Alexei Navalny’s Prison Diaries
My job is to seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of his family to deal with everything else. They won’t let me down and will sort out all my headaches. As they say in prison here: they will take my punches for me.
March 26th
The ghastliest days in prison are the birthdays of close family, especially children.
What sort of pathetic greeting is it to send a letter to your son on his fourteenth birthday? What kind of memory will that be of being close to his father?
“For my birthday my dad took me on a hike.”
“Well, on my birthday, my dad taught me how to drive a car.”
“For my birthday my dad sent me a letter from prison on a piece of notepaper. He promised that when he gets out he’ll teach me how to boil water in a plastic bag.”
Let’s face it, you don’t get to choose your parents. Some kids get stuck with jailbirds.
But it is on my children’s birthdays that I am particularly aware of why I’m in jail. We need to build the Beautiful Russia of the Future for them to live in.
Zakhar, happy birthday!
I really miss you and love you very much!
April 3rd
It’s a real Russian spring day. That is, the snowdrifts are up to my waist, and it’s been snowing all weekend. Snow is something prisoners hate, because what do they do when it snows and after it snows? That’s right, they clear the snow away. Arguing that it is, after all, April, and in at most ten days it will all just melt anyway, not only doesn’t work but draws heartfelt indignation from the prison administration. If anything is lying anywhere in violation of the regulations and the normal routine of doing things, it must be shovelled up, scraped off, and removed. That said, clearing snow actually is one of the most meaningful activities in prison life, because most of the others are an inane response to the need to generate work at all costs. The prisoners have a saying: “It doesn’t matter where what gets chucked, as long as the con feels completely fucked.”
This describes my feeling every weekend, because, although you can find at least an inkling of sense in shovelling snow in April, the work is genuinely exhausting. Because I am classified as a nontrusted prisoner, they don’t allow me to shovel the snow like everyone else and to break the ice on the “main line,” the camp’s principal street, along which the commandant walks. In my local area and with my own squad, though, I have to shovel.
We all have that classic labor-camp look that belongs in a movie about the Gulag. The heavy jackets, fur hats, and mittens, the enormous wooden shovels, each of which is so heavy you would think it was made of cast iron, especially after it gets saturated with water, which freezes. They are the selfsame shovels used by the soldiers who cleared the streets of my military home town when I was a child. You might have thought that in the thirty years that have passed since then shovel technology would have progressed toward production of lighter shovels, but in Russia, as with so many other things, we didn’t hack it. We were brought a couple of lightweight shovels that immediately broke. The response was the usual “Oh, well, what the hell, let them use the wooden shovels. We’ve used them for shovelling snow all our lives. They are reliable.” As if to say, Our grandfathers invented these shovels and far be it from us to doubt their wisdom by trying to improve something that is already ideal.
So there I was, scowling, wearing a heavy winter jacket, and wielding a wooden shovel with snow frozen to it. The only thing that amused me, and at least partly enabled me to accept this reality, is that on these occasions I feel like the hero of my all-time favorite joke. It is a Soviet joke, but has a certain relevance today.
A boy goes out for a stroll in the courtyard of his apartment block. Boys playing soccer there invite him to join in. The boy is a bit of a stay-at-home, but he’s interested and runs over to play with them. He eventually manages to kick the ball, very hard, but unfortunately it crashes through the window of the basement room where the janitor lives. Unsurprisingly, the janitor emerges. He is unshaven, wearing a fur hat and quilted jacket, and clearly the worse for a hangover. Infuriated, the janitor stares at the boy before rushing at him.
The boy runs away as fast as he can and thinks, What do I need this for? After all, I’m a quiet, stay-at-home sort of boy. I like reading. Why play soccer with the other boys? Why am I running away right now from this scary janitor when I could be lying at home on the couch reading a book by my favorite American writer, Hemingway?
Meanwhile, Hemingway is reclining on a chaise longue in Cuba, with a glass of rum in his hand, and thinking, God, I’m so tired of this rum and Cuba. All this dancing, and shouting, and the sea. Damn it, I’m a clever guy. Why am I here instead of being in Paris discussing existentialism with my colleague Jean-Paul Sartre over a glass of Calvados?
Meanwhile, Jean-Paul Sartre, sipping Calvados, is looking at the scene in front of him and thinking, How I hate Paris. I can’t stand the sight of these boulevards. I’m sick and tired of all these rapturous students and their revolutions. Why do I have to be here, when I long to be in Moscow, engaging in fascinating dialogue with my friend Andrei Platonov, the great Russian writer?
Meanwhile, in Moscow, Platonov is running across a snow-covered courtyard and thinking, If I catch that little bastard, I’ll fucking kill him.
Although, of course, I am no Andrei Platonov, I have the quilted jacket and the fur hat, and I, too, am writing a book. Next, I’ll finish the chapter about how I met Yulia.
July 1st
I live like Putin and Medvedev.
At least I think so when I look at the fence around my barracks. Everyone has the usual fence, and inside there are rods to dry the laundry on. But I have a six-metre-high fence, the kind I have only seen in our investigations of Putin’s and Medvedev’s palaces.
Putin both lives and works in such a place—in Novo-Ogaryovo or Sochi. And I live in a similar place. Putin lets ministers sit in the waiting room for six hours, and my lawyers have to wait five or six hours to see me. I have a loudspeaker in my barracks that plays songs like “Glory to the F.S.B.,” and I think Putin has one, too.
That’s where the similarities end, though.
Putin, as you know, sleeps until 10 a.m., then swims in the pool and eats cottage cheese with honey.
But, for me, 10 a.m. is lunchtime, because work starts at 6:40 a.m.
6:00—Wake up. Ten minutes to make my bed, wash, shave, and so on.
6:10—Exercise.
6:20—Escorted to breakfast.
6:40—Searched and escorted to work.
At work, you sit for seven hours at the sewing machine on a stool below knee height.
10:20—Fifteen-minute lunch break.
After work, you continue to sit for a few hours on a wooden bench under a portrait of Putin. This is called “disciplinary activity.”
On Saturday, you work for five hours and sit on the bench under the portrait again.
Sunday, in theory, is a day off. But in the Putin administration, or wherever my unique routine was set up, they are experts at relaxation. On Sunday, we sit in a room on a wooden bench for ten hours.
I don’t know who can be “disciplined” by such activities, except a cripple with a bad back. But maybe that’s their goal. But you know me, I’m an optimist and look for the bright side even in my dark existence. I have as much fun as I can.
While sewing, I’ve memorized Hamlet’s soliloquy in English.
However, the inmates on my shift say that when I close my eyes and mutter something in Shakespearean English, like “in thy orisons be all my sins remembered,” it looks as if I were summoning a demon.
But I have no such thoughts: summoning a demon would be a violation of the prison regulations.
2023
January 12th
In my two years behind bars, my only truly original story is the one about the psycho. Everything else has been told and described numerous times. If you open any book by a Soviet dissident, there will be endless stories of punishment cells, hunger strikes, violence, provocations, lack of medical care. Nothing new. But my story about the psycho is fresh; at least, I’ve never seen or heard anything like it.
So, let me give you an idea about the SHIZO, the place where I sit all the time. It is a narrow corridor with cells on either side. The metal doors offer little to no soundproofing, plus there are ventilation holes above the doors, so two people sitting in opposite cells can have a conversation without even raising their voices. This is the main reason there has never been anyone in the cell opposite mine, or in my entire eight-cell section. I am the only one there, and I have never seen any other punished convicts the whole time.
And then, about a month ago, they put a psycho in the cell across from mine. At first, I thought he was faking it. He was very active. If you tell a kid to act like a madman, that’s what he’ll come up with. Screaming, growling, hitting, barking, arguing with himself in three different voices. But, in the case of my psycho, seventy per cent of the words are obscene. There are a lot of videos online of people who think that they’ve been possessed by demons. This is very similar—the growling wail (my favorite of his three personas) comes on periodically and doesn’t cease for hours. That’s why I stopped thinking he was a faker; no normal person can yell for fourteen hours every day and three hours at night for a month. And, when I say “yell,” I mean the kind of yelling that makes your neck veins swell up.
