Kremlin opponent Alexei Navalny wrote hundreds of letters from the prison camp before his death. They provide an insight into his desires and thoughts.
His font is small so that as much as possible fits on one page. But the letters are clean and finely curved: Alexei Navalny wrote hundreds of letters to his friends and comrades-in-arms from the Russian prison camp – first from the Melechovo penal camp, then from the remote Arctic prison called “Polar Wolf”. According to Russian authorities, the famous Kremlin critic is said to have died there last Friday.
Since 2021, Navalny has been serving a prison sentence as a political prisoner of the Kremlin. This was repeatedly extended in a total of five processes – by now it should be more than 30 years. Navalny passed the time by poring over books and writing letters to his friends. The US newspaper “The New York Times” has some of them. They provide an insight into Navalny's thoughts and feelings before his death.
“Doesn’t this obvious thing worry Democrats?”
Navalny confided to a friend, the Russian photographer Evgeny Feldman, what he thought of former US President Donald Trump. The Republican's election agenda, Navalny said, was “really scary.” If incumbent US President Joe Biden has a health problem, “Trump will become president,” the New York Times quotes from Navalny's letter. According to the newspaper, with regard to the US elections, he asked: “Isn't this obvious thing worrying the Democrats?”
“That's what I can't forgive Yeltsin for”
Navalny was also interested in other topics, despite harsh prison conditions and torture. As the New York Times reported, citing his letters, the 47-year-old boasted that he had read 44 books in English in one year. He wrote that he prefers to read ten books at the same time and switch back and forth between them. He satisfied his hunger for reading with political memoirs, a three-volume work by the Soviet dissident Anatoly Marchenko and the novel “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
The opposition politician also stuck to his “Russia of the Future” party and planned his further political strategy. He exchanged political thoughts with journalists, gave friends career advice and commented on viral social media posts sent to him by his team.
Video | Navalny supporters attack Putin's party office
Source: t-online
Navalny hardly said a word about Russia or Russian President Vladimir Putin. He only wrote a few lines about Putin's predecessor, former Russian President Boris Yeltsin. “Prison, investigations and trials are now the same as in the books of the Soviet dissidents,” the New York Times quotes from one of his letters. The fact that Yeltsin failed to change the Soviet system “is what I cannot forgive Yeltsin for,” said Navalny.
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Preference for Berlin kebab
But Navalny also talked about other topics during his time in the prison camp. For example, he thanked his friend Fishman for writing to him about his life in Amsterdam. “Usually everyone thinks that I need really pathetic and heartbreaking words,” the New York Times quoted Navalny as saying from an excerpt of the letter. “But I really miss the daily grind – news about life, food, salaries, gossip.”
