Alexey Navalny has been missing for a week, probably because he’s being transferred between prisons. Meduza describes this grueling process in Russia’s penitentiary system.

Alexey Navalny’s exact whereabouts have been unknown to his lawyers and family for more than a week, at the time of this writing. He failed to appear in court via videolink on December 7. Officials attributed his absence to an “electrical accident” at Correctional Colony Number 6 outside Vladimir, where the opposition politician has been held for the past several months. His lawyers were later denied a meeting with their client. On December 11, Navalny missed another court hearing. That same day, the facility outside Vladimir revealed that Navalny is “no longer listed” among its inmates, declining to clarify where he went. On December 12, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that the Putin administration doesn’t know where Navalny is.

Unless something truly tragic has happened, Alexey Navalny’s disappearance likely means that he’s being transferred to a high-security penal colony (Russia’s supermax prisons) to serve his 19-year sentence handed down in August 2023 for the crime of “extremism.” Prisoner transfers are a grueling, dangerous, and unpredictable process. It’s also one of the most humiliating experiences of being incarcerated in Russia, say human rights activists and former inmates.

In March 2023, journalist Ksenia Mironova — the fiancée of journalist Ivan Safronov, who was sentenced in 2022 to 22 years in prison for “treason” — wrote an essay for Meduza’s Kit newsletter describing Russia’s prisoner transfer process. In light of Navalny’s most recent disappearance inside the prison system, Meduza in English shares the following highlights from Mironova’s text.

Not an easy preparation

Prisoner transfers in Russia can take weeks and sometimes even months to complete. The process is dirty, unpredictable, and dangerous. Regarding prominent inmates, the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) likes to begin transfers just before long holidays, when it’s harder for the news media and human rights activists to capture the public’s attention. Further complicating things, the FSIN treats information about prisoner transfers as a secret. Generally speaking, inmates only get advance notice about being moved when they’re sentenced to minimum-security penal settlements, where they’re responsible for delivering themselves. 

Russia technically has legal guarantees that should make moving convicts less harrowing. Article 75 of the Penitentiary Code grants inmates the right to a brief meeting with relatives before being transferred, and Article 76 limits time spent in transit prisons to 20 days. There are also regulations on living conditions during transfers, but all this is systematically ignored. 

In reality, people sentenced to prison in Russia can only guess when the guards will suddenly pull them out of one facility and pack them onto trains for the long haul to somewhere else. Given this arbitrariness, relatives must have care packages ready at a moment’s notice. These parcels are crucial for keeping inmates healthy, nourished, warm, and sanitary during the arduous journey ahead. Prisoners need laceless bags, additional food, weather-appropriate clothes, and medicine (though guards will confiscate even over-the-counter medications, distributing them at a doctor’s orders, if at all).

Mobile phones and wristwatches are strictly forbidden. To enforce the ban, guards perform painful body-cavity searches. Former prisoner Alexander Melnikov told Amnesty International that officials inserted a long tube into an inmate’s anus and then squeezed a bottle of hot water up the shaft by stomping on the bottle. Being caught with hidden contraband jeopardizes any chance of early release on parole.

Some prisoners reach certain agreements with their guards to get messages to loved ones. This is how Ukrainian entrepreneur Alexander Marchenko contacted the outside world during his transfer process, but such services are risky for the guards, too. For example, Marchenko’s transfer guards reportedly lost their jobs after helping him get a letter to his wife.

The stages of prisoner transfer

Rise and shine

Inmates being transferred are awakened at 5 a.m. and moved to a large cell without beds or anywhere to sit. The room is usually filthy. The air often stinks. Prisoners spend several hours here, waiting to be searched together with their personal things.

Get on the bus

The FSIN has its own special prisoner transport vehicles that it uses to move inmates to its special prisoner train cars. Those train cars, however, are attached to regular passenger trains, which means transfers must often proceed along circuitous routes, depending on the availability of suitable trains and their schedules. Ex-convicts say being loaded from these buses onto the train is like a scene out of a movie. “Dogs are barking, the guards are shouting. You’re running with bags in your arms, in handcuffs, strapped to another person,” recalled former political prisoner Alexey Polikhovich.

Life on the tracks

The sleeper units inside the FSIN’s train cars have been converted into jail cells with three-tier bunk beds, though the word “bed” doesn’t quite capture these unpadded surfaces. The only sunlight in the carriages comes from across the corridor. In the summer, guards sometimes arrange to have local firefighters spray the train cars with their hoses. The cabins can get so hot that the entering water explodes into steam. 

The cells occupy space that usually accommodates four passengers, but the FSIN is authorized to load between 12 and 16 prisoners, depending on a trip’s duration. Officials connect the two middle bunks through the center of the room using boards known as a “seventh shelf.” As a result of this contrivance, inmates must crouch or lie side by side. 

In all this crowding and these extreme temperatures, sanitary conditions are miserable. Prisoners are granted bathroom access only every six hours, and many guards ignore requests to use the toilet. So, inmates rely on plastic bottles to catch their bodily waste.

The prisoners themselves in these train cars are a panoply of humanity, albeit not in a way that is safe for many people. Packed together, there are inmates of different gender identities and various criminal convictions. Violent and nonviolent felony offenders can find themselves cellmates. The authorities separate only the inmates sentenced to life, who are kept in special compartments without any sunlight. 

Quarantine

After finally reaching their destination, inmates’ quarters remain cramped: prison officials shave the heads of new arrivals (but only the men), give them a shower, and place them in quarantine, where they spend the next several days on equally uncomfortable beds, often without heating. Officially, quarantining new inmates is a public health measure, but prisoners say it’s also the authorities’ way of teaching anyone who didn’t learn en route just what to expect as a guest of the Russian penitentiary system.

Far-flung and heavy with history

While Russia is hardly the only country in the world that fails to honor all its human-rights commitments when transferring inmates, centuries-long traditions in imprisonment and the vastness of the nation itself continue to plague how the Russian state manages this process.

The locations of Russia’s prisons are wildly inefficient for modern conditions. For example, there are currently 13 penitentiary institutions in the Republic of Komi, home to some 740,000 people, while there are only six in the Moscow region, which has nearly 13 million residents. Both the Tsarist and Soviet regimes developed a penitentiary culture that combined incarceration and exile, sending prisoners from the country’s more populated western regions to its remote corners. In the Gulag, inmates were used as forced labor in the Far North and the Far East, working hazardous jobs in the extraction of raw materials. 

Activists and watchdogs say the continued practice of imprisoning people thousands of miles from their homes is also a tool the authorities use to punish certain inmates. Russia’s Penitentiary Code forbids the very concept of “exile” and requires the FSIN to incarcerate people in the regions where they live or were convicted, but exceptions to this rule render it meaningless. The authorities can transfer an inmate anywhere across the country by citing reasons related to “health,” “safety,” and the simple unavailability of space at local facilities. 

Women prisoners are especially at risk of being sent far from home. The FSIN operates 760 penitentiary institutions across the country, but only 46 accommodate women (according to records published in 2017). Statistics released in 1999 showed that 12 percent of all Russian inmates were imprisoned outside their home regions, but this figure was 44 percent for women inmates.

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Experts at Amnesty International have presented the Russian authorities with options to improve the country’s ailing prison system. Officials could undertake cosmetic fixes by boosting public oversight of compliance with current regulations and ending the secrecy of the transfer process. More radical solutions would be to build new prisons closer to population centers and reform the Penitentiary Code to limit the transfer process to seven days.

In the meantime, inmates’ relatives can petition the prison system for a placement at a facility near home. These requests can be submitted while a prisoner is in pretrial detention awaiting a penal-colony assignment or even after the transfer process has begun. Of course, these appeals are rarely ever granted. If a family is able to secure a better placement, it could also inflict a second transfer on an inmate who just endured the process.