Back in 2013, when Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was facing bogus criminal charges, I recalled when my great-grandfather, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, compared Russia to a tub full of dough. “You put your hand down in it, down to the bottom,” and “when you first pull out your hand, a little hole remains.” But then, “before your very eyes,” the dough returns to its original state — a “spongy, puffy mass.”
Navalny’s death in a remote Arctic penal colony more than a decade later proves that little has changed.
The prison where Navalny died is a particularly brutal one. Nicknamed “Polar Wolf,” it is a freezing cold gulag for violent criminals. But Navalny — an anti-corruption lawyer and blogger — was not known for violence. In 2013, he was fending off trumped-up embezzlement charges and the convictions that got him sent to Polar Wolf in 2021 were for parole violations, fraud and contempt of court. While in prison, he accumulated more convictions on fabricated charges, including supporting extremism.