Each morning at 5am, Alexei Navalny was roused with the words “Wake up!” as the Russian national anthem played on the prison loudspeakers. It was always dark in the polar night above the Arctic Circle, and the temperature outside could fall below -30C (-22F). The convict would have a sheepskin coat and an ushanka hat to keep warm in a prison colony better known by its nickname: the Polar Wolf.
Then, a second song began: I am Russian – a nationalistic anthem by the pro-Kremlin pop star Shaman that has become a favourite at patriotic rallies.
“So imagine the scene,” wrote Navalny in one of his last accounts from a punishment cell in the Polar Wolf. “A prisoner Alexey Navalny, who is sentenced to 19 years in prison, and whom Kremlin propaganda has tirelessly smeared for years because he participated in Russian protests, is exercising to the song I am Russian, which he is being given as an educational activity for correctional purposes.”
Inside a punishment cell, Navalny said, he could not see the sky. In the past, he had had to choose between eating his breakfast and writing letters to friends and acquaintances, as he had just 30 minutes for both. Just days before his death, his mother came for a rare visit.
“I don’t want to hear any condolences,” she later wrote. “We saw our son in the colony on the 12th, we had a visit. He was alive, healthy and cheerful.”
From late December until his death on 16 February, Navalny spent his last days in Russia’s IK-3 prison, a harsh penal colony above the Arctic Circle that was built in 1961 on the site of the 501st gulag, one of the Stalin-era labour camps that housed millions of prisoners during the Soviet era.
In descriptions by former prisoners, confidantes of Navalny, prison activists and journalists, as well as Navalny’s own letters from the far north, the Guardian has put together an account of where and how the fiercest political opponent of Vladimir Putin spent his last days.
Navalny understood he might never leave prison alive. Yet there is little doubt his dispatch to IK-3 in the remote Yamalo-Nenets region hastened his demise, either due to the extreme conditions or a more direct act of foul play.
“This is one of the most remote and inaccessible areas of Russia, with extreme climatic conditions,” says Olga Romanova, the founder and head of the Russian prisoner advocacy organisation Russia Behind Bars. “Of course, there is no public oversight there – but that’s like everywhere else.”
Platon Lebedev, a former business partner of the ex-Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky, spent two years in the colony from 2005. In an interview then, Lebedev complained about the relentless mosquitoes that thrive in the region in the spring, part of what experts say is the “use of climate as a tool of repression”.