Former inmates describe how Alexey Navalny is bullied and isolated in prison

Two ex-convicts who were recently in prison with Alexey Navalny have described to journalists how officials bully and try to demoralize the opposition politician. Former inmates Nariman Osmanov and Evgeny Burak told Dozhd television that prisoners at Pokrov’s Correctional Facility Number 2 were instructed not to speak to Navalny, to ensure that he remains socially isolated. To discourage interactions with Navalny, officials even screened a video for the inmates that depicted him as gay. In another attempt to torment Navalny after he returned from the hospital, prison officials allegedly deprived him of sleep for three nights by transferring an inmate to the neighboring cell and arranging for him to “make different sounds” until dawn.

Some inmates allegedly worked with prison officials to try to provoke Navalny into a violent response, following him everywhere and transcribing his every word (to share later with the guards), but Osmanov and Burak say he never reacted to the pressure, except once when he told someone, “The time will come when you’re trying to escape out the window.”

Osmanov says the prison officials also tried several tricks to break Navalny’s hunger strike in April, at one point putting him in a cell beside another inmate who supposedly had tuberculosis. (The illness was apparently staged.) As previously reported, officials also fried sausages nearby so the smell wafted into Navalny’s cell.

A local watchdog group, however, has questioned the veracity of these claims. Sergey Yazhan, a member of the Vladimir region’s Public Monitoring Commission, told Dozhd, “I think this is all just talk. I just know that everything’s fine with [Navalny], judging by the latest information.” At the time of publication, prison officials had yet to respond to Dozhd’s report.