It’s Navalny versus Putin at the ‘Dead Road’ gulag
The opposition leader’s move to a Soviet-era penal colony in the Arctic is another stage in the long battle between dictator and dissident, says
TPutin and Navalny are locked in a struggle familiar from Soviet times – the dictator armed with all the might of the state, and the dissident with only his moral superiority and a fragile sense of humour.
he good news is that after disappearing into the maw of the Russian prison system for three weeks, Alexei Navalny is still alive. The bad news is that the Russian opposition leader is in penal colony FKU IK-3, known as Polar Wolf, one of the nastiest places devised by man to incarcerate his fellow man, a direct descendant of the gulag system of forced labour camps that imprisoned some 14 million people between 1930 and 1954.
The prison colony is a modern gulag built on an old gulag, a place steeped in historical suffering deliberately chosen by Vladimir Putin to isolate his only serious domestic opponent and cow Russians by reminding them of the grim Stalinist past.
As with everything Putin does, the decision to move Navalny is straight out of the KGB playbook, an act of theatre demonstrating that the brutal political repression of the Soviet era is back, and never really went away.
Polar Wolf is 65km inside the Arctic Circle, 1900km northeast of Moscow in the remote town of Kharp in the Yamalo-Nenets region, one of 25 “special regime correctional colonies” reserved for serial murderers, rapists and political prisoners.
It is a prison specifically designed to inflict maximum suffering. According to those with experience of Polar Wolf, it is a place intended to induce “hopelessness” and crush “any rebellious spirit”.
This week the temperature is expected to drop to minus 28C. Former inmates describe being beaten on arrival. Punishments include being forced to stand without moving in the Arctic cold and then being doused in icy water.
Escape is almost impossible, with the tundra on one side and the polar Urals on the others. Navalny’s days will be spent pointlessly sewing tambourines from deerskin. The dark, frozen winter gives way to a brief, mosquito-infested summer.
Navalny joked that from his prison cell, “It’s night, then evening, then night again ... I was transported on such a strange route that I didn't expect anyone to find me here before mid-January”. This is another Soviet tradition, when the fiendish bureaucracy would wrench prisoners from one gulag to another without word of their whereabouts.
The 1020 prisoners in Polar Wolf have no access to the internet or telephone. The only way to communicate is by the notoriously unreliable Russian postal system. All letters are censored. To relay messages on X, Navalny passes them to his lawyers, who must undertake a gruelling 44-hour train journey to visit him.
Chillingly, what IK-3 is today grows directly from what it once was.
Polar Wolf is built on the site of an earlier Soviet forced labour colony, the 501st Construction Camp for prisoners building a railway across the Russian Arctic, a vast, failed project that was murderous, megalomaniacal and entirely futile.
Starting in 1947, inmates of the 501st camp slaved on the trans-polar main line, a rail link spanning northern Siberia for 1297km, aimed at connecting to the easternmost parts of the Soviet empire. The 501st gulag inmates built from the west starting near the River Ob, the 503rd from the east and the River Yenisey.
About 100,000 prisoners toiled on the project, some of them convicted of political crimes, as well as Ukrainian nationalists and German prisoners of war, but most of them had been jailed for food theft during the famines of 1946-7. Civilian women also worked on the railway, drawn to the camps to try to save their children from starvation.
The lice-ridden, malnourished and frost-bitten slave labourers cleared snow, built embankments and constructed bridges. The tracks built across permafrost in the winter buckled and sank into the summer mud. When the project ran out of steel, the engineers used wood, which rotted.
The gulag inmates called the rail line the “Dead Road” and the “Road to Nowhere”.
Stalin died in 1953, and within weeks his grand project was abandoned, along with 11 locomotives and 60,000 tonnes of metal. By that time the line extended just 500km from one end, and 200km from the other.
In her book Gulag, Anne Applebaum estimates that the aborted project cost 40 billion roubles (about US$10 billion in 1950 dollars) and claimed “tens of thousands of lives”. Parts of the line are still visible, with ghostly embankments and rotted bridges, testament to the vicious pointlessness of the gulag system.
This, then, is where Putin has consigned 47-year-old Navalny. He faces a 19-year sentence for various alleged crimes, including extremism, the rehabilitation of Nazism, and inciting children to commit dangerous acts. More trumped-up charges are expected shortly.
Navalny’s own description of life in Putin's penal colonies might have been written by Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Varlam Shalamov, survivors of Stalin’s gulag: “You might imagine tattooed musclemen with steel teeth carrying on with knife fights to take the best cot by the window ... There is constant control and a culture of snitching.”
Like those earlier dissenters, Navalny has been sent into the limitless internal exile that was the hallmark of Stalin’s labour camp system. Like Solzhenitsyn, he stands as the living condemnation of a tyrannical regime. And, like the gulag inmates from an earlier era, he has responded with black humour to an impossibly dark situation.
“I am your new Santa Claus,” he said in a Christmas posting from his new jail. “I have grown a beard during the 20-day transit. Unfortunately, there are no reindeer ... I now live above the Arctic Circle.”
It is no coincidence that Navalny has been moved into more extreme isolation just as Putin is about to run for a fifth term in office, his victory a foregone conclusion that would keep him in power until 2030, longer than Stalin’s rule.
Putin and Navalny are locked in a struggle familiar from Soviet times – the dictator armed with all the might of the state, and the dissident with only his moral superiority and a fragile sense of humour. That contest will continue until one or the other dies, a bleak and uncertain future riding on a tragic past, a road to nowhere.