Russian power continues to intimidate its opponents. Opponent and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, who has been jailed in Russia for a year and a half, said he was put in a disciplinary cell on Monday, August 15.
“Greetings from isolation,” she wrote Twitter (in English) the opponent sentenced to 9 years imprisonment in a “strict regime penal colony” in March. “Union struggle is never easy, but then what about the unions in prison,” he adds, a week after announcing the creation of a union of prisoners in his prison near the city of Vladimir.
1/17 I am an icon of conscious consumption.
In my cell there is only a mug and a book. I only get a spoon and a plate with meals. They even took away my prison clothes and gave me makeshift ones. Now I have huge white letters SHU on my back.
Greetings from solitary confinement.
— Alexei Navalny (@navalny) August 15, 2022
Alexei Navalny explains that he was put in solitary confinement for three days for unbuttoning the top of his prison garb, which “obviously makes me an incorrigible and unrepentant villain,” he jokes his messages. He adds that management has threatened to make the solitary cell his “permanent residence” if he “doesn’t change his mindset.”
He describes his cell as a “concrete alcove” where “it’s very hot,” with a chair, a fold-out bed, a sink, and “a hole in the floor.” Visits are forbidden there, as are letters and packages, he only has “a cup and a book”. “I’m a role model for responsible consumption,” jokes the opponent, who was arrested on his return to Russia in January 2021 after suffering severe poisoning, which he blames on the Kremlin. With pen and paper, allotted him just over an hour a day, he now says he wants to write a handbook on prisoners’ rights to inform them.
16/17 I am now sitting on an iron bench behind an iron desk. I’m going to end this thread and write a handbook for inmates on their workplace rights until they take the paper away. The Commission is right: I really do seem incorrigible
— Alexey Navalny (@navalny) August 15, 2022