Kremlin critic Navalny sent to notoriously harsh prison

Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition politician, is going to serve his prison sentence in a penal colony notorious for disciplinary measures considered harsh even by Russian standards, Russian news outlets reported Monday.

Navalny returned to Russia in January despite the government’s threats of arrest, after spending months in a Berlin hospital recuperating from being poisoned. He was subsequently convicted in a show trial of violating the terms of his parole during his stay in Germany and sentenced to more than two years in prison.

On Monday, the European Union placed sanctions on four senior Russian officials considered responsible for his prosecution, the first time the EU has exercised that power under a new law to punish human rights violators worldwide.

The EU had already sanctioned six Russians and a state scientific research center in response to the poisoning.

News reports on state-run outlets offered an early glimpse of the likely conditions of Navalny's imprisonment. The site, Penal Colony No. 2, is known for strict enforcement of rules and for making extensive use of a separate, harsher punishment facility within its walls where inmates are not allowed to mingle or even talk among themselves, according to former inmates and lawyers.

While guards oversee the prison, fellow prisoners maintain discipline within the brigades, either in cooperation with guards, a group known as “activists,” or as criminal gang leaders, known as “thieves in law.”

Penal Colony No. 2 is controlled by “activists” in cahoots with the warden, according to former inmates, an arrangement that will allow the prison administration to strictly control Navalny’s life at all times.

Dmitry Dyomushkin, a nationalist politician who served time in the colony, described conditions in the separate punishment brigade, where Navalny could wind up for infractions as minor as failing to button his jacket, as psychologically harrowing.

Inmates, for example, must shave every morning but are not allowed to do so themselves because they are not allowed to hold razors; instead, “activists” wield the razors and cuts and nicks are common, he said.

Inmates spend hours standing with their hands clasped behind their backs, looking at their feet, forbidden from making eye contact with the guards, Dyomushkin said in an interview on the Echo of Moscow radio station.