Kremlin critic Navalny sent to penal colony, outlets say
MOSCOW — Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition politician, is going to serve his prison sentence in a penal colony notorious for disciplinary measures considered harsh even by Russian standards, Russian news outlets reported Monday.
Russia’s decision to transfer Navalny to a prison known for abusive treatment of inmates came even as the Kremlin faced mounting foreign criticism for the sentencing as well as an assassination attempt on Navalny last summer.
Navalny returned to Russia in January despite the government’s threats of arrest, after spending months in a Berlin hospital recuperating from being poisoned. He was subsequently convicted in a trial of violating the terms of his parole during his stay in Germany and sentenced to more than two years in prison.
Russia’s prison service has not officially disclosed Navalny’s whereabouts, following the Russian practice of keeping inmates incommunicado while in transit and in the first days or weeks at a new prison. But news reports on staterun outlets offered an early glimpse of the likely conditions of his imprisonment.
The site, Penal Colony No. 2 and also known by its initials IK2, is in the Vladimir Region in European Russia east of Moscow, indicating Navalny will not serve his sentence in the country’s harshest prisons in Siberia or the Arctic.
But the colony is known for strict enforcement of rules and for making extensive use of a separate, harsher punishment facility within its walls where inmates are not allowed to talk among themselves, according to former inmates and lawyers.
The site is typical for Russia’s colony-type prisons that evolved from the gulag camps established in the 1930s.
While guards oversee the prison, fellow prisoners maintain discipline within the brigades, either in cooperation with guards, a group known as “activists,” or as criminal gang leaders, known as “thieves in law.”
At Penal Colony No. 2, activists command fellow prisoners to perform meaningless tasks such as making beds multiple times a day, or undressing and then dressing again, according to accounts of former convicts.
Dmitry Dyomushkin, a nationalist politician who served time in the colony, described conditions in the separate punishment brigade, where Navalny could wind up for infractions as minor as failing to button his jacket, as psychologically harrowing.
Inmates, for example, must shave every morning but are not allowed to do so themselves because they are not allowed to hold razors; instead, “activists” wield the razors and cuts and nicks are common, he said.
Inmates use toilets without partitions and are obliged to do so in the presence of an activist, he said.
“They will find many ways to pressure him,” Dyomushkin said of Navalny’s term in Penal Colony No. 2. In these conditions, he said, “your personality deforms.”