Opinion | Vladimir Putins critics now meet only in prison or in court

PRETRIAL DETENTION CENTER NO. 5, MOSCOW — By unwritten instruction, political prisoners are not supposed to be held in the same (or adjacent) cells in Russian prisons and penal colonies — a departure from late Soviet times, when special labor camps in the Perm Region and a whole wing of Vladimir City Prison were designated specifically for opponents of the regime. Some of the most prominent Soviet dissidents — including Natan Sharansky and Vladimir Bukovsky — passed through these notorious institutions, which are described in grim detail in their memoirs. If there was any upside, it was the chance to interact with fellow human rights activists. Sharansky warmly recalls sharing a prison cell with Lithuanian dissident Viktoras Petkus, their conversations and chess matches.

Today’s political prisoners are spread among regular inmates — and so, in the 16 months I’ve been imprisoned, I have had only a few accidental encounters with fellow opposition members. Once, I shared a ride in a police van with Alexei Gorinov, a Moscow municipal councilor arrested for denouncing the war in Ukraine at his council meeting.

Another time, I spent all day in a holding cell of the Moscow City Court with Daniel Kholodny, the director of Alexei Navalny’s video operations (and Navalny’s co-defendant). Before his trial, Daniel was also held at our prison, so we were sometimes escorted together to the administrative wing to meet with lawyers or investigators. Of course, we used every opportunity for a conversation along the way.

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For one day, I even shared a cell with a fellow political prisoner — Vadim Ostanin, a leader of the Navalny movement in Siberia. We were both pleasantly puzzled as to how this was possible, but the prison warden realized his mistake; Vadim was hastily removed from my cell at 2 a.m. that night.

But the most unusual — and most unexpected — encounter with an opposition colleague happened one morning last month, when the prison guard opened the feeding slot in my cell door and told me to get ready for a court appearance by video link. I did not have any scheduled hearings that day and had no idea what was going to happen. The answer came once I was locked in a metal cage (yes, even when you speak by video from a secure room inside a prison, they still lock you in a cage) and the screen was turned on.

What I saw made me think of a scene in Franz Kafka’s “The Trial” in which the protagonist, facing a prosecutor and assembled guests in the attic of a random residential building, has to respond to charges of which he has no knowledge. The room on the video screen looked like a school gym. At the head of the court, under a double-headed eagle clumsily fastened to the wall, sat Moscow City Court Judge Andrei Suvorov, with his chair behind a small (also school-type) desk. His judicial gown looked strikingly out of place, given the circumstances. The room was filled with men in black masks and khaki uniforms. At a table by the wall on the left side of the screen sat the defendant surrounded by his lawyers — and it was only when he stood up to approach the camera and speak that I realized it was Alexei Navalny.

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The Russian authorities are doing their best to hide the sham trials of their political opponents from public view. My own trial at the Moscow City Court, which ended with a 25-year sentence, was held entirely behind closed doors. Alexei’s trial was actually organized inside the penal colony in the Vladimir Region where he is serving his previous sentence. It was there where I was now connected by video link, called by Alexei as his defense witness.

Because he had to respond to his official indictment, Alexei’s questions to me were no less Kafkaesque than the surroundings. Does public opposition to the government constitute extremist activity? Is the freedom of public demonstrations conditional on permission by the authorities? Was his 2013 campaign for mayor of Moscow (where he came in second with 27 percent of the vote) just a cover for his underground illegal activities? Were his anti-corruption investigations detailing the riches of Vladimir Putin and his close entourage slanderous fabrications? And so on. A few times, I had to ask whether the question was serious. “Unfortunately, yes — that is my indictment,” Alexei would respond each time.

We hadn’t spoken since Alexei’s arrest in January 2021, so it was nice to see one another, even in such unorthodox circumstances. Suvorov didn’t interrupt us once — a pleasant change from my own trial, during which Judge Sergei Podoprigorov constantly cut me off when I spoke and did not let me ask my own defense witnesses (journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dmitry Muratov and veteran opposition leader Grigory Yavlinsky) a single question. Unlike Podoprigorov — who has been sanctioned in the United States and other Western countries under Magnitsky laws that I helped pass — Suvorov had nothing personal against his defendant.

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Of course, that didn’t affect the result in any way — verdicts for political prisoners are decided in the Kremlin ahead of time. This month, Alexei was sentenced to 19 years in a “special regime” penal colony.

“Only in a Russian court can an extremist call a traitor as his defense witness,” Alexei quipped during our courtroom exchange, referring to the respective charges against us. “There’ve been stranger things,” I replied. “Alexander Solzhenitsyn was declared a traitor, and Nelson Mandela was convicted as a terrorist. But, somehow, time has set everything right.”

And so it will again in Russia. Of this, I have no doubt.

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