The Russian state is making a sluggish spectacle of crushing Alexey Navalny and his group. The opposition politician is in jail, serving a two-and-a-half-year sentence for “violating his parole” whereas he recovered from a near-fatal poisoning attack by his personal authorities. Last week, Navalny’s attorneys and his spouse, Yulia, stated that he has developed well being issues for which jail authorities are denying ample remedy. He can be going through torture by sleep deprivation. (The jail service has denied mistreating Navalny.) On Wednesday, Navalny declared a starvation strike. Meanwhile, Navalny’s allies are planning new demonstrations to demand his launch. Dozens of people round Russia are nonetheless in jail after being arrested in reference to pro-Navalny demonstrations that occurred in January and February. Over the weekend, authorities arrested Yuri Zhdanov, the daddy of Ivan Zhdanov, who heads Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.
“Everyone who knows Alexey knows that he never complains,” Yulia Navalnaya wrote, on Instagram. “He tolerates pain in silence and makes jokes.” She wrote that Navalny had developed again ache a month earlier, whereas he was in jail in Moscow: “Ever since, he’s been in his current ‘friendly concentration camp,’ ” a time period that Navalny has used to characterize the jail colony. She added, “He’s been asking for pain relievers. A doctor who specializes in back problems wrote out on a piece of paper a set of special exercises that can be used to reduce pain. But these bastards not only won’t give him pain relievers or let a doctor come in and examine him but they even took the notes with these exercises away from the lawyer and won’t give them to Alexey.”
Navalny has been writing about his experiences in jail, and the entries are posted on his social-media accounts: “If you kept an eye on my court hearings, you might have noticed that I never sat down in the defendant box and spent hours pacing. That’s because I could either stand or lie down.” He wrote that he had been asking for medical assist in the jail colony, largely in useless. “It got to the point where it’s hard to get up from the bed, and it hurts a lot. . . . A week ago, the prison doctor saw me and started dispensing two ibuprofen pills [per day] but did not tell me what my diagnosis is.” He has began shedding using his proper leg. “If I place my weight on my right leg, I fall right down. That’s a little disturbing. I’ve got used to my right leg lately, and I’d hate to lose it.” Just months in the past, Navalny relearned the best way to stroll whereas recovering from publicity to the nerve agent Novichok. He joked about ambling across the jail colony on a picket leg and talking in quotations from “Treasure Island.” On Wednesday, Navalny wrote that he had developed numbness in his left leg, as nicely.
Navalny has also written concerning the many violations for which he has been cited for the reason that begin of his incarceration. He stated that the colony’s seven-person disciplinary committee is presently reviewing some twenty experiences of his alleged violations, together with “getting up from bed ten minutes before the order to get up” and refusing “to go outside for morning exercises, saying to prison officer, ‘Let’s go grab a cup of coffee instead.’ ” He stated he additionally reportedly “refused to watch a video lecture and called it idiotic” and “wore a T-shirt to a meeting with his lawyer.” He added, “I’m anticipating a citation that says, ‘was smiling broadly when the schedule prescribed suffering.’ ”
When Navalny first arrived on the jail colony, he wrote that he was woke up each hour of each night time. “I wake up because a man in uniform is standing by my bed. He is filming me, using a video camera and narrating, ‘Two-thirty, Inmate Navalny. Prophylactic check-in for escape risk. On location.’ And then I go back to sleep, knowing that there are people who are thinking about me and will never lose track of me.” Whatever levity Navalny brings to his accounts of his imprisonment, the impression they depart is of a person being tortured by sleep deprivation and refusal of medical care.
When Navalny returned to Russia, on January 17th—from Germany, the place he had been recovering from the aftereffects of the poisoning—he knew he was prone to be arrested on trumped-up prices, however said that he didn’t need to change into “just another political émigré.” Other leaders of his group have been dwelling in exile, in order to remain out of Russian prisons. On Monday, Ivan Zhdanov, the pinnacle of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, stated that his father, a retired civil servant, had been arrested, ostensibly as a result of, in 2019, he allegedly really useful a household for backed housing who could not have certified. “My father is sixty-six years old and has many medical conditions,” Ivan Zhdanov wrote, on Facebook. “I don’t think he can get out of pre-trial detention without losing what remains of his health, if he survives at all. . . . They will sink lower only if they start killing children for what their fathers do. They’ve already started killing fathers for their children’s actions. . . . I’m not going to lie, this is the most terrifying thing that could have happened to me.”
Last week, Leonid Volkov, who runs the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s organizing arm, introduced a plan to carry mass protests demanding Navalny’s launch. Past protests have been largely spontaneous, however this one is asking individuals to register; as soon as half 1,000,000 individuals have pledged to participate, the group will announce dates and places for demonstrations. The Anti-Corruption Foundation has created a page exhibiting those that have registered in cities and cities round Russia. Putting oneself on the map takes braveness—eleven thousand individuals had been detained throughout winter protests, and dozens had been chosen, seemingly at random, to be prosecuted. Everyone is aware of what occurs to leaders like Zhdanov, and to Navalny himself, who has the eyes of the world on him. Still, to this point, greater than 300 and fifty thousand Russians have stated that they are going to threat their very own security to attempt to save Navalny.
