Prominent Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has revealed the shocking conditions within Russia’s maximum security prison colony
Russian Opposition leader Alexei Navalny has given his first interview from a maximum security prison colony. The prison is located in Pokrov, 100km east of Moscow.
Navalny is known for his wok exposing corruption in Russia, and is highly critical of the Kremlin.
He compared the conditions within the prison to a ‘Chinese labour camp’, saying that officers force him to watch eight hours of state television every day.
“You need to imagine something like a Chinese labor camp, where everybody marches in a line and where video cameras are hung everywhere. There is constant control and a culture of snitching.”
Through pages of handwritten questions and answers sent from jail, the Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny laid out his case — by turns funny, sarcastic and ironic — for the inevitability of democracy in his country. Read excerpts of the interview: https://t.co/Th6OlroVzT pic.twitter.com/rDSCQN16Rk
— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 25, 2021
Russia’s psychological violence
Navalny said that his punishment of brainwashing and propaganda is a form of “psychological violence”.
He gave details as to how guards monitor the prisoners, prohibiting them from reading or writing, and waking them if they fall asleep.
Despite this, Navalny seemed to be in good spirits about the future of Putin’s regime in Russia.
“Sooner or later, this mistake will be fixed, and Russia will move on to a democratic, European path of development. Simply because that is what the people want,” he said.
Navalny calls for US and European governments to drop sanctions
He also reiterated that the US and Europe should remove their current sanctions on Russia, which impact the people more than those in power.
Navalny is currently serving a two and a half year sentence for his criticism of Russia’s president and the Kremlin.
However, this month a federal court also charged him with new crimes that could prolong his sentence by three years, after the next presidential election.
This comes after he was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok last year, Putin’s poison of choice. The Kremlin denies any involvement, and insists that his imprisonment isn’t political.
