Putin's enemy number one, Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny has informed that he is in the prison colony about 85 kilometers east of Moscow.


In a letter sent through his lawyers Mr. Navalny described tight controls at his prison, saying they include hourly checks during the night.

Russian opposition politician described the prison, IK-2, as a “friendly concentration camp.” He said that he hasn’t seen “even a hint at violence” there but faced overwhelming controls that he compared to George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

Navalny, whom prison authorities marked as a flight risk, said he’s subject to particularly close oversight that includes a guard waking him up every hour at night and filming him to report that he’s in place.

I calmly go back to sleep with a thought that there are people who remember about me and will never lose me, he said with a touch of his trademark sardonic humor, adding that the prison is rigged with surveillance cameras.

I must acknowledge that the Russian prison system has managed to surprise me, Navalny wrote. I couldn’t imagine that it was possible to set up a real concentration camp within 100 kilometers from Moscow, he added.

He said that the prison regimen is rigorously observed and prisoners meticulously follow the rules.

While I haven’t seen any violence or even a hint at violence, the strained posture of inmates who stand at attention and fear turning their heads make me easily believe numerous accounts of people beaten nearly to death with wooden hammers here at IK-2 Pokrov quite recently, he informed.

Last month, Navalny was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison for, as court defined it, violating the terms of his probation while convalescing in Germany. The sentence stems from a 2014 embezzlement conviction that Navalny has rejected as fabricated — and which the European Сourt of Human Rights has ruled to be unlawful.