Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny is alive and being held in a penal colony in Siberia, according to his spokeswoman. “We found Alexei Navalny,” Kira Yarmysh said on 25 December, adding that he was now in northern Russia. His team had had no contact with him since 6 December, after he was moved from a previous prison. Mr Navalny, considered one of Vladimir Putin’s leading opponents, has been imprisoned since 2021. “His lawyer saw him today. Alexei is fine,” Ms Yarmysh wrote on the Telegram messaging app. She said he had been moved to the IK-3 penal colony in Kharp in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District, in northern Russia. He had previously been held in Melekhovo, 235 km (145 miles) east of Moscow. Mr Navalny’s aide Ivan Zhadov said the colony was one of the “most remote colonies” in Russia, with “harsh” conditions. He added that Mr Navalny’s move demonstrated how “the system deals with political prisoners, trying to isolate and suppress them”. Navalny: Russia’s jailed but vociferous Putin critic Navalny and Russia’s arsenal of exotic poisons His team had grown increasingly worried after he failed to appear at several court hearings. Mr Navalny made his name as a campaigner against corruption, gathering millions of views for his video investigations. A charismatic campaigner, he seemed to be the only Russian opposition leader capable of mobilising people in large numbers across Russia to take part in anti-government protests. But in 2020, he was poisoned in Siberia by what Western laboratories later confirmed to be a nerve agent. He was treated abroad. On returning to Russia in 2021, he was immediately arrested.

Dang, I was sure he’s dead at this point.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny is alive and being held in a penal colony in Siberia, according to his spokeswoman.

“We found Alexei Navalny,” Kira Yarmysh said on 25 December, adding that he was in a penal colony in northern Russia.

She said he had been moved to the IK-3 penal colony in Kharp in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District, in northern Russia.

He added that Mr Navalny’s move demonstrated how “the system deals with political prisoners, trying to isolate and suppress them”.

Mr Navalny made his name as a campaigner against corruption, gathering millions of views for his video investigations.

A charismatic campaigner, he seemed to be the only Russian opposition leader capable of mobilising people in large numbers across Russia to take part in anti-government protests.

The original article contains 257 words, the summary contains 126 words. Saved 51%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

Harp (ex-Aurora Borealis) has two colonies, Polar Wolf and Polar Owl, both are harsh, both started as a part of Gulag, and they seems to be confused a lot.

• IK-3 is Wolf, it had some oligarchs in the past, article claims he’s there. It’s not for life sentences, death row inmates.
• IK-18 is Owl, and one can see popular inmates there are particularly infamous mass murderers: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_Owl Don’t click at them if you want to sleep tonight.

As you see, even Wikipedia isn’t sure and it has no article for Wolf on English, hence he’s got described under Owl. How often there’re cities of 5k people with two colonies?

It’s still brutal, but he’s not sent there to actually die, but to sit indefinetely in the middle of nowhere. Even if someone released him at it’s gates, he’d have troubles leaving on his own. It’s a very small town and free transit to other places is very questionable.

I won’t speculate exactly why, but it’s a really long process to bring him there, and there were claims he had his own unit for solitary confinement at the old place, so why moving him at all? His aides would probably have to choose a life here to keep their contact and support, that hurts him. But it’s still unknown what neccessitated that move. Wasn’t he already under a total control?

As far as I’m given to understand from folks who are Russian (but got out of Russia) or Ukrainian, this fellow would more be a change from one strongman to another if he replaced Putin. Apparently his Livejournal has him saying some nasty stuff he hasn’t repudiated. (Unfortunately, I don’t speak or read Russian so I can’t examine the sources myself very well, and machine translation doesn’t bring cultural nuance or context.) (Also, as funny as it sounds to people who remember Livejournal as the first English-speaking major social media for fandom, Livejournal has been the place for years for Russian intellectuals and politicians to say their bit, so it has a different cultural context in Russia than it does elsewhere where it was mainly used for fandom drama.)

It’s been strangely fascinating watching as western media tries to hold him up as some hope, when as far as I can tell when I stop to listen to actual Ukranians or Russians with better cultural knowledge on how Russia works than most western commentators, there’s basically minimal hope he’ll be anything close to a (good) Western-style leader and if he gets into power. (it gets swept under the rug in the west that Russian culture is NOT western european culture and things that are a “given” in European and other western cultures actually are not necessarily established culturally in Russia.)

As far as I understand it, it’ll just be exchanging one dude who’s done obviously terrible things (Putin) for another who probably’s not going to be all that different, and will just do his own brand of bad things. I think perhaps people just hope he’ll be a stable asshole, as opposed to an unstable one as Putin’s become.

Or maybe they just like a scapegoat narrative–it has been fascinating to me that he voluntarily returned to Russia, and it really reminds me that people who aren’t necessarily good can still show courage, and shape narratives that way in their favor. I suspect his actions have motivations underneath that I don’t understand because I don’t understand Russian strongman culture. And I suspect other people interpret his actions through a western lens, without understanding there’s cultural nuance going on that doesn’t align with how a western viewpoint might interpret something, and that’s why western media keeps talking about him so breathlessly.

Someone I read pointed out that in the real world, people are actually largely ok with monarchies and authoritarian rulers so long as the ruler at the top keeps things stable enough for business to be conducted. Ideals like democracy fall by the wayside in light of pragmatism when a nation state is unstable–people crave stability over all, over democracy even, regardless of what method of governance brings it. They will flock to authoritarianism if it promises stability.

And in Russia, the early 90s in the aftermath of the fall of the USSR brought a great deal of instability and hardship along with its “democracy”, so there’s not necessarily a positive feeling towards it as there is in more-functional western nations where it’s been working more or less for decades, as people who lived through the 90s in Russia associate the concept with hardship, not stability. Basically, a good concept implemented like crap can poison the concept in people’s minds for the rest of their life.

So I suspect if Putin is ever ousted, whoever replaces him (whether this guy or another) will be there because people think he can bring stability, not because the successor will actually be a good leader (from a western perspective).

But it’s all operating on a lower level of the “hierarchy of needs” than most people in western countries understand–more concern with base survival, less with being able to flower and thrive. So things might stabilize, but it might still be very bad for people, especially minorities, in Russia, and bad for smaller states if this guy gets into power but also turns his eye to conquering or dominating them in order to garner support.

Anyway. I find it interesting this guy hasn’t yet been executed. Instead they (supposedly) shuffle him off elsewhere. If you were Putin, why not kill him? Must be things going on behind the scenes that we don’t see, or understand, things concerning enough that Putin thinks executing him will be more trouble than it solves.

If Navalny ever comes to power, I don’t have any particular hope he’ll be a “good” leader.

But he has an interesting story, to be sure, and you can’t say he hasn’t been through quite a bit of hardship.