Confined to chilly, concrete cells and infrequently alone along with his books, Aleksei A. Navalny sought solace in letters. To one acquaintance, he wrote in July that nobody might perceive Russian jail life “without having been here,” including in his deadpan humor: “But there’s no need to be here.”
“If they’re told to feed you caviar tomorrow, they’ll feed you caviar,” Mr. Navalny, the Russian opposition chief, wrote to the identical acquaintance, Ilia Krasilshchik, in August. “If they’re told to strangle you in your cell, they’ll strangle you.”
Many particulars about his final months — in addition to the circumstances of his dying, which the Russian authorities introduced on Friday — stay unknown; even the whereabouts of his physique are unclear.
Mr. Navalny’s aides have mentioned little as they course of the loss. But his ultimate months of life are detailed in earlier statements from him and his aides, his appearances in courtroom, interviews with individuals near him and excerpts from non-public letters that a number of pals, together with Mr. Krasilshchik, shared with The New York Times.
The letters reveal the depth of the ambition, resolve and curiosity of a frontrunner who galvanized the opposition to President Vladimir V. Putin and who, supporters hope, will reside on as a unifying image of their resistance. They additionally present how Mr. Navalny — with a wholesome ego and constant confidence that what he was doing was proper — struggled to remain linked to the skin world.
Even as brutal jail circumstances took their toll on his physique — he was typically denied medical and dental therapy — there was no trace that Mr. Navalny had misplaced his readability of thoughts, his writings present.
He boasted of studying 44 books in English in a 12 months and was methodically getting ready for the longer term: refining his agenda, learning political memoirs, arguing with journalists, allotting profession recommendation to pals and opining on viral social media posts that his crew despatched him.
In his public messages, Mr. Navalny, who was 47 when he died, known as his jailing since January 2021 his “space voyage.” By final fall, he was extra alone than ever, compelled to spend a lot of his time in solitary confinement and left with out three of his attorneys, who had been arrested for participation in an “extremist group.”
Still, he saved up with present occasions. To a pal, the Russian photographer Evgeny Feldman, Mr. Navalny confided that the electoral agenda of former U.S. President Donald J. Trump seemed “really scary.”
“Trump will become president” ought to President Biden’s well being endure, Mr. Navalny wrote from his high-security jail cell. “Doesn’t this obvious thing concern the Democrats?”
A Public Life
Mr. Navalny was in a position to ship a whole lot of handwritten letters, due to the curious digitalization of the Russian jail system, a relic of a short burst of liberal reform in the midst of Mr. Putin’s 24-year rule. Through an internet site, individuals might write to him for 40 cents a web page and obtain scans of his responses, usually per week or two after he despatched them, and after they handed by way of a censor.
Mr. Navalny additionally communicated with the skin world by way of his attorneys, who held up paperwork towards the window separating them after they had been barred from passing papers. At one level, Mr. Navalny reported in 2022, jail officers coated the window in foil.
Then there have been his frequent courtroom hearings on new felony circumstances introduced by the state to increase his imprisonment, or on complaints that Mr. Navalny filed about his therapy. Mr. Navalny informed Mr. Krasilshchik, a media entrepreneur now in exile in Berlin, that he loved these hearings, regardless of the rubber-stamp nature of Russia’s judicial system.
“They distract you and help the time pass faster,” he wrote. “In addition, they provide excitement and a sense of struggle and pursuit.”
The courtroom appearances additionally supplied him a possibility to indicate his contempt for the system. This previous July, on the conclusion of a trial that resulted in one other 19-year sentence, Mr. Navalny informed the choose and officers within the courtroom they had been “crazy.”
“You have one, God-given life, and this is what you choose to spend it on?” he mentioned, in response to textual content of the speech printed by his crew.
In considered one of his final hearings, by video hyperlink in January, Mr. Navalny argued for the suitable to longer meal breaks to devour the “two mugs of boiling water and two pieces of disgusting bread” to which he was entitled.
The enchantment was rejected; certainly, all through his imprisonment, Mr. Navalny appeared to savor meals vicariously by way of others, in response to interviews. He informed Mr. Krasilshchik that he most popular doner kebabs to falafel in Berlin and took an curiosity within the Indian meals that Mr. Feldman tried in New York.
The courtroom additionally dismissed his criticism about his jail’s solitary “punishment” cells, through which Mr. Navalny spent some 300 days.
The cells had been normally chilly, damp and poorly ventilated 7-feet-by-10-feet concrete areas. But Mr. Navalny was protesting one thing totally different: Inmates ordered to spend time in these cells had been allowed just one e-book.
“I want to have 10 books in my cell,” he informed the courtroom.
Books Sustained Him
Books seemed to be on the heart of Mr. Navalny’s jail life, all the way in which till his dying.
In a letter final April to Mr. Krasilshchik, Mr. Navalny defined that he most popular to be studying 10 books concurrently and “switch between them.” He mentioned he got here to like memoirs: “For some reason I always despised them. But they’re actually amazing.”
He was steadily soliciting studying suggestions, but additionally disbursed them. Describing jail life to Mr. Krasilshchik in a July letter, he really helpful 9 books on the topic, together with a 1,012-page, three-volume set by the Soviet dissident Anatoly Marchenko.
Mr. Navalny added in that letter that he had reread “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” the searing Alexander Solzhenitsyn novel about Stalin’s gulag. Having survived a starvation strike and gone months “in the state of ‘I want to eat,’” Mr. Navalny mentioned he solely now began to understand the depravity of the Soviet-era labor camps.
“You start to realize the degree of horror,” he wrote.
Around the identical time, Mr. Navalny was additionally studying about fashionable Russia. Mikhail Fishman, a liberal Russian journalist and tv host now working in exile from Amsterdam, heard from a Navalny aide that the opposition chief had learn his new e-book concerning the assassinated opposition determine Boris Y. Nemtsov.
Mr. Fishman mentioned he was informed that Mr. Navalny appreciated the e-book, however that he considered it as too favorable to Boris N. Yeltsin, the previous Russian president.
Mr. Fishman wrote to Mr. Navalny to push again, arguing, amongst different issues, that Mr. Yeltsin hated the Okay.G.B., the dreaded Soviet secret police that quashed dissent. Mr. Navalny responded that he was “particularly outraged” by that declare.
“Prison, investigation and trial are the same now as in the books” of Soviet dissidents, Mr. Navalny wrote, insisting that Mr. Putin’s predecessor had failed to vary the Soviet system. “This is what I cannot forgive Yeltsin for.”
But Mr. Navalny additionally thanked Mr. Fishman for providing some particulars about his life in Amsterdam.
“Everyone usually thinks that I really need pathetic and heartbreaking words,” he wrote in an excerpt that Mr. Fishman shared with The Times. “But I really miss the daily grind — news about life, food, salaries, gossip.”
Kerry Kennedy, a human-rights activist and the daughter of the Democratic politician Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968, additionally exchanged letters with Mr. Navalny. He informed her that he had cried “two or three times” whereas studying a e-book about her father really helpful by a pal, in response to a duplicate of a letter, handwritten in English, that Ms. Kennedy posted on Instagram after Mr. Navalny died.
Mr. Navalny thanked Ms. Kennedy for sending him a poster with a quote from her father’s speech about how a “ripple of hope,” multiplied 1,000,000 instances, “can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
“I hope one day I’ll be able to hang it on the wall of my office,” Mr. Navalny wrote.
Staying Connected
The pal who really helpful the Kennedy e-book was Mr. Feldman, the Russian photographer who coated Mr. Navalny’s try and run for president in 2018. Mr. Feldman, now in exile in Latvia, mentioned he despatched a minimum of 37 letters to Mr. Navalny since his 2021 arrest and acquired replies to nearly all of them.
“I really like your letters,” Mr. Navalny wrote within the final message that Mr. Feldman acquired, dated Dec. 3, excerpts from which he shared with The Times. “They’ve got everything I like to discuss: food, politics, elections, scandalous topics and ethnicity issues.”
The latter, Mr. Feldman mentioned, was a reference to their exchanges on antisemitism and the Gaza struggle. Mr. Navalny additionally described his newfound appreciation for the actor Matthew Perry, who died in October; although he had by no means watched “Friends,” Mr. Navalny was moved by an obituary he learn in The Economist.
The December letter ended with Mr. Navalny’s ideas on a preoccupation he shared with Mr. Feldman — American politics. After warning of a possible Trump presidency, Mr. Navalny concluded with a question: “Please name one current politician you admire.”
Three days after Mr. Navalny despatched that letter, he disappeared.
During a frantic, 20-day search, Mr. Navalny’s exiled allies mentioned they despatched greater than 600 requests to prisons and different authorities businesses.
On Dec. 25, Mr. Navalny’s spokeswoman declared he had been present in a distant Arctic jail often called Polar Wolf.
“I’m your new Santa Claus,” Mr. Navalny posted on social media the following day, after his lawyer visited him. “I don’t say ‘Ho-ho-ho,’ but I say ‘Oh-oh-oh’ when I look out the window, where there is night, then evening and then night again.”
In the Arctic
Mr. Navalny mentioned within the publish that he was taken on a circuitous route by way of the Ural Mountains to his new jail, which was labeled as a harsher “special regime” facility.
Even on that journey, Mr. Navalny was studying books. He wrote to the journalist Sergei Parkhomenko that by the point he arrived at Polar Wolf he had learn all that he was in a position to convey with him, and was compelled to select from the classics in his new jail library: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky or Chekhov.
“Who could’ve told me that Chekhov is the most depressing Russian writer?” Mr. Navalny wrote in a letter that Mr. Parkhomenko shared on Facebook.
Mr. Parkhomenko mentioned he acquired the letter on Feb. 13. Unlike Mr. Navalny’s earlier letters, it was handwritten on easy, squared pocket book paper and forwarded to him as {a photograph} by Yulia Navalnaya, Mr. Navalny’s spouse. Polar Wolf didn’t enable the digital letter-writing service supplied by his earlier jail.
It had turn into clear that the Kremlin was intent on silencing Mr. Navalny. The attorneys who had represented him for many of his time behind bars had been in jail, whereas letters and guests would take longer to achieve him in his new jail.
Mr. Navalny’s mom, Lyudmila Navalnaya, flew to the Arctic after the announcement of his dying and, on Saturday, acquired an official discover that he had died at 2:17 p.m. the prior day.
Mr. Navalny’s legacy will reside on, pals and allies say, partly by way of his writings in jail. Mr. Feldman, the photographer, mentioned that Mr. Navalny’s authorized crew informed him that the opposition chief had responded to a minimum of a number of the letters Mr. Feldman despatched in latest weeks.
“Honestly, I think about this with horror,” Mr. Feldman mentioned. “If the censors let them through, I’ll be getting letters from him for the next several months.”
Mr. Krasilshchik, the media entrepreneur, mentioned he was left to ruminate on the final letter he acquired, in September. Mr. Navalny concluded it by positing that if South Korea and Taiwan had been in a position to make the transition from dictatorship to democracy, then maybe Russia might, too.
“Hope. I’ve got no problem with it,” Mr. Navalny wrote.
He signed off: “Keep writing! A.”
Neil MacFarquhar, Oleg Matsnev and Milana Mazaeva contributed reporting.
