Chocolate town denies Navalny sweet freedom

Navalny’s new home is part of a sprawling network of some 684 work colonies, a system established by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin reminiscent of his Gulag forced labor network, that today holds some 393,000 prisoners

POKROV, Russia (AFP) — Until last week, the provincial town of Pokrov outside Moscow, lined with Soviet-era residential blocks and teetering wooden homes, had only one claim to fame: A monument to chocolate.

That changed on Sunday when it emerged that the Kremlin’s most outspoken critic, Alexei Navalny, who survived a Novichok poisoning attack last year and was imprisoned last month, would be serving out his sentence in a notorious penal colony here. Surrounded by a corrugated

fence topped with barbed wire, Penal Colony No. 2 outside Pokrov some 100 kilometers (60 miles) east of Moscow will be the anti-corruption campaigner’s home for the next two and a half years.

The court ruling last month to jail Navalny, 44, for parole violations on years-old embezzlement charges sparked outrage in Russian civil society and concern in the West, with the European Union agreeing fresh sanctions against Russia.

Next door to Navalny’s jail is a towering food processing plant run by Mondelez International, which gifted the bronze statue of a fairy holding confectionary to Pokrov in 2009, marking 15 years of operations.

The town is a stopover between Moscow and Vladimir, a fortress town and former capital of Russia dotted with UNESCO-protected ornate churches that lure throngs of tourists on day trips from Moscow.

During the Soviet era, the region marked the boundary of the so-called 101st-kilometer from Moscow, beyond which many members of the cultural elite were exiled.

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