From his prison, Alexei Navalny continues to fight against the Kremlin

Kovrov

From our special correspondent

On June 4, Alexeï Navalny will celebrate his birthday, the 47th, at the mitard. “I took it back for a fortnight…” It was with these words, with a fatalistic and ironic smile as often at home, that the most famous opponent of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin announced his placement in a disciplinary cell on 22 may. “For the sixteenth time! “, sighs his lawyer, Alexander Fedoulov. To celebrate the opponent from a distance, his supporters still present in Russia have promised rallies, actions prohibited in advance by the authorities.

This day in May, at 10 a.m., Navalny and his lawyer are preparing for another long judicial day. They consult each other, but at a distance. Imprisoned since January 2021 on his return to Russia after an attempted poisoning in Siberia then long months of treatment in Germany, Alexeï Navalny is recluse in the penal colony IK-6 of Melekhovo, in the Vladimir region, some 200 km from Moscow. His lawyer is present in the regional court of Kovrov, the neighboring town.

Thin and drawn features, but gestures and mockery still as sharp, the opponent appears in a small skylight: a television screen which, fixed on a pale wall, is connected in video with a tiny room of the prison newly painted yellow canary. The only link, tenuous but constant, between the opponent and the outside world. Alexeï Navalny continues his fight from prison where he regularly opposes prison rules. His last dismissal in a disciplinary cell – three meters long by two wide – would have been motivated by his refusal to resume the work of dressmaker imposed on him.

But it is above all in the small rooms of the court of the regional court of Kovrov that he battles with the authorities. The Kremlin’s pet peeve has already been sentenced to a cumulative 11.5 years in prison for violation of judicial review, fraud and contempt of court. So many accusations that the opponent says were fabricated from scratch by the Kremlin to silence him.

Maliciously, Alexeï Navalny reversed the situation, using the judicial system as a platform. While the vast majority of prisoners silently undergo prison rules, he takes advantage of the slightest flaw in the system to file a complaint. Each gives rise to hearings, at first instance and then on appeal, or even before the equivalent of the Court of Cassation in Moscow. And, despite the link reduced to visios, with the sometimes faulty connection, these hearings are as many opportunities for Alexeï Navalny to cling to the outside world.

That day, no less than six hearings are linked between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m., mobilizing in two different rooms three judges, a whole judicial and police staff. In this role-reversed game, the prison administration finds itself in the dock. Most of the time, Navalny’s complaint is dismissed. But the goalkeepers are still forced to answer the opponent’s questions from a distance.

The agenda is grotesque, far removed from the grand politics and anti-Putin rhetoric of the initial trials. But Alexeï Navalny is having a field day. He denounces the lack of lighting in his cell, the opaque windows, the paint and the walls covered with dirty lime, the absence of hot water and ventilation, the deficiencies in the hygienic rules… During one of the most surreal of these long judicial hours, he even managed to challenge one of the chief guards on… the choices of television channels imposed on prisoners. The opponent, for whom “the Russian defeat in Ukraine is inevitable”, also continues via his lawyers to comment on political and international life. Loud and clear, beyond his legal proceedings by which he wants to be as procedural as his jailers, he testifies week after week to his desire to continue the fight in prison against the machine of the Russian state.

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