzzled by the Kremlin. When asked about Navalny’s social media presence on Tuesday, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, said that it was “not our business” if Navalny spoke out.
But the written exchange of questions and answers covering 54 handwritten pages is by far his most comprehensive and wide-ranging account.
In today’s Russia, Navalny made clear, hours spent watching state television and movies chosen by the warden are the experience of a political prisoner, a status Amnesty International has assigned to Navalny. Gone are the shifts of heavy labor in mining or forestry and the harrying by criminals and guards alike that was the hallmark of the Soviet gulag for political prisoners.
“You might imagine tattooed muscle men with steel teeth carrying on with knife fights to take the best cot by the window,” Navalny said.
“You need to imagine something like a Chinese labor camp, where everybody marches in a line and where video cameras are hung everywhere. There is constant control and a culture of snitching.”
Despite his circumstances, Navalny was upbeat about Russia’s future prospects, and he outlined his strategy for achieving political change through the electoral system even in an authoritarian state.
The modern experience of a Russian political prisoner, Navalny said, is mostly “psychological violence,” with mind-numbing screen time playing a big role.
Navalny described five daily sessions of television watching for inmates, the first starting immediately after morning calisthenics, breakfast and sweeping the yard.
After some free time, there’s a two-hour spell in front of the screen, lunch, then more screen time, dinner and then more TV time in the evening. During one afternoon session, playing chess or backgammon is an acceptable alternative.
“We watch films about the Great Patriotic War,” Navalny said, referring to
World War II, “or how one day, 40 years ago, our athletes defeated the Americans or Canadians.”
During these sessions, he said, “I most clearly understand the essence of the ideology of the Putin regime: The present and the future are being substituted with the past — the truly heroic past, or embellished past, or completely fictional past. All sorts of past must constantly be in the spotlight to displace thoughts about the future and questions about the present.”
The approach of lengthy, enforced television watching, while taken to extremes at Penal Colony No. 2, is not unique to the site, where inmates in politically hued cases have been incarcerated before.
It sprang from a penal reform in Russia begun in 2010 to boost guards’ control over inmates through their day and to reduce the sway of prison gangs. The intent is not so much brainwashing as control, experts on the Russian prison system say.
This was a break from the Soviet approach to maintaining order in the gulag camps through the use of gang leaders, or “thieves in law,” who were co-opted and protected by the KGB and used to harass, humiliate and break political prisoners.
“Everything is organized so that I am under maximum control 24 hours a day,” Navalny said. He said he had not been assaulted or threatened by fellow inmates but estimated that about onethird were what are known in Russian prisons as “activists,” those who serve as informants to the warden.
Navalny, 45, conceded that he has struggled to remain visible in Russian politics through a tumultuous period as the government has clamped down on the opposition and the news media.