His relatives had not been heard from for three weeks. On Monday 25 December, Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Putin's main political opponent, was able to give news of his detention, through his lawyer, who was allowed to visit him. And these are not necessarily reassuring for the 47-year-old activist.

The founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), sentenced last August to 19 years in prison for "extremism", has just been transferred to the IK-3 penal colony in Kharp, located in the Yamalo-Nenets region, beyond the Arctic Circle, and nearly 1,900 kilometers northeast of Moscow. The opponent disappeared at the beginning of December from the penal colony in the Vladimir region, worrying even US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who had a message about X before Christmas.

1/9 I am your new Santa Claus.

Well, I now have a sheepskin coat, an ushanka hat (a fur hat with ear-covering flaps), and soon I will get valenki (a traditional Russian winter footwear). I have grown a beard for the 20 days of my transportation.

— Alexey Navalny (@navalny) December 26, 2023

In a series of humorous messages published on X, Alexei Navalny spoke about his new conditions of detention, thanks to information passed on to his lawyers: "I now have a sheepskin coat, an ushanka hat (a fur hat with flaps that cover the ears) and soon I will have valenki (traditional Russian winter shoes). I grew a beard during the 20 days of my transport [...]. The 20 days of transportation were pretty exhausting, but I'm still in a good mood, as befits a Santa Claus."

"Sever ties between detainees and their relatives"

Behind these ironic tweets, however, lies a much harsher reality. In Kharp, where he is staying, Alexei Navalny will have to contend with temperatures of up to -40°C in winter, his access to e-mails and his visiting rights will be severely limited. "Even if Navalny is still provocative, always showing humor, he has health problems, and faces the isolation, even torture that exists in some Russian prisons," said Sylvie Bermann, former ambassador of France to Moscow between 2017 and 2019. "The weather conditions are very harsh, much harsher than in previous colonies," says Marc Elie, a Gulag historian at the Center for the Study of the Russian, Caucasian and Central European Worlds (Cercec). There is little light for six months of the year, and in the summer you are attacked by mosquitoes and gnats."

The Kharp penal colony is one of 700 labor camps currently operating in Russia, where nearly 266,000 inmates are locked up. This is a historically low figure, linked to the sending of convicts to the front in Ukraine. Before the war began in 2022, there were nearly 420,000 prisoners in the country.

"In Russia, you have four types of confinement," explains historian Marc Elijah: "the open-type colony, in which the inmates are very free; the general regime, where the majority of detainees are locked up in barracks; the harsh regime, with stronger restrictions, especially on visitation rights; and the exceptional regime, in which Navalny finds himself. The latter regime is reserved for the most dangerous prisoners, those sentenced to life imprisonment or those whose death sentences have been commuted to life imprisonment."

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For many observers, these penal colonies are part of the legacy of the Gulag, the concentration camp system that allowed the deportation of more than 20 million people during the Soviet era. While the Gulag officially disappeared after Stalin's death in 1953, some of its features live on in today's prison system. Founded in the early 1960s and able to accommodate about a thousand inmates, the Kharp penal colony is built on the former 501st Gulag.

"The prison world retains a certain number of features that date back to the Stalinist era, including the idea of the climate as a tool of repression," says Emilia Koustova, a lecturer at the University of Strasbourg and an expert on the Russian world. They are also very isolated places. For three weeks, Navalny's whereabouts were unknown. There is a use of arbitrariness that has persisted since the Stalinist era with a desire to sever the links between detainees and their relatives. This severance of ties becomes a means of repression and terror, or blackmail." Before his transfer to IK-3, Alexei Navalny faced multiple periods of solitary confinement. "In total, he will have spent 236 days there," his spokeswoman, Kira Iarmych, said last October.

"There is a desire to ignore him and to go after him"

Considered by Vladimir Putin as his main enemy, Alexei Navalny continues to pay the price for his relentlessness against corruption and for denouncing the despotic regime in the Kremlin. On 20 August 2020, the lawyer and activist suffered an attempted Novichok poisoning that required emergency hospitalisation and lengthy rehabilitation in Germany. At a press conference, the Kremlin master denied being behind the operation: "If we had wanted it, the case would have been brought to a conclusion," he said.

For Emilia Koustova, also a member of the board of directors of the NGO Memorial France, "Putin clearly has a very particular attitude towards Navalny, he never pronounces his name, there is a desire to ignore him and to relentlessly attack him. His transfer to a colony that is characterized by a particularly harsh regime is a step in that direction."

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Navalny's transfer also comes three months before the next Russian presidential election in which Vladimir Putin has declared his candidacy. "On this issue, Alexei Navalny will no longer be able to convey political messages," says Emilia Kustova. The re-election of Vladimir Putin – rid of his main critic – for a six-year term, authorised by the 2020 constitutional referendum, appears to be a mere formality, in the absence of a strong opposition. The last opponents who tried to shake up the Kremlin strongman were killed or imprisoned, such as Andrei Pivovarov, former director of the Open Russia movement, and Ilya Yashin, 38, an opposition figure. According to a tally by the human rights NGO Memorial France, whose central body was dissolved by the Russian Supreme Court in September 2021, there are currently more than 500 political prisoners in Russia.

Last Saturday, the candidacy of journalist Ekaterina Duntsova, was rejected by the Russian Election Commission for "errors in documents". "In reality, there is no credible opposition, not to mention that many people of his generation are very much in favor of Vladimir Putin's re-election. He has every chance of being re-elected with a fairly high turnout," confirms former ambassador Sylvie Bermann. The Russian presidential election will be held on March 17, 2024.

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