Алексей Навальный

It has been exactly two years since I returned to Russia. I have spent these two years in prison. When you write a post like this, you have to ask yourself: How many more of such anniversary posts will you have to write? 
Life and the events around us prompt the answer: however many it may take. Our miserable, exhausted Motherland needs to be saved. It has been pillaged, wounded, dragged into an aggressive war, and turned into a prison run by the most unscrupulous and deceitful scoundrels. Any opposition to this gang - even if only symbolic in my current limited capacity - is important. 
I said it two years ago, and I will say it again: Russia is my country. I was born and raised here, my parents are here, and I made a family here - I found a loved one and had kids with her. I am a full-fledged citizen and I have the right to unite with like-minded people and be politically active. There are plenty of us, certainly more than corrupt judges, lying propagandists, and Kremlin crooks. 
I'm not going to surrender my country to them, and I believe that the darkness will eventually fade away. But as long as it persists, I will do all I can, try to do what is right, and urge everyone not to abandon hope.
Russia will be happy!

In my two years behind bars, my only truly original story is the one about the psycho. Everything else has been told and described numerous times.

If you open any book by a Soviet dissident, there will be endless stories of punishment cells, hunger strikes, violence, provocations, lack of medical care. In short, nothing new. But my story about the psycho is really new - at least I've never seen or heard anything like it. 

So, let me give you an idea of the place where I sit all the time. It is a narrow corridor with cells on either side. The metal doors offer little to no soundproofing, plus there are ventilation holes above the doors, so the two people sitting in the cells opposite can have a conversation without even raising their voices. This is the main reason why there has never been anyone in the cell opposite from mine, nor in my entire 8-cell section. I was the only one there, and I had never seen any other punished convicts the whole time (well, except for my cellmate, the tractor driver, of course).

And then about a month ago, they put a psycho in the cell across from mine. At first I thought he was faking it. Very active and cartoonish. If you tell a kid to act like a madman, that's about what he'll come up with. Screaming, growling, hitting, barking, arguing with himself in three different voices. But in the case of my psycho, 70% of the words are obscene. There are a lot of videos online of people who think that they've been possessed by demons. This is very similar - the growling wail (my favorite of his three personas) comes on periodically and doesn't turn off for hours. That's why I stopped to think he was a faker - no normal person can yell for 14 hours every day during the day and 3 hours at night for a month. And when I say "yell", I mean the kind of yelling that makes one's neck veins swell up. 

For the past month, I've been going nuts and starting every checkup by demanding to transfer this lunatic somewhere else. It's impossible to sleep at night or read during the day. They don't transfer him, and they deliberately emphasize: he is a convict just like you. 

And then I find out a wonderful detail: this nutcase was incarcerated (he got 24 years for killing someone) in another place, and a month ago they moved him here on purpose, and now they constantly keep him in a punishment cell, so that he, so to speak, keeps me entertained. 

I have to admit that this plan is working: I never get bored, not do I ever get a good night's sleep. Sickness is especially cool: during the day you suffer in a cell with a fever and dream of the night when they lower your bunk bed and give you a mattress, and at night you listen to the cheerful barking of your neighbor. As you know, sleep deprivation is one of the most effective tortures, but formally, I can't complain: he's an inmate like me, he was also put in a punishment cell, and it is up to the administration to decide who gets put in which cell. 

But as usual in such situations I am amazed at something else.
This was all planned, you know. Someone thought of this and implemented it at the regional or federal level - you can't just transfer a convict for no reason at all, there's a rule about serving your whole term in one colony. So there was an order from above: press him. And the generals and colonels at lower levels held a meeting: "So, how shall we press him?" And someone, wanting to distinguish himself, said: "We have a madman in this and that prison, he screams day and night. Let's take him to Navalny."
"Yes, yes. What a great idea, fellow officers. Comrade Colonel, proceed and report on the execution."
I won't be surprised if it turns out that they took a raving madman from a prison hospital, declared him sane, and now keep him in a cell across mine so that he can entertain me.

The moral of this story is simple: the Russian prison system, the Federal Penitentiary Service, is run by a real collection of not just scoundrels, but real sick perverts. Everything in their system always has a sick twist: the infamous mop rapes, sticking boilers up people's anuses, etc. It wouldn't occur to a bad but sane person to do such a thing. Everything you read about the horrors and fascist crimes of our prison system is all true. There's just one correction: the reality is even worse.

I did manage to earn my tenth term in the punishment cell in the last year after all. My prison goons actually bothered enough to convene their commission on the weekend of December 31 especially for me. 
"Convict Navalny, surveillance operator noticed that you washed your face at 5:24 in the morning, while according to the schedule you wake up at 5:00 and wash at 6:00. Given the severity of the offense (they really said so) you will be transferred to the punishment cell for a maximum term of 15 days." 
Thus my plans for a fancy New Year were ruined: I had saved a packet of potato chips and a can of saury for it. So I spent the New Year in the ShIZO with my old friends: a bum (who was sad) and a psycho (who was howling and shouting behind the door). 
New Year in the ShIZO is like any other day: getting up at 5 and going to bed at 21. So for the first time since I was six years old I just slept the whole New Year night. All in all I am pleased. People pay money to celebrate New Year in some unusual way, and I got that for free. 
I'm only a little worried about the depression of my neighbor, the bum. I should probably call him a tractor driver now, since I cleaned him up very well and he is a tractor driver by trade. He was released on January 3 and brought back to me on January 4. And whenever they let him out, they do not take him to the barracks like everyone else. Instead, they always declare him ill and put him in the medical ward, which was full of flu patients - there's an epidemic here. And exactly 24 hours later they threw him back into my cell. It seems like they use him as a bioweapon. No wonder he's sad. 
Stay healthy in the new year! 😉

Guess what this is.
The exact answer will be at the end of this post, but generally, you can see the state of human rights and justice in Russia in these pictures. See how the system works when you are not allowed to beat up a person, but your leadership ordered you to hurt them badly. 
For example, I have a problem with my spine. It is clear what one has to do to make the problem worse: keep me immobile as much as possible. That's easy to achieve. If you lock a person up in a punishment cell, where he can either stand or sit on an iron stool for 16 hours a day, after a month in such conditions even a healthy person will undoubtedly get back pains. I've spent the last three months like this. Naturally, my back hurts a lot. 
So, what can I do? I write a petition: call me a doctor. After a month and a half, and only after a threat of a lawsuit, the doctor comes - some woman in a mask. She takes five minutes to examine me and writes something in my medical record. When asked obvious questions like what her diagnosis is, what she prescribed me, and even what her last name is and where she works, the woman says: "Take him away". Taking me away is the only thing that is done here quickly and without any problems. 
After a while they start giving me some kind of injections. "What are you injecting?" - I ask. "We inject what the doctor prescribed. B vitamins, for example." Vitamins are great, but the injections don't help, and in general, I feel a little uncomfortable being injected with an unknown drug. 
I ask: "Write down on a piece of paper the name of the doctor, the diagnosis, and what they're giving me." I ask once, twice, twenty-two times. My lawyer writes a complaint. All to no avail.
I open the Internal Rules and see that I have a 100% guaranteed right to get a copy of my medical records. What good rules, I think, and write a request for a copy of my records. Exactly one month later, I get an answer: according to the law you have the full right to get your medical records, here they are, a 26-page attachment. 
You have probably already guessed by now that the screenshots above are what my medical records look like.
It's like they're saying, "We had to give you the chart, so here it is, enjoy reading it."
And they're all smiling, laughing and having a blast. They don't even hide the fact that I can write as many complaints as I want to the court and Moscow, but it was Moscow that came up with it all. The head of the Federal Penitentiary Service, General Gostev, personally approved it, and in the courts there are the same people like them, but wearing mantles instead of uniforms. 
And you laughed at the fact that I'm getting winter boots through court. Well, what else can I do? Now I'm going to sue for the right to actually be able to read something in my own medical records. I'm looking forward to the moment when they will start bringing meals to my cell only after I file a court complaint. 
Well, that's okay. I'm a lawyer myself and I love trials. My lawyers are getting a little tired though 😉

A regular and joyful event in my life - getting out of the punishment cell - now looks quite mundane. They just take me out of the last cell of the long corridor and bring me to the first one, but on our way we enter the search room, where I change my clothes. After all, there must be order in everything: while I am in the punishment cell (ShIZO), there must be huge stenciled letters "ShIZO" on the back of my shirt, and if I am put in the "cell-type room" (PKT), then the letters "PKT" must be on the back of my shirt as well. 
Despite the distance of only 30 meters, there is a huge difference from a practical point of view. In the punishment cell nothing is allowed, and in the regular cell they give me food I can purchase at the prison store along with my meal. So while I'm at one end of the corridor I drink boiling water, and when I'm at the other end of it, I drink coffee, which improves my mood by 300 percent. 
I'm constantly weighed here, so I know that on average I lose 3.5 kilograms of weight for every 10 days in the punishment cell, which I slowly regain if they don't put me back right away. 
I read somewhere that when you fatten piglets, you cannot always feed them well - you will get a lot of fat and not enough meat. Competent breeders alternate: they feed the piglets for one month and then "marinate" them for the next month. That way you get excellent results: a layer of fat, a layer of meat, a layer of fat, a layer of meat. 
This makes me think: could it be that they want to eat me? I mean, the African dictator Bokassa was known to eat members of the opposition in order to gain their power. 
Putin's level of madness is on par with Bokassa's and his 24-year reign is quite respectable for any crazed dictator. So he may well adopt the best practices of his "colleagues". That would be very original and demonstrate to the whole world that we are following our own independent way of development and the West cannot tell us what to do 😉

It's amazing with how much delight and schadenfreude our propagandists (in my case, the radio in my cell) talk about the destruction of Ukraine's energy system. Basking in joy, they report how many cities have been left without power, how many people have no heat, how the Kyiv subway has stopped working again, and details like, "People heat up food with candles," which bring them to an ecstasy that is noticeable even in their voices. 
Certainly, I don't expect these creeps to have any basic sympathy for innocent civilians in a horrible situation. I am rather puzzled as to why they cannot look a little further than their own noses and take simple things into account. Firstly, these strikes on civilian infrastructure do not demonstrate the power and prowess of Russian weapons at all, but rather the helplessness of the Russian army. Having suffered several major defeats at the hands of the troops they allegedly destroyed a year ago, it is simply taking revenge on the civilian population. The population certainly suffers, but there is no military sense in these strikes. And this is clearly how Russian citizens perceive it. Look at the second slide: the poll shows that only 14% of Russian citizens still agree that the "special military operation" is going well. And the proportion of such answers is dropping with each passing month.
Secondly, and most importantly, we are pounding the Ukrainian energy system with missiles invented (and often made) back in the Soviet Union. And also Iranian drones, those flying mopeds, which nevertheless turned out to be more high-tech than anything the Russian army possesses after 23 years under the leadership of Supreme Commander-in-Chief Putin. And it is quite obvious that Ukraine, being a scientifically and industrially advanced state and formerly a key part of the Soviet military-industrial complex, can definitely create something no worse than an Iranian flying moped, and most likely even better. 
We have seen in practice how our air defenses work - they do not. If Ukraine was able to hit a strategic aviation airfield deep inside the country, and if we ourselves maniacally impose this type of war with strikes on power grids on them, we will soon see that, as they say, two can play at this game. And then the Ukrainians will knock out the lights and heat first in Kursk and Belgorod, then in Voronezh, and then in Moscow. Who will we then complain to about needing to heat food for our children with a candle flame? 
It is clear what the propagandists will say: in response to our peaceful humanitarian missile strikes, they employ terrorist and Russophobic missile strikes. But that won't sound convincing at all.

Life in Russia has completely turned into a set of episodes from the movie "Wedding in Malinovka". There is not even a semblance of law and order, and the main faces are some gang members. 
It turns out that Putin's cook Prigozhin came to my penal colony as well in order to recruit convicts into his battalions. An eyewitness recounts: "He arrived by helicopter, all the convicts were gathered at the stadium together with their superiors. Prigozhin was small and bald. He said: "I've done 10 years myself, I'm calling on you to become my storm troopers. In six months I'll issue a pardon to everyone, you have five minutes to think about it." After that, 80-90 people went to the headquarters (administration building) to register, and then there was a second wave of recruitment. 
What I want to say is that you and I don't fully understand what terrible long-term consequences all this recruitment will have. 
There are 440,000 people sitting in Russian prisons. Over a short period of time a couple of million people pass through the system of pre-trial detention facilities and prisons. They are the Russian criminal population. That is, the police, the IC, the courts and prisons mainly exist for them. We spend enormous amounts of money and effort to keep them from committing crimes. 
And now 100% of this population, the law-abidingness of which we so desperately want to increase, knows exactly: there is no law, there are no courts, there are no rules. All of this is a fiction - these lies about educational work and correction as an opportunity for parole. At the snap of a finger, literally within 24 hours, murderers and robbers with huge prison sentences are released not by the court, and not even by Putin, but by the small bald man who comes to prisons with a story about doing 10 years himself. And all these colonels, lieutenant-colonels, operatives, tutors, and security officers, who were only just puffing their cheeks and imagining themselves to be, if not all-powerful, then some kind of guardians of the law, stand at attention before this "great warlord," whose image lacks only a huge bottle of muddy moonshine in his hands. 
And this generation of criminals, and many generations to come, will tell each other stories along the lines of "He still had 15 years left to serve for two murders, but they let him out." And this will be right up there with false, hypocritical lectures about how you have to participate in artistic activities in order to get commendations and qualify for parole many years later. 
And it's not just about convicts. Even though there aren't many of them, there still are decent people in the penitentiary system. How must they feel standing at the stadium next to convicts, to whom a former criminal announces: "If you're ready to be my storm troopers, in five minutes I'll take you away from here, and in six months you're free with a pardon."? Both the courts, and the investigators, and the FSB are complicit and involved in this, because they either have to cover it up, or organize it, or pretend not to notice it. This is the very real underlying corrosion of the foundations of the state. 
We will be paying the price for this for a long time. Even if it were militarily expedient, even then it would be completely unacceptable. But even from the military point of view this is nonsense, the usual Putin-Prigozhin corruption crap. Putin told Prigozhin to create squads of criminals, where they smash heads with sledgehammers and hold public executions. And all this for the purpose of shamelessly snatching a piece of land from the neighboring state. The foundations of law are being destroyed in Russia for the sake of a future defeat in a shameful war.

I am a genius of the underworld. Professor Moriarty is no match for me. You all thought I had been isolated in prison for two years, but it turns out I was actively committing crimes. Luckily, the Investigative Committee was vigilant and didn't miss a thing. 
I received an official notification that a new criminal case was opened against me due to the fact that I, while in prison:
- Promoted and called for terrorism
- Publicly called for extremism
- Financed extremist activities
- Rehabilitated Nazism.
Isn't it awesome? Rarely has a criminal done as much on the outside as I have done while behind bars. The only thing that casts a shadow on my smugness is the fact that these achievements aren't just my own, but also the work of my accomplices: Leonid Volkov, Ivan Zhdanov, Liliya Chanysheva. I am the leader of a criminal group, and they follow my orders.
For example, as I understood from the ruling, my fault in promoting Nazism lies in the fact that Volkov said on the air of Popular Politics: "Colonel Stauffenberg was right to try to kill Hitler, he must have been killed". From the point of view of the Investigative Committee and Putin, Hitler was the legitimate authority, and blowing him up was an act of extremism.
Everything else follows the same line. All the programs on Popular Politics are terror and extremism conducted under my leadership.
My attorneys calculated that, taking into account the punishments under each of these articles, my cumulative sentence must be about 30 years.
What can I say? Subscribe to @politica_media 😉

“Your Honour, you come face to face with what is happening every day. You know that this is not going to end well. Why tear people away from their families and send them to the frontline to kill other people? Are we not—all of us—citizens of Russia? How do you sleep at night knowing this?”

Today the appeal hearing of Alexei Navalny’s sentence concerning his “fraud” case has taken place. Last spring he was tried right in the penal colony and sentenced to 9 years of imprisonment.

“I plead not guilty. And I think that others, such as myself, have done everything in their power in order to prevent the events that are transpiring right now. And we continue to do so. And I urge every Russian citizen to fight against this regime, this war, and the mobilization.”

Watch the full video on the “Navalny LIVE” channel.

I'm sorry, I'm always the last one to learn the news. But this is something that is worth writing about it even after everyone else has.

If I myself were asked who should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and not even right now, but in any of the last few years, I would answer: "Memorial Human Rights Center".

This is a great organization. It has had and continues to have amazing and legendary people working there. They and people like them are the hope of our country.

Congratulations and hugs to everyone at Memorial, I am so proud of you.

I congratulate Ales Bialiatski, the Viasna Human Rights Centre and all the Belarusian people, who got locked in one huge punishment cell by their government. Freedom will come, just like spring.

I congratulate the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties. The Peace Prize has a special weight and significance for a nominee from a country at war, where "peace" is not a trivial abstraction, but something that people are fighting and dying for. I am sure that this Peace Prize is the first of many that will justly go to the citizens and organizations of Ukraine. Let peace come, let prizes come, let happy life come.

Alexei Navalny is a beacon of hope for democracy in Russia and around the world and the face of the opposition against Putin.

I am in awe of Navalny’s courage. His efforts to champion a more democratic vision for Russia are selfless and shocking. And insanely brave.

Many are afraid to speak their own mind. That’s why it’s so important to think about Alexei Navalny these days, who is still a courageous man and stands for principles that offer good prospects for many Russian citizens.

There are real heroes in this world and they are not on movie screens. Navalny is a moral superhero. A hero of conscience and courage. He’s survived assassination attempts and sits in prison right now because of his fight for truth and democracy, not just for Russia but for all who are sick of corruption, greed, and the violent abuse of power. He has a wife and children, but, like Mandela and Havel, he refuses to capitulate to bullies. Solidarity with this man should be a global commitment.

He is a stalwart fighter for a Russia free of the Putin stain. When Russia eventually emerges from the petty authoritarianism misruling the country, Mr. Navalny’s fellow citizens must remember his sacrifice.

With the eyes of the world now trained on Russian President Vladimir Putin amid his brutal invasion of Ukraine, Navalny’s message of resistance is finding new weight inside and outside of Russia, even as he remains behind bars.

He understood if he wanted to be the moral conscience of the nation, he had to lead by example. And show people that they should not be afraid. And that he wasn’t going to be afraid.

Navalny has been exposing Kremlin corruption since 2008. His campaign to dislodge Russia’s ruthless dictator has inspired unprecedented street protests; at their height these involved tens of thousands of people marching through Moscow chanting, “Putin is a thief”.

Even though he has been unable to challenge the president at the ballot box, his voice retains its power for many Russians and he remains a threat to the Kremlin.

Navalny now sits in one of Russia’s worst prisons, his life in the hands of a dictator who all evidence says already tried to kill him once for exposing the grotesque corruption of his regime. Navalny saw no alternative to risking everything to make a difference in his country. Even the all-powerful Vladimir Putin recognizes the power of a single man without fear.

For recognizing corruption as the biggest political problem of our times, and for risking limb and life to fight it, Navalny deserves the Nobel Peace Prize—or, at the very least, the full and unconflicted support of decent people.

Mr. Navalny knew what awaited him, because he knows as well as the dissidents of the Soviet era knew that the one thing a corrupt and authoritarian regime cannot abide is the truth. “I am not afraid. I know that I am in the right.