Navalny was able to send hundreds of handwritten letters. They reveal the depth of the ambition, resolve and curiosity of a leader who galvanized the opposition to President Vladimir Putin
sought solace in letters. To one acquaintance, he wrote in July that no one could understand Russian prison life “without having been here,” adding in his deadpan humour: “But there’s no need to be here.”
Flowers and a photo of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny are placed near the Russian consulate in Frankfurt, Germany.People lay flowers at the Wall of Grief monument to honour the memory of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny in Moscow.People leave flowers and candles opposite the Russian embassy, to commemorate the death of Alexey Navalny in London.A police officer watches as a man visits the makeshift memorial for Alexei Navalny in St. Petersburg, Russia.
“Trump will become president” should President Joe Biden’s health suffer, Navalny wrote from his high-security prison cell. “Doesn’t this obvious thing concern the Democrats?”Navalny was able to send hundreds of handwritten letters, thanks to the curious digitalization of the Russian prison system, a relic of a brief burst of liberal reform in the middle of Putin’s 24-year rule.
The court appearances also provided him an opportunity to show his contempt for the system. In July, at the conclusion of a trial that resulted in another 19-year sentence, Navalny told the judge and officers in the courtroom they were “crazy.” The court also dismissed his complaint about his prison’s solitary “punishment” cells, in which Navalny spent some 300 days.
Navalny added in that letter that he had reread “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” the searing Alexander Solzhenitsyn novel about Josef Stalin’s gulag. Having survived a hunger strike and gone months “in the state of ‘I want to eat,’” Navalny said he only now started to grasp the depravity of the Soviet-era labour camps.Around the same time, Navalny was also reading about modern Russia.
Kerry Kennedy, a human-rights activist and the daughter of Democratic politician Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968, also exchanged letters with Navalny. He told her that he had cried “two or three times” while reading a book about her father recommended by a friend, according to a copy of a letter, handwritten in English, that Kennedy posted on Instagram after Navalny died.
The December letter ended with Navalny’s thoughts on a preoccupation he shared with Feldman – American politics. After warning of a potential Trump presidency, Navalny concluded with a query: “Please name one current politician you admire.”During a frantic, 20-day search, Navalny’s exiled allies said they sent more than 600 requests to prisons and other government agencies.
“Who could’ve told me that Chekhov is the most depressing Russian writer?” Navalny wrote in a letter that Parkhomenko shared on Facebook.
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