2022
[Instagram post]
January 17
Exactly one year ago today I came home, to Russia.
I didn’t manage to take a single step on the soil of my country as a free man: I was arrested even before border control.
The hero of one of my favorite books, Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy, says, “Yes, the only suitable place for an honest man in Russia at the present time is prison.”
It sounds fine, but it was wrong then and it’s even more wrong now.
There are a lot of honest people in Russia—tens of millions. There are far more than is commonly believed.
The authorities, however, who were repugnant then and are even more so now, are afraid not of honest people but of those who are not afraid of them. Or let me be more precise: those who may be afraid, but overcome their fear.
There are a lot of them too. We meet them all the time in all sorts of places, from rallies to the media, people who remain independent. Indeed, even here, on Instagram. I recently read that the Ministry of the Interior was firing staff who had “liked” my posts. So in Russia in 2022, even a “like” can take courage.
In every period, the essence of politics has been that a tin-pot tsar who wants to arrogate to himself the right to personal, unaccountable power needs to intimidate the honest people who are not afraid of him. And they, in turn, need to convince everyone around them that they should not be afraid, that there are, by an order of magnitude, more honest people than the mean little tsar’s security guards. Why live your whole life in fear, even being robbed in the process, if everything can be arranged differently and more justly?
The pendulum swings endlessly. Or the tug-of-war. Today you are brave. Tomorrow they seem to have scared you a bit. And the day after tomorrow they have scared you so much that you despair and become brave again.
I have no idea when my journey into space will end, if ever, but on Friday I was informed that another criminal case is being brought against me and going to court. And there is yet another coming up, in which I am supposedly an extremist and a terrorist. So I’m one of those cosmonauts who don’t count the days until the end of their term. What is there to count? People have been kept in prison for as long as twenty-seven years.
But I find myself in this company of cosmonauts precisely because I tried my utmost to tug my end of the rope. I pulled over to this side those among the honest people who would not or could no longer bear to be afraid.
That is what I did. I don’t for a second regret it. And I will continue to do it.
Having spent my first year in prison, I want to tell everyone exactly the same thing I shouted to those who gathered outside the court when the guards were taking me off to the police truck. Don’t be afraid of anything. This is our country and it’s the only one we have.
The only thing we should fear is that we will surrender our homeland to be plundered by a gang of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. That we will surrender without a fight, voluntarily, our own future and the future of our children.
Huge thanks to all of you for your support. I can feel it.
I’d just like to add: This year has gone by incredibly quickly. It seems only yesterday I was boarding the plane to Moscow, and now I’ve already completed a year in prison. It’s true what they say in science books: time on earth and in space passes at different speeds.
I love you all. Hugs to everyone.
February 9
A word of truth has tremendous power. And here’s a perfect example for you.
Now I’m just another prisoner. I don’t have any power. I have no party. I am barred from running for office. And it has been deemed appropriate to attach the prefix “extremist” to my surname.
In all probability, the Kremlin believes that in this way they have defeated me and all of us. They will be congratulating each other.
But now see how they are planning to judge me on their latest fabricated charge. Right here, in this prison. That is truly unprecedented. I have become a collector of Putin’s Most Amazing Trials.
The court is a Moscow court, the court of Lefortovo district.
Everybody—the judge, the court clerk, the prosecutors, lawyers, investigators, the witnesses—is in Moscow. And they are all going to have to come here to me, to this prison.
The cause of all this is straightforward: It is the word of truth. The gang of thieves and liars headed by Putin shuns it as vampires shun sunlight. They know I have nothing but the word of truth, and I’m not afraid to use it, even if they lumber me with a dozen more sentences.
That is why they want to try me where I have to strip naked twice before I can even talk to my lawyers through glass. That is, right here in this penal colony.
As if to say, talk all you like. No one except the police dog is going to hear you.
It is worth looking separately at the court order for the holding of the session. There is no hint of an explanation as to why the trial is scheduled to be held in this prison, but it is twice asserted that it will be an open sitting of the court. That is an iconic example of what we can only call Putin’s signature hypocrisy. As if to say, “What’s the problem? We are trying Navalny in open court. Okay, so it’s inside a prison, but that’s a nuance. And we guarantee that anybody who can get into the courtroom, by teleporting, say, or parachuting in (if they don’t get shot on the way down), will be free to attend.”
I won’t deny it: What is happening infuriates me. How can anyone so openly and ostentatiously spit on the law? But also, if I am honest, I have a feeling of great satisfaction at just how scared our bunker-palace, bribe-taking old man is of what I say at these trials. It doesn’t seem like anything out of the ordinary, and yet it absolutely grates on their nerves in the Kremlin. And he shrieks at his meetings, “I don’t want a single living soul to hear a word of it!”
I don’t think things are going to work out the way they want. Their whole strategy is to stop anybody from hearing me. But there is you. Not all of Russia by any means has been intimidated and is cowering under a rotting log, trembling, ready to resign themselves to the poverty and degradation. There are many honest people, armed as I am, with the word of truth. Millions of them.
Support us. Let every day of this closed “open trial” in a prison be a day when you share what is driving that old man out of his mind, that he insists must be banned. From information about the trial itself to the Anti-Corruption Foundation investigations (and more). Make sure that in these few days many more people learn about the palaces and yachts of those people of modest means. About the mistresses and second families of these conservative Orthodox Christians. About the foreign real estate of the patriots of United Russia.
They will not be able to silence or intimidate everyone. In Russia, quite apart from me, there are many who will continue to tell the truth.
February 22
Yesterday I watched, in a meeting of the Security Council of Russia, a collection of dotards and thieves (I think our Anti-Corruption Foundation investigated every one of them for corruption) and was reminded of just such a collection of highly placed dotards in the Politburo of the Communist Party’s Central Committee who, in much the same way, on a whim, imagining they were geopolitical players at the “great chessboard,” decided to send Soviet troops into Afghanistan.
That resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties, a traumatizing of nations, with consequences neither we nor Afghanistan can put behind us, and the emergence of one of the main reasons for the collapse of the U.S.S.R.
Those senile idiots in the Politburo hid behind a fig leaf of a duplicitous ideology. Putin’s senile idiots don’t have an ideology, only their incessant, blatant lying. They don’t even bother to think up a remotely plausible casus belli.
Both groups needed just one thing: to distract the attention of the Russian people from the country’s real problems—lack of economic development, rising prices, rampant lawlessness—and redirect it toward imperial hysteria.
Have you watched the news on the state channels recently? That’s all I get to watch, and I can assure you there is no news about Russia there at all. Every news item is about Ukraine, the United States, Europe.
Barefaced propaganda is no longer enough for the dotards and thieves. They thirst for blood. They want to move models of tanks around on a map of a theater of military operations.
And then the head of the Politburo of the twenty-first century came out with a lunatic speech. The most accurate characterization of it was on Twitter: “It’s absolutely just like my grandfather getting drunk at a family gathering and embarrassing everyone with his version of how global politics work.”
It would be funny, if only the drunken grandfather was not this sixty-nine-year-old who is clinging to power in a country with nuclear weapons.
Replace “Ukraine” in his speech with “Kazakhstan,” “Belarus,” “the Baltic republics,” “Azerbaijan,” “Uzbekistan,” including even “Finland.” Imagine where the geopolitical thinking of that senile grandfather will take him next. The decision in 1979 ended very badly for all concerned. And this decision will end no less badly. Afghanistan was ruined, but the U.S.S.R. was also dealt a mortal blow.
Because of Putin, hundreds now, and in the future tens of thousands, of Ukrainians and Russian citizens will die. Yes, he will stop Ukraine from developing, he will drag it into the swamp, but Russia too will pay a high price.
We have everything for massive twenty-first-century development, but we will again squander the historic opportunity of leading a rich, healthy life as a nation, in exchange for war, filth, lies, and a palace with golden eagles in Gelendzhik.
Putin and his senile thieves in the Security Council and United Russia party are the enemies of Russia and the main threat to it. Not Ukraine. Not the West. Putin is a murderer and wants more killing. It is the Kremlin that is making you poorer, not Washington. It is not in London but in Moscow that economic policy is conducted in a way that means a pensioner’s food “shopping basket” has doubled in price.
To fight for Russia, to save Russia, is to fight for the removal of Putin and his kleptocrats. But now that also means to fight for peace.
February 24
Well, so what kind of platform do I have now? This is not a platform; I’m in the dock.
But that has its advantages. You know the way people sometimes say in a dispute, “I just want to say for the record…” Even if there plainly is no record.
But I have one.
Everything I say goes on the record. So I started today’s court appearance with a petition: “Esteemed court, I wish officially and for the record to declare that I am against this war [in Ukraine]. I consider it immoral, fratricidal, and criminal. It has been started by the Kremlin gang to make it easier for them to steal.
“They are killing so they can thieve.”
It was important for me to say that on the record. So that it would be permanent. So that I myself could always be reminded that I had said these words at the moment they needed to be said: I am against the war.
You should say that too.
March 26
The ghastliest days in prison are the birthdays of close family, especially children.
What sort of pathetic greeting is it to send a letter to your son on his fourteenth birthday? What kind of memory will that be of being close to his father?
“For my birthday my dad took me on a hike.”
“Well, on my birthday my dad taught me how to drive a car.”
“For my birthday my dad sent me a letter from prison on a piece of notepaper. He promised that when he gets out, he’ll teach me how to boil water in a plastic bag.”
Let’s face it, you don’t get to choose your parents. Some kids get stuck with jailbirds.
But it is on my children’s birthdays that I am particularly aware why I’m in jail. We need to build the Beautiful Russia of the Future for them to live in.
Zakhar, happy birthday!
I really miss you and love you very much!
April 3
It’s a real Russian spring day. That is, the snowdrifts are up to my waist, and it’s been snowing all weekend. Snow is something prisoners hate, because what do they do when it snows and after it snows? That’s right, they clear the snow away. Arguing that it is, after all, April, and in at most ten days it will all just melt anyway, not only doesn’t work, but draws heartfelt indignation from the prison administration. If anything is lying anywhere in violation of the regulations and the normal routine of doing things, it must be shoveled up, scraped off, and removed. That said, clearing snow actually is one of the most meaningful activities in prison life, because most of the others are an inane response to the need to generate work at all costs. The prisoners have a saying: “It doesn’t matter where what gets chucked, as long as the con feels completely fucked.”
This describes my feeling every weekend, because although you can find at least an inkling of sense in shoveling snow in April, the work is genuinely exhausting. Because I am classified as a non-trusted prisoner, they don’t allow me to shovel the snow like everyone else and to break the ice on the “main line,” the camp’s principal street, along which the commandant walks. In my local area and with my own squad, though, I have to shovel.
We all have that classic labor camp look that belongs in a movie about the Gulag. The heavy jackets, fur hats, and mittens, the enormous wooden shovels, each of which is so heavy you would think it was made of cast iron, especially after it gets saturated with water, which freezes. They are the selfsame shovels used by the soldiers who cleared the streets of my military hometown when I was a child. You might have thought that in the thirty years that have passed since then, shovel technology would have progressed toward production of lighter shovels, but in Russia, as with so many other things, we didn’t hack it. We were brought a couple of lightweight shovels that immediately broke. The response was the usual “Oh, well, what the hell, let them use the wooden shovels. We’ve used them for shoveling snow all our lives. They are reliable.” As if to say, Our grandfathers invented these shovels and far be it for us to doubt their wisdom by trying to improve something that is already ideal.
So there I was, scowling, wearing a heavy winter jacket, and wielding a wooden shovel with snow frozen to it. The only thing that amused me, and at least partly enabled me to accept this reality, is that on these occasions I feel like the hero of my all-time favorite joke. It is a Soviet joke, but has a certain relevance today.
A boy goes out for a stroll in the courtyard of his apartment block. Boys playing soccer there invite him to join in. The boy is a bit of a stay-at-home, but he’s interested and runs over to play with them. He eventually manages to kick the ball, very hard, but unfortunately it crashes through the window of the basement room where the janitor lives. Unsurprisingly, the janitor emerges. He is unshaven, wearing a fur hat and quilted jacket, and clearly the worse for a hangover. Infuriated, the janitor stares at the boy before rushing at him.
The boy runs away as fast as he can and thinks, What do I need this for? After all, I’m a quiet, stay-at-home sort of boy. I like reading. Why play soccer with the other boys? Why am I running away right now from this scary janitor when I could be lying at home on the couch reading a book by my favorite American writer, Hemingway?
Meanwhile, Hemingway is reclining on a chaise longue in Cuba with a glass of rum in his hand and thinking, God, I’m so tired of this rum and Cuba. All this dancing, and shouting, and the sea. Damn it, I’m a clever guy. Why am I here instead of being in Paris discussing existentialism with my colleague Jean-Paul Sartre over a glass of Calvados?
Meanwhile, Jean-Paul Sartre, sipping Calvados, is looking at the scene in front of him and thinking, How I hate Paris. I can’t stand the sight of these boulevards. I’m sick and tired of all these rapturous students and their revolutions. Why do I have to be here when I long to be in Moscow, engaging in fascinating dialogue with my friend Andrei Platonov, the great Russian writer?
Meanwhile, in Moscow, Platonov is running across a snow-covered courtyard and thinking, If I catch that little bastard, I’ll fucking kill him.
Although, of course, I am no Andrei Platonov, I have the quilted jacket and the fur hat, and I too am writing a book. Next I’ll finish the chapter about how I met Yulia.
April 5
This is how the Russian TV viewers have seen it. And I am one of them.
I heard yesterday morning about the monstrous events in Bucha from the news that Russia is calling a meeting of the UN Security Council in connection with the massacre carried out there by Ukrainian Nazis.
In the evening, the anchor of Channel One explained it all:
“NATO has been preparing the provocation in Bucha for a long time and at the highest level. This is further confirmed by the fact that President Biden recently called Putin a ‘butcher.’ Listen to how similar the English words ‘butcher’ and ‘Bucha’ sound. That is how the Western public was subconsciously prepared for this provocation.”
You cannot imagine the monstrousness of the deceit on national channels. And, unfortunately, how persuasive it is for people who have no access to alternative news sources.
I’m saying all this to make the point that Putin’s propagandists long ago ceased to be merely a tool. They are committed warmongers and have become a party of their own.
They demand war to a victorious conclusion. The threat of nuclear war does not deter them. Live on air they smear and destroy their fellow Putinites if they so much as hint that peace negotiations are a good thing.
Their politics is a propaganda snake biting its own tail. Propagandists create a public opinion that no longer simply enables Putin to commit war crimes but demands them from him.
Warmongers must be treated as war criminals. All this Rwandan-style Radio of a Thousand Hills needs to be subjected to sanctions and someday brought to justice.
I want to remind you that the National Media Group, which owns the greater part of this apparatus of deceit, is the personal property of Putin himself, and that is why it is officially directed by Putin’s mistress, Alina Kabaeva.
It is essential that decisive measures be taken to obstruct the work of these heirs of Goebbels, from a complete ban on the supply and maintenance of equipment, to a search for their assets in the West and visa blacklisting.
Monstrous atrocities in Bucha, Irpin, and other Ukrainian cities were committed not only by those who tied the hands of civilians behind their backs, not only by those who shot them in the back of the head, but also by those who stood close by, whispering, “Shoot them, shoot them. We’ll spin this so well on tonight’s TV show.”
June 15
My journey into space continues. I’ve been transferred from one spaceship to another.
In other words, hello, everyone, from a strict regime camp.
Yesterday I was moved to Melekhovo Penal Colony 6.
I’m in quarantine, so there’s not much to tell. Here are just a couple of fresh impressions about cultural life and outrages.
On the cultural front: I almost went nuts carrying my books kept in prison storage to and from the police truck. The jailers almost went nuts listing them all. That’s despite the fact that, worrying about just such a situation, I managed a month ago, with great difficulty, to persuade the administration to let me donate fifty books to the prison library. Yesterday, for the first time in my life, as I was carrying those sacks, I wondered whether book burning is necessarily a bad thing.
As for the outrages: In quarantine there is a notice listing the jobs you can be trained for here and how long the courses last. In just three months you can become, like me, a garment worker—essentially, a seamstress—that elite of the working class who can instantly distinguish a linen seam from a lapped seam. But can you imagine it, those who choose the profession of “poultry deboner” also have a three-month course! In other words, in that respect they are being equated with us seamstresses. I mean, come on, what is there in deboning a chicken you would need to study for three months? Are they rolling the carcasses in rhinestones or what?
I am outraged.
As for everything else, it is okay for now.
Hello to everyone, hugs for you all.
July 1
I live like Putin and Medvedev.
At least I think so when I look at the fence around my barracks. Everyone has the usual fence, and inside there are rods to dry the laundry on. But I have a six-meter-high fence, the kind I have only seen in our investigations of Putin’s and Medvedev’s palaces.
Putin both lives and works in such a place—in Novo-Ogaryovo or Sochi. And I live in a similar place. Putin lets ministers sit in the waiting room for six hours, and my lawyers have to wait five or six hours to see me. I have a loudspeaker in my barracks that plays songs like “Glory to the FSB,” and I think Putin has one too.
That’s where the similarities end, though.
Putin, as you know, sleeps until 10:00 a.m., then swims in the pool and eats cottage cheese with honey.
But for me 10:00 a.m. is lunchtime, because work starts at 6:40 a.m.
6:00—Wake up. Ten minutes to make my bed, wash, shave, and so on.
6:10—Exercise.
6:20—Escorted to breakfast.
6:40—Searched and escorted to work.
At work, you sit for seven hours at the sewing machine on a stool below knee height.
10:20—Fifteen-minute lunch break.
After work, you continue to sit for a few hours on a wooden bench under a portrait of Putin. This is called “disciplinary activity.”
On Saturday, you work for five hours and sit on the bench under the portrait again.
Sunday, in theory, is a day off. But in the Putin administration, or wherever my unique routine was set up, they are experts at relaxation. On Sunday we sit in a room on a wooden bench for ten hours.
I don’t know who can be “disciplined” by such activities, except a cripple with a bad back. But maybe that’s their goal.
But you know me, I’m an optimist and look for the bright side even in my dark existence. I have as much fun as I can. While sewing, I’ve memorized Hamlet’s soliloquy in English.
However, the inmates in my shift say that when I close my eyes and mutter something in Shakespearean English like “in thy orisons be all my sins remembered,” it looks as if I were summoning a demon.
But I have no such thoughts: summoning a demon would be a violation of the prison regulations.