From ice-cold cells to mysterious injections, prison put Navalny's health at risk

Aleksei A. Navalny portrayed himself as invincible and consistently used his trademark humor to suggest that President Vladimir V. Putin could not break him no matter how dire his prison conditions became.

But behind the brave face, the reality was clear to see. Since his incarceration in early 2021, Mr Navalny, Russia's most formidable opposition figure, and his staff have regularly suggested that his conditions were so dire that he was put to death in slow motion.

Now his aides believe their fears have come true.

The cause of Mr Navalny's death in prison at the age of 47 has not yet been determined – in fact, his family has not yet even been allowed to see his body – but Russia's toughest penal colonies are known for their dangerous conditions , and Mr. Navalny was singled out for particularly harsh treatment.

“Aleksei Navalny was subjected to torture and torture for three years,” said Russian journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dmitry A. Muratov wrote in a column after his death was announced Friday. “As Navalny's doctor said to me: the body cannot handle this.”

More than a quarter of Navalny's incarceration since 2021 was spent in freezing “punishment cells” and he was often denied access to medical care. He was transferred to increasingly cruel prisons. And at one point he said he was getting shots, but he couldn't figure out what was in the syringes. His team feared he was being poisoned again.

What specifically led to Mr. Navalny's death on Friday in a remote prison above the Arctic Circle may remain a mystery. Russia's prison service released a statement on Friday afternoon saying Mr Navalny felt ill and suddenly lost consciousness after being outside.

Russian state media reported that he had suffered a blood clot. But the story changed on Saturday, when Mr Navalny's mother and lawyer arrived at the prison. They were told he was suffering from “sudden death syndrome,” which appeared to indicate sudden cardiac arrest, said Ivan Zhdanov, director of Mr. Navalny's anti-corruption foundation.

Investigators told a lawyer for Mr. Navalny that a repeat investigation was being conducted and the results would be released next week. Mr Navalny's staff called for the immediate release of the body so his family could order an independent analysis, accusing Russian authorities of lying to conceal the body.

According to his aides, Mr. Navalny had been placed in a punishment cell at the Arctic prison in the Yamalo-Nenets autonomous region on Wednesday, two days before Russian authorities announced his death.

His spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, said this was his 27th time in such an inhumane space, usually a concrete cell about 2 by 3 meters with unbearable conditions: cold, damp and poorly ventilated. Had he survived, his final round of punishment would have brought his total time in such a cell to 308 days, more than a quarter of his time in confinement, Ms Yarmysh said.

Once a day at 6:30 a.m., prisoners in the Arctic facility's punishment cells are admitted to a coffin-like concrete room open to the sky through a metal grille, Mr. Navalny said. in a message from the institution earlier this year. According to the Russian Prison Service report, Mr Navalny appeared to lose consciousness after such a hearing on Friday. It was about -20 Fahrenheit outside.

In a letter from prison last month, Mr Navalny described how he was able to walk a total of 11 steps from one end of the open-air space to the other, noting that it was the coldest it had been on any of his walks so far: 26 Fahrenheit.

“Even at this temperature you can walk for more than half an hour, as long as you have time to grow a new nose, ears and fingers,” he wrote. “There are few things as invigorating as a walk in Yamal at half past six in the morning. And despite the concrete fence, what a lovely fresh breeze blows through the garden, wow!”

While walking there recently, he said he was freezing and thought about how Leonardo DiCaprio climbed into a dead horse to escape the cold in the wilderness survival film “The Revenant.” A dead horse would freeze within 15 minutes in that part of Russia, Mr. Navalny surmised.

“We need an elephant here – a hot, fried elephant,” he said.

Mr Navalny often used such humor despite his inhumane treatment. But during the three years of his captivity it had become increasingly clear that he might not survive.

“The cumulative treatment of Navalny over several years in prison – you could say it almost killed him,” Mariana Katzarova, the United Nations Human Rights Council special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Russia, said in an interview. Saturday. “We don't know yet. We need an investigation.”

For a while, Mr. Navalny seemed almost invincible.

In August 2020, he fell ill on a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow after being poisoned with a Russian-made nerve agent from the Novichok family. He was kept in an induced coma for two weeks during treatment in Germany – and survived.

The US government later attributed the poisoning to Russia's Federal Security Service, known as the FSB

Despite the assassination attempt, Mr Navalny returned to Russia in early 2021 to continue his fight against Mr Putin, who denied Russian involvement in the poisoning and was soon jailed. His health began to deteriorate almost immediately.

In March 2021, he took complained about severe back pain that later developed into a problem with his leg.

He demanded that the prison authorities provide him with proper medical care and give him medication. Instead, they subjected him to sleep deprivation, he said. At the end of March 2021, he took declared a hunger strike over his treatment, and Russian doctors and Hollywood stars have pleaded his case in open letters to Mr Putin.

About three weeks later, that was the case for Mr. Navalny investigated by an independent panel of doctors. The doctors' tests showed that “soon there will be no one left to treat,” Mr Navalny said in a post on Instagram.

Last year, Mr. Navalny wrote from prison that his jokes about the punishment cell should not normalize the environment. He regretted that a fellow political prisoner who had spoken out against the war in Ukraine had been put in a punishment cell, despite being disabled and missing part of his lung.

Mr. Navalny described the dire health conditions in the prison where he said many prisoners suffered from tuberculosis. He also complained about having one installed early last year mentally unwell person in a cell opposite him, as a form of torment, and a sick prisoner in his small cell.

His lawyer, Vadim Kobzev, said at the time that the prison deliberately infected him with a respiratory disease, refused to give him medication and then “treated” him with massive doses of contraindicated antibiotics. Mr. Navalny developed severe stomach pains and lost more than 15 pounds as a result, Mr. Kobzev said.

“These actions cannot be considered anything other than an open strategy to destroy Navalny's health in any way,” Kobzev said in a statement at the time. “It is clear that without Moscow's approval, the prison would not risk engaging in this level of demonstrative illegality.”

Mr Kobzev has since been arrested on charges of extremism over links to Mr Navalny – part of a wider roundup of the opposition leader's lawyers late last year.

Mr. Navalny became dizzy and was given an IV during an unexplained medical episode in early December. But Russian authorities still transferred him later that month from a prison in the Vladimir region, about 130 miles east of Moscow, to the “special regime” penal colony in the Arctic, where he died.

Several doctors contacted after his death, including one involved in his initial treatment in the Siberian city of Omsk, said his death was likely unrelated to his poisoning more than three years earlier, given his robust recovery.

But since then he has faced many other health risks.

“A Russian prison is a place where you have to be prepared to die every day,” Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, a Russian tycoon who spent 10 years in prison after challenging Putin, said on Friday.

In the interview, Mr. Khodorkovsky, who was released in 2013, said a prisoner must find a way to treat the burden as a test to survive mentally, and Mr. Navalny had done that. But even then, he added, “this doesn't protect you from death.”

Anton Trojanovsky reporting contributed.