Inside Alexei Navalny’s hellhole penal colony: Soviet-era ‘Polar Wolf’ arctic facility where 1,085 of Russia’s worst criminals are tortured with electric shocks, beatings and confined to tiny cells with just a hole for a toilet
Alexei Navalny spent his last days in a hellish penal colony inside the Arctic Circle, where prisoners are tortured with beatings and electric shocks.
The opposition leader died while serving a 19-year prison sentence The FKU IK-3 facility, known as Polar Wolf, houses more than a thousand of the country’s worst criminals, along with a handful of political prisoners who dared to challenge Putin’s regime.
Polar Wolf is a Soviet-era prison considered one of the toughest in Russia.
Aside from the brutal treatment of prisoners inside, the penal colony is located in the Arctic, 1,200 miles northeast of Moscowwhere temperatures drop below -25F.
Navalny was transferred there in December from Penal Colony 6, 150 miles outside Moscow. He said it took 20 days to reach FKU IK-3.
A view of the entrance to the prison colony in the city of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenetsk region, about 2,000 kilometers northeast of Moscow, Tuesday, January 23, 2024
Alexei Navalny (pictured) died in the brutal penal colony FKU IK-3, a Soviet-era prison camp
A woman walks to the entrance of the IK-3 penal colony, where Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny died while serving his prison sentence. The prison is located in the Kharp settlement in the Yamal-Nenets region
Former prisoners have described how FKU IK-3 is designed to make prisoners feel “utterly hopeless” and crush “any rebellious spirit.” The facility in Kharp, part of Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service, can accommodate up to 1,085 people.
Lawyers for Navalny recently claimed that guards at the penal colony had tried to do so ‘destroy Navalny’s health by all means and means’.
Vadim Kobzev, a lawyer for Navalny, said yes had lost 7kg and was ‘intentionally infected’ with an unknown acute viral respiratory disease while in a hellish punishment cell.
Navalny “was not given proper medicine” and was instead “treated with huge doses of antibiotics that should not have been used,” Kobzev said.
“These actions cannot be considered anything other than an open strategy to destroy Navalny’s health by all means and means,” the lawyer said.
Other forms of punishment and torture include lining up prisoners in the freezing outdoors and shooting them with a powerful water cannon.
Prisoner rights activist Olga Romanova recounted one prisoner’s claim that they had to queue outside in “light clothes” for up to 40 minutes during the height of winter.
They are ordered not to move and if one person so much as rubs their hands together for warmth, “the whole group was doused with water.”
‘In the spring there was a new torture. Mosquitoes and biting flies. If you moved a hand, the water came. They would just shower the whole group with a water cannon,” Romanova said, according to Radio Free Europe.
About 60 km north of the Arctic Circle, Polar Wolf was founded in the 1960s as part of what was once the Gulag system of forced labor camps, according to the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper.
A group of officers visit the prison colony in the city of Kharp, where temperatures will drop to minus 28 degrees Celsius in the coming week
A group of officers walk into a prison colony in the city of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenetsk region, about 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow
Strict rules dating back to Soviet times stipulate that prisoners’ families and lawyers are not informed of their whereabouts until they reach their destination
A group of prisoners sit during classes in the prison colony where Alexei Navalny’s associates say he has been located
Little has been reported on the general living conditions of prisoners not held in solitary confinement. Conditions in other facilities suggest they sleep in cramped rooms with cots.
Prisoners are also unlikely to be provided with clothing sturdy enough to withstand the freezing temperatures.
In January, Navalny joked about the Arctic conditions on the messaging app Telegram, sarcastically quipping: “Nothing gives you more energy than a walk in Yamal at 6:30 in the morning.”
“Even at this temperature, you can only walk for more than half an hour if you manage to grow a new nose, new ears and new fingers,” he wrote about the -25 degrees Celsius conditions.
Navalny mentioned a scene in the 2015 film The Revenant in which Leonardo DiCaprio takes shelter in the carcass of a horse.
“I don’t think that would have worked here. A dead horse would freeze in 15 minutes,” Navalny said. “We need an elephant here, a hot elephant, a fried elephant.”
The dark jokes were typical of Navalny’s refusal to break down in the face of unimaginable odds. He once described one of the colonies in which he was held as “a friendly concentration camp.”
The punishment cells where prisoners are held in solitary confinement would be small, with only a hole in the ground for a toilet.
And the concrete-walled walkways used by the prisoners are about eleven steps long, three steps wide and covered with metal bars.
Former prisoners in similar facilities have also told how guards regularly meted out electric shocks and beatings.
Ukrainian filmmaker Oleh Sentsov, who was imprisoned for five years in the IK-8 ‘Polar Bear’ prison, said: ‘As soon as you cross the threshold, they let you know that you are in purgatory where you have no rights and no one to complain against.
Navalny, pictured with his wife Yulia in happier times, waged a crusade against official corruption and organized mass protests against the Kremlin, angering the Kremlin
‘Beating, humiliation, electric shocks, being held naked or in wet clothes in a cold cell – but that’s not the worst… You can be locked in a fetal position in an iron box where you can barely breathe and have to pee on yourself. They routinely threaten to rape you if they bully you.”
In Penal Colony No. 6, where Navalny was previously held, rape and violence against prisoners are commonplace, while guards have been ruthless in their sadism.
While Navalny was held there, authorities punished him for minor infractions.
On one occasion he was punished for washing his hands six minutes earlier than planned, and on another occasion for undoing the top button of his shirt.
Since Navalny was first jailed in January 2021, he has been in and out of solitary confinement, which is often used to punish rule breakers in Russia’s prison system, both at Penal Colony No. 6 and the Polar Wolf facility.
After his most recent court appearance on Thursday – hours before his death – a message on Navalny’s X account said he was again sentenced to solitary confinement.
Imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is dead, the prison system of the Yamalo-Nenets region where he served his sentence said on Friday.
Russian news sources announced Navalny’s death – citing the Siberian prison where he served his sentence – sparking shock and anger around the world, with world leaders quick to point the finger at Russian President Vladimir Putin (pictured today in Russia)
Online news outlet SOTA reported that the court hearing was convened on Thursday after an “altercation” with a prison guard who tried to confiscate Navalny’s pen.
Navalny wrote later on Thursday that he had been given 15 days in solitary confinement.
“The Yamal prison decided to destroy Vladimir’s reputation for pleasing and pleasing the Moscow authorities. They just gave me fifteen days of solitary confinement,” he wrote on X.
“This is the fourth period of solitary confinement in less than two months that I have been with them,” he added.
On one of the last times he was seen earlier in 2023, Navalny had just emerged from his eleventh separate period of confinement in a 3-by-2-meter “concrete kennel,” with only a hole in the ground for a toilet.
Looking even thinner and unwell than usual, he was suffering from a serious lung infection, contracted after prison staff forced him to share a cell with a vagrant suffering from a contagious respiratory disease – and then refused to treat him when he fell ill.