Russia is doing to Aleksei Navalny what America does to teenagers.
Aleksei Navalny is the best-known opposition figure in Russia. He’s handsome and tall, unlike his nemesis, Vladimir Putin. He’s virtually a household name in the West. And he’s familiar enough to an American audience for the New York Times to publish front-page stories about him, when most Americans probably couldn’t name a single other Russian besides Putin and maybe Tolstoy.
Anyway, he’s a professional dissident in a country where holding a sign calling the “special operation in Ukraine” a war is enough to get you arrested.
The FSB tried to poison him. Then Putin’s administration put him in a penal colony. And in the latest extreme measure meant to silence him, they’ve permanently placed him in solitary confinement, which is something that we do to random teenagers every day in every jail and prison in America.
Look at how the New York Times describes his situation:
“The general tendency has been to pressure him constantly, to make every day even worse, to keep pressuring him so that he breaks, to suppress him,” Lyubov Sobol, a key member of Navalny’s team, said in an interview, adding that a renewed effort to cut him off from the outside began around the end of September, about the same time that the Kremlin ordered a general draft for the Ukraine war.
“These have been conditions of severe isolation; now he is isolated even more,” she said.
Ms. Sobol said there were concerns about Mr. Navalny’s health, even though he was not one to complain about that.
In a long thread on the social media network, Mr. Navalny wrote with his characteristic dry humor that his new cell was a “regular cramped cell, like a punishment cell” but that he was allowed to bring two books instead of one and that he could use the prison commissary for a limited amount of money.
Mr. Navalny said that he had already been locked up in solitary confinement seven times in the last three months, having spent two-thirds of his time there since August.
Aside from attempting to start a labor union among the prisoners, other “infractions” that landed him there included not buttoning his collar and not cleaning the prison yard well enough, he said. Another time he had addressed a prison official by his military rank rather than the more respectable name and patronymic.
Mr. Navalny had previously described the cells as among the worst punishments. “I’m not going to lie — it’s a hellhole and an unpleasant place in every way possible,” he wrote. “But there are more important things in life than comfort.”
Mr. Navalny said his new conditions would not prevent him from speaking out against the war and the ruling party. “That’s what I call on everyone to do,” he wrote “At every opportunity, campaign against the war, Putin and United Russia.”
Navalny is an internationally renowned political figure and he’s making the heroic choice to continue speaking out at great risk to himself and his family. Surely there’s solace—no matter how horrific your cell—to know with certainty that you’re on the right side of history.
Kalief Browder was also right, but in the less grandiose matter of a stolen backpack. He didn’t steal the backpack; it was a case of mistaken identity compounded by criminally shoddy police work (the witness told police multiple times that there was surveillance footage of the attack but it doesn’t seem it was ever viewed).
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