Aleksei A. Navalny portrayed himself as invincible, persistently utilizing his hallmark humor to counsel that President Vladimir V. Putin couldn’t break him, irrespective of how dire his circumstances grew to become in jail.
However behind the courageous face, the truth was plain to see. Since his incarceration in early 2021, Mr. Navalny, Russia’s most formidable opposition determine, and his employees repeatedly recommended his circumstances had been so grim that he was being put to demise in sluggish movement.
Now his aides consider their fears have come true.
The reason for Mr. Navalny’s demise in jail at 47 has not been established — in truth his household has not but even been allowed to see his physique — however Russia’s harshest penal colonies are recognized for hazardous circumstances, and Mr. Navalny was singled out for notably brutal remedy.
“Aleksei Navalny was subjected to torment and torture for 3 years,” the Russian journalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Dmitri A. Muratov wrote in a column after his demise was introduced on Friday. “As Navalny’s physician informed me: the physique can’t face up to this.”
Greater than 1 / 4 of Mr. Navalny’s incarceration since 2021 was spent in freezing “punishment cells” and he was usually denied entry to medical care. He was transferred to ever crueler prisons. And at one level, he mentioned he was being given injections however was prevented from discovering out what was within the syringes. His staff apprehensive he was once more being poisoned.
What particularly led to Mr. Navalny’s demise on Friday at a distant jail above the Arctic Circle could stay a thriller. The Russian jail service launched a press release Friday afternoon saying that Mr. Navalny felt sick and out of the blue misplaced consciousness after being exterior.
Russian state media reported that he had suffered a blood clot. However the story modified on Saturday, when Mr. Navalny’s mom and lawyer arrived on the jail. They had been informed he had suffered from “sudden demise syndrome,” which appeared to point sudden cardiac arrest, in accordance with Ivan Zhdanov, director of Mr. Navalny’s anti-corruption basis.
Investigators informed a lawyer for Mr. Navalny {that a} repeat examination was being performed and the outcomes could be launched subsequent week. Mr. Navalny’s employees known as for the physique to be launched instantly in order that his household might order an impartial evaluation, accusing Russian authorities of mendacity to hide the physique.
In keeping with his aides, Mr. Navalny had been put in a punishment cell on the Arctic jail within the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Area on Wednesday, two days earlier than Russian authorities introduced his demise.
His spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, mentioned that marked his twenty seventh time in such an inhumane house, normally a roughly 7-feet-by-10-feet concrete cell with insufferable circumstances — chilly, damp and poorly ventilated. His newest spherical of punishment, had he survived, would have taken his whole interval in such a cell to 308 days, greater than 1 / 4 of his time in incarceration, in accordance with Ms. Yarmysh.
As soon as a day at 6:30 a.m., prisoners within the punishment cells on the Arctic facility are allowed right into a coffin-like concrete enclosure open to the sky by way of a steel grate, Mr. Navalny mentioned in a message from the ability earlier this 12 months. It gave the impression to be after such a session on Friday that Mr. Navalny misplaced consciousness, in accordance with the Russian jail service’s account. It was about -20 Fahrenheit exterior.
In a letter from jail final month, Mr. Navalny described how he might stroll a complete of 11 steps from one finish of the open-air house to the opposite, noting that the coldest it had been thus far on considered one of his walks was -26 Fahrenheit.
“Even at this temperature, you may stroll for greater than half an hour, as long as you’ve time to develop a brand new nostril, ears and fingers,” he wrote. “There are few issues as invigorating as a stroll in Yamal at 6:30 within the morning. And what an exquisite recent breeze blows into the yard, regardless of the concrete enclosure, wow!”
Whereas strolling there on a latest day, he mentioned he was freezing and occupied with how Leonardo DiCaprio climbed right into a lifeless horse to flee the chilly within the wilderness survival film “The Revenant.” A lifeless horse would freeze in that a part of Russia inside quarter-hour, Mr. Navalny surmised.
“Right here we’d like an elephant — a sizzling, fried elephant,” he mentioned.
Mr. Navalny usually employed such wit within the face of his inhumane remedy. Nevertheless it had change into more and more clear, over his three years of incarceration, that he may not survive.
“The cumulative remedy of Navalny over a number of years in jail — in a method you could possibly say it was driving him near demise,” Mariana Katzarova, the United Nations Human Rights Council particular rapporteur on the human rights state of affairs in Russia, mentioned in an interview Saturday. “We don’t know but. We’d like an investigation.”
For a time, Mr. Navalny did appear nearly invincible.
In August 2020, he fell in poor health on a flight from the Siberian metropolis of Tomsk to Moscow, after being poisoned with a nerve agent from the Russian-made Novichok household. He was put right into a medically induced coma for 2 weeks throughout remedy in Germany — and survived.
The U.S. authorities later attributed the poisoning to Russia’s Federal Safety Service, often called the F.S.B.
Regardless of the assassination try, Mr. Navalny returned to Russia in early 2021 to proceed his struggle in opposition to Mr. Putin, who denied Russia’s involvement within the poisoning, and rapidly discovered himself imprisoned. His well being started to deteriorate nearly instantly.
In March 2021, he complained about extreme again ache that later become an issue along with his leg.
He demanded that jail authorities present him with correct medical care and provides him remedy. As an alternative, they subjected him to sleep deprivation, he mentioned. On the finish of March 2021, he declared a starvation strike over his remedy, and Russian medical doctors and Hollywood stars took up his trigger in open letters to Mr. Putin.
About three weeks later, Mr. Navalny was examined by an impartial panel of medical doctors. The checks by the medical doctors discovered that, “quickly sufficient, there received’t be anybody to deal with,” Mr. Navalny mentioned in a message posted to Instagram.
Final 12 months, Mr. Navalny wrote from jail that his jokes concerning the punishment cell shouldn’t normalize the setting. He lamented {that a} fellow political prisoner, who had spoken out in opposition to the warfare in Ukraine, had been put in a punishment cell, regardless of being disabled and lacking a part of his lung.
Mr. Navalny described dire well being circumstances in jail, the place he mentioned many inmates suffered from tuberculosis. He additionally complained early final 12 months concerning the administration in his former jail inserting a mentally unwell individual in a cell reverse his, as a type of torment, and an in poor health prisoner in his small cell.
On the time, his lawyer, Vadim Kobzev, mentioned the jail intentionally contaminated him with a respiratory sickness, refused to present him medication after which “handled” him with large doses of contraindicated antibiotics. Mr. Navalny suffered extreme abdomen ache and misplaced greater than 15 kilos in consequence, Mr. Kobzev mentioned.
“These actions can’t be thought to be something apart from an open technique to destroy Navalny’s well being by any and all means,” Mr. Kobzev mentioned in a press release on the time. “Clearly, the jail wouldn’t threat participating on this degree of demonstrative unlawfulness with out approval from Moscow.”
Mr. Kobzev has since been arrested on extremism expenses for associating with Mr. Navalny — a part of a broader roundup of the opposition chief’s attorneys late final 12 months.
Mr. Navalny suffered a dizzy spell and was placed on an IV drip in an unexplained medical episode in early December. However Russian authorities nonetheless transferred him later that month from a jail within the Vladimir area, about 130 miles east of Moscow, to the “particular regime” penal colony within the Arctic the place he died.
A number of medical doctors contacted after his demise, together with one who was concerned in his preliminary remedy within the Siberian metropolis of Omsk, mentioned his demise was seemingly unrelated to his poisoning greater than three years earlier, given his sturdy restoration.
However he confronted many different well being hazards since then.
“A Russian jail is a spot the place it’s important to be ready to die daily,” Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, a Russian tycoon who spent a decade in jail after difficult Mr. Putin, mentioned on Friday.
Within the interview, Mr. Khodorkovsky, who was launched in 2013, mentioned a prisoner should discover a solution to deal with the burden as a take a look at with a purpose to survive mentally, and Mr. Navalny had executed that. However even then, he added, “this is not going to shield you from being killed.”
Anton Troianovski contributed reporting.
