Alexei Navalny's pen pal at 'Polar Wolf' jail shares how politician stayed sane
A prison pal of Alexei Navalny has revealed how the late activist mocked guards to keep himself sane while forced to endure torturous solitary confinement.
Natan Sharansky, 76, a Soviet dissident and former Israeli minister, was sent to the same Arctic gulag where Navalny died earlier this month. Though the pair never met, they formed a bond through personal letters they sent to each other throughout 2023.
They had a shared sense of humour, and often wrote to each other about the differences in the penal colony since Sharansky's stay. The dissident had written about his experience in his memoir, Fear No Evil, which Navalny said gave him "hope" for Russia's future. Sharansky told DailyMail.com that he considered Navalny a "hero" after his jailing at the IK-3 colony around 155 miles east of Moscow.
Sharansky - who was a chess prodigy when he was a boy - said he would play the board game in his mind. This helped him through a 100-day spell of solitary confinement in the 1980s where he was almost starved-to-death.
A prison cell in Navalny's jail (Kira Yarmysh/EAST2WEST NEWS)He said he was put in a small, freezing room, and the guards would take away any warm clothes. He was given just three pieces of bread and three cups of water per day. There was no one to talk to, nothing to read and not even a bed for him to sleep on.
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Both men were forced to endure the torturous punishment. Sharansky explained: "In my case I also played a lot of chess in my head, in Navalny's case I think he was spending a lot of time joking (and) mocking the border guards.
"But you really have to find a way to both be very serious and feel yourself in the center of the struggle, and to laugh at the system, to dismiss it - to overcome it. You become physically weaker and weaker, you are losing weight, but it’s important not to lose your moral integrity. It’s surprising how similar our experiences were… that’s why it was very easy for us (to become friends) without knowing one another before."
The Soviet dissident Anatoli Sharansky (left) shown in a photo dated February 1986 accompanied by US ambassador Richard Burt during a major East-West prisoner exchange (AFP via Getty Images)
Sharansky now, years after being freed from prison (Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)When Navalny first contacted Sharansky, the pair were complete strangers. He had read his book, telling him "your book makes me feel very optimistic because one regime already fell".
The fact he knew the regime had an end date comforted him, even if he lost his life. Sharansky said that huge parts of the Russian public are becoming more and more uncomfortable with Putin's authoritarian grasp on the country.
But the more people begin to resist, the more effort Putin's regime will put in to controlling them, he added. But there are also a number of underground and political networks keeping up the fight against the tyrant. Some of those are the Russians writing letters to political prisoners in the gulag.
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