Electrocutions, torture and -30ºC open-air ‘cage’… in Putin’s sadistic ‘Polar Wolf’ gulag where Alexei Navalny died
DEEP within the Arctic Circle is the sadistic ‘Polar Wolf’ gulag where Alexei Navalny ended his days, a frigid ‘purgatory’.
As the temperature drops below -30 degrees Celsius and the winter sun never rises, the prisoners are sent outside for morning roll call wearing only thin clothing.
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A former inmate said on social media: “I remember those walks in just a T-shirt. Horrible.
“I wouldn’t want anyone locked up there.”
When warmer spring weather arrives, plagues of biting mosquitoes and lice swarm over the convicts.
If one of the men backs away, the entire group is rinsed with water.
The barbaric prison regime was the Russian opposition leader from Navalny final punishment for defying tyrant Vladimir Putin.
This was announced on February 16 the 47 year old had died in the hellhole, where beatings and electric shocks are routinely administered and those deemed to have broken the rules are thrown into solitary confinement.
There can be few cruel or desolate prison colonies on earth.
Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, who was imprisoned in a nearby colony, said: “As soon as you cross the threshold, they make it clear that you have arrived in purgatory.
“You have no rights, and complaining to anyone is pointless.”
And an unnamed lawyer insisted: “Conditions there are extremely harsh because the special regime is essentially legalized torture.”
No wonder then that the following follows from Navalny Britain has sanctioned six officials running the prison, including the prison’s head, Colonel Vadim Konstantinovich Kalinin.
They are banished from British shores and their assets frozen.
‘Savage ritual’
It is claimed that Navalny – who was imprisoned on charges including fraud and extremism, which he denied – was probably murdered with a blow to the heart, a technique that was once taught KGB special forces agents.
Yet the brutal regime in the colony had already destroyed his health.
A prison train carrying the anti-corruption activist entered the city of Kharp last December.
Built by prisoners during the blood-soaked reign of the Soviet despot Joseph StalinKharp – 6,400 inhabitants – is home to the penal colony FKU IK-3, nicknamed Polar Wolf.
Few creatures could thrive in this bleak landscape, where dark pine forest meets frozen Arctic tundra.
Navalny’s chief strategist Leonid Volkov wrote on X/Twitter: “It is almost impossible to reach this colony, it is almost impossible to send letters there.
“This is the highest possible level of isolation in the world.”
Navalny’s transfer from a penal colony near Navalny, who had already survived a nerve agent poisoning in 2020, Moscow had lasted twenty tiring days.
When someone undresses and goes to wash, the water is turned off and people wearing masks come in and start beating him. They hit me with clubs and fists on my buttocks, my head, my face, my ribs
Micho Khulilidze
The prisoner of conscience would probably have passed the large statue of a giant gray wolf as he entered the prison camp.
Former prison guard Mikho Khulilidze, who was in Polar Wolf on kidnapping charges, told of a cruel welcome ritual for new convicts.
The former prisoner revealed: “When prisoners enter the colony, they are taken to the bathhouse.
“When someone undresses and goes to wash, the water is turned off and people wearing masks come in and start beating him.
“They hit me with clubs and fists on my buttocks, my head, my face, my ribs.”
Navalny’s new ‘home’ was a small cell; the view from his window was a towering chain link fence that he could just make out in the 24/7 darkness of an Arctic Circle winter.
Like the other prisoners, he was only allowed 30 minutes of outdoor exercise every day and two visits per year.
But on Boxing Day – shortly after his arrival – Navalny sent a cheerful message on social media through his lawyer, saying: “I am your new Santa Claus. I now live in the Arctic Circle.
“I don’t say ‘Ho-ho-ho’, but I do say ‘Oh-oh-oh’ when I look out the window, where I can see night, then evening, then night again.”
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Newcomers to Polar Wolf are often quarantined – officially for sanitary reasons – which serves as an early warning of the brutal conditions.
Former inmates say the prison is designed to make inmates feel “utterly hopeless” and crush “any rebellious spirit.”
At Polar Wolf, another brutal torture took place for those the authorities wanted to silence.
“If someone misbehaves in the eyes of the prison authorities, and they want to punish him, they can just lock him up in this prison. [outdoor] cage. . . lock him up and leave him overnight.
“And it’s understandable that someone would just freeze and die.
“Then they took him to the infirmary and made it look like he died in his sleep of heart failure.”
Meanwhile, another inmate who worked in the prison’s boiler room said on social media that he “looked like a skeleton after six months.”
On New Year’s Day, Navalny gave another glimpse into his life behind bars, jovially saying through his lawyers: “It’s just like any other day: we wake up at 5 a.m. and go to bed at 9 p.m. So for the first time since I was six, I just slept through New Year’s Eve.
“In general, I am satisfied. People pay money to celebrate the New Year in an unusual way, but I did it for free.”
At the beginning of January he posted a photo on the website Telegram app from his small concrete-walled training ground, which was only eleven steps long and three steps wide.
As temperatures plummeted, he cheerfully wrote: “It hasn’t been colder than -32°C yet. Nothing gives you more energy than a walk in Yamal at half past six in the morning.”
A joke about a scene in the 2015 film The Revenant, in which Leonardo DiCaprio shelters in the carcass of a horse, he added: “I don’t think that would have worked here.
‘Demons and Devils’
“A dead horse would freeze within 15 minutes. We need an elephant, a hot one, fried.”
Solitary confinement is used to punish those who have committed trumped-up offenses of the most trivial order.
In late January, a Navalny aide said the campaigner had endured 10 days of isolation for “misrepresenting himself” to a guard.
It was his 25th stint in solitary since he was jailed in February 2021 – 283 days in total.
A year earlier Navalny told how he was forced to share a cell with a prisoner who had serious mental health problems.
He said there are “a lot of videos online about people believing they are possessed by demons and devils” and that his new cellmate “looked very similar.”
It was said that the deranged man “let out a growling, guttural scream. . . He screams for fourteen hours during the day and three hours at night.”
In a previous prison, Navalny had shared a cell with a “homeless vagabond” who had “serious problems” with hygiene.
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He said: “If you live in a cell and someone lives within arm’s length of you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and you are both one or two meters away from the toilet 24 hours a day, and the toilet has a hole in it. the floor is, so your hygiene is fundamental.
“A prisoner who is problematic in this sense will immediately make your life unbearable.”
Navalny was convinced that the two cellmates had been deliberately placed there. Professor Robert Horvath, a specialist on Russian politics, said. “This system often uses other prisoners as weapons.”
Navalny was only 47, but his state-sponsored torture had aged him beyond his years.
Emaciated and haggard, he was physically broken, but his spirit remained unchanged. Then came the news that his supporters worldwide feared.
Authorities at the Siberian penal colony claimed he collapsed after a walk and was suffering from ‘sudden death syndrome’.
Activist Vladimir Osechkin believes assassins used the ‘one-punch’ technique to eliminate Navalny as the Russian presidential elections approximation.
The exiled dissident said: “I think they first destroyed his body by leaving him in the cold for a long time and limiting blood circulation to a minimum.
“Then it becomes very easy to kill someone within seconds. It is an old method of the KGB special forces.
“They trained their officers to kill a man with one punch to the heart. It was a hallmark of the KGB.”
from Navalny body was eventually returned to his mother Lyudmila eight days after his death.
His wife Yulia had accused Putin of forcing Lyudmila to agree to a secret burial in an unknown location, or to have her son’s body buried in prison forever. But she refused.
Now Julia has vowed to continue her husband’s “fight for a free Russia.”
Polar Wolf may have taken her heroic husband’s body, but Putin never gave Putin his soul.