Navalny’s prison pen pal reveals how he stayed sane in Arctic ‘Polar Wolf’ prison
Alexei Navalny kept his sanity in Russian prison by making jokes and “mocking the border guards,” according to a survivor of the same gulag.
Forty years ago, 76-year-old Soviet dissident and former Israeli minister Natan Sharansky spent nine years in the same frigid Arctic facility where Navalny died.
Although they never met, the intergenerational activists formed a historic friendship revealed through deeply personal letters they changed in 2023.
They bonded over a shared sense of humor and how little the Russian prison system has changed since Sharansky was an inmate – as detailed in his memoir Fear No Evil.
Navalny, 47, said Sharansky’s book gave him “hope” for Russia’s future in his final year behind bars in the IK-3 colony, about 250 kilometers east of Moscow.
Speaking to DailyMail.com in the aftermath of his death, Sharanksy called Navalny a ‘hero’ and revealed the methods they used to stay sane amid horrific conditions.
Alexei Navalny (pictured) kept his sanity in Russian prison by making jokes and “mocking the border guards,” according to a survivor of the same gulag and his friend Natan Sharansky, 76
Most recently it was reported that Navalny died of ‘sudden death syndrome’, but no details were given to substantiate this claim
Sharansky was a chess prodigy as a child, and he said playing the board game in his head helped him get through 100 days of near-starvation and solitary confinement in the 1980s.
Meanwhile, Navalny had to endure the same torture methods 40 years later by “mocking the border guards” deployed to enforce the Orwellian system.
“I was in a small room, about six square meters, very cold, they take away all the warm clothes,” Sharansky told DailyMail.com on Thursday.
‘Three slices of bread, three cups of water a day, no one to talk to, nothing to write or read, no bed, no normal table.
‘Through it all you have to remind yourself why you are there and find the way to feel very deeply that you are in the middle of the struggle, to keep saying no to the KGB and not to give in to the pressure you experience every moment.
“In my case I also played a lot of chess in my head, in Navalny’s case I think he spent a lot of time joking (and) mocking the border guards.
“But you really have to find a way to be very serious and feel yourself in the middle of the struggle, and laugh at the system, push it aside, overcome it.
‘You become physically weaker and weaker, you lose weight, but it is important not to lose your moral integrity.
“It’s surprising how similar our experiences were… that’s why it was very easy for us (to become friends) without knowing each other before.”
Sharansky praised Navalny for “maintaining his six meters of freedom in his cell against all odds,” and condemned his murder as “a terrible, cynical murder of a true hero.”
The two activists were strangers when Navalny began their correspondence – he wrote his first letter to Sharansky from IK-3.
“Navalny wrote to me in his letter that ‘your book makes me feel very optimistic because one regime has already fallen,’” Sharansky added.
‘He knew they could kill him, but this regime is doomed, and that made him optimistic.
‘And with me it was the same: we knew that the (Soviet) regime was doomed. I didn’t know if I would get out alive, but I knew the regime was doomed.’
Forty years ago, Soviet dissident and former Israeli minister Natan Sharansky, 76, spent nine years in the same icy Arctic facility where Navalny died.
Civil rights activist, Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky from the USSR (wearing fur hat) and US Ambassador Richard Burt after his release in West Germany at the Glienicker Bridge connecting (East German) Potsdam and (West) Berlin
Canadians protest in support of Sharansky on his 35th birthday on the 115th day of his hunger strike in a Soviet prison
“You decide that your freedom is not theirs, but mine alone,” he added. “By saying no to the KGB you are part of this historic struggle against this regime… the struggle continues.”
Sharansky named former Washington Post columnist Vladimir Kara-Murza and Russian opposition leader Ilya Yashin as two prominent activists carrying Navalny’s torch.
He added that “more and more ordinary people in Russia” are also feeling uncomfortable with the increasingly authoritarian stranglehold Putin is exerting over them.
“The more uncomfortable people feel, the more they resist, and the more effort the regime has to make to control them,” he said. “It will fall.”
Sharanski said there are several networks inside and outside Russia that continue the fight against Putin, including those that write letters to prisoners in the gulags.
Crowdfunding efforts to support political prisoners have also raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. including one telethon organized last summer by several independent media outlets, which raised 34.5 million rubles ($415,000).
Born in Donestk, eastern Ukraine, Sharansky was imprisoned in the former Soviet Union in 1977 while campaigning for the rights of Jews to immigrate to Israel.
He was convicted on a trumped-up charge of spying for the Americans, and spent nine years of torture and solitary confinement in the Siberian prison where Navalny died on February 16, 2024.
Sharansky became the first political prisoner to be released by former Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev in a prisoner exchange in 1986, following an international campaign for his freedom led by his wife Avital.
He wrote a book called Fear No Evil, which Navalny, 47, read in prison and said it gave him “hope” for Russia’s future. Sharansky continued a decades-long career in politics, rising to the level of Israel’s deputy prime minister in 2001.