The last known images of Alexei Navalny alive sum up his character and martyrdom. Filmed by the online media outlet Sota on Thursday, February 15, on the eve of his death, they show the opposition leader appearing before a court in Kovrov via a screen, from his prison colony in Kharp, in the Arctic. They record one of the countless procedures pitting him against the prison administration.
Freshly extracted from solitary confinement to appear in court, Navalny appeared slimmed down but in good shape, smiling and even able to joke with the judge that his bank accounts were running dry and that the court's decisions were "helping to empty them." Judge and prisoner parted cordially; even the uniformed bailiff flashed a smile. The following day, the prison administration announced Navalny's death. The 47-year-old prisoner leaves behind a wife, Yulia, and two children, Daria, 22, and Zakhar, 15.
Right up to the end, in the increasingly rare messages he managed to get out, he displayed his optimism, his good humor even. Yet his condition was cause for despair: Sentenced to several terms in prison (the longest being 19 years), he was facing other charges, a litany that had the whiff of a life sentence.
Until the very end, too, he refused to make the slightest concession to the regime he had fought against for two decades, contesting every decision made by his jailers, even going so far as to demand the right to form a union of prisoners and guards. Even after his imprisonment, Navalny never abandoned his ambition to enter politics. In his messages and in court, he continued to vilify Vladimir Putin and denounce the Russian president's "criminal" war in Ukraine.
Three of his lawyers are in prison for helping to pass on these messages, which were then published on social media. Navalny himself paid a heavy price for this persistence. Following his arrest on his return to Russia in January 2021, he was sent to solitary confinement 27 times, on the most flimsy of pretexts: "didn't button his uniform properly," "didn't put his hands behind his back while walking," "quoted a decision of the European Court of Human Rights" or "didn't clean the yard properly."
In the prisons of the Vladimir region where he was held until his transfer to the Arctic in December 2023, the prisoner was also subjected to informal pressures: assaults by fellow inmates, unanswered requests for winter boots, and refusals of medical treatment, which led him to go on hunger strike for over three weeks in April 2021. In solitary confinement, he frequently shared his cell with an insane, unwashed prisoner, who screamed all day long. Navalny also complained of having to listen, day after day, to long reruns of Putin's speeches.
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