A mockup of Russian prisoner Alexey Navalny's isolation cell is currently on a European tour. After stops in Dusseldorf, Berlin, Paris, and The Hague, the replica of the box in which Russian opposition activist Alexey Navalny is imprisoned is currently on display in front of a 15th Century Gothic cathedral in central Prague, with its next destination scheduled for Geneva on June 10.
Organizers of the exhibit say their aim is to demonstrate to Western publics the consequences faced by Russians who speak out against the regime of Vladimir Putin.
"When people see an isolation cell in the middle of a city, they come up to find out what is going on," Olga Guseva, coordinator of the #FreeNavalny organization and curator of the installation, told Newsweek. "We are then able to explain to them who Alexey Navalny is, what conditions he is living under, and how many more political prisoners are enduring similar persecution in Russia."
Although Navalny was imprisoned more than a full year before the February 24, 2022 launch of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many of the country's most prominent political prisoners have been jailed specifically for their opposition to their country's unprovoked attack against its democratic neighbor. These include political activists such as Vladimir Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin, both of whom were well-known critics of Putin years before the war.
But the ranks of prisoners also includes more random figures, like Yury Kokhovets, a 37-year-old Moscow man who faces up to 10 years in prison after saying in a July 2022 Radio Liberty man-on-the-street interview that "in Bucha our soldiers from Buryatia and Dagestan shot peaceful civilians."
Although Kokhovets's name was not given as part of the interview, Russian authorities managed to use facial recognition software to track him down, arrest him, and charge him with spreading "fakes" that, they allege, featured "motives of hate or hostility" against the Russian army.
Guseva sees a connection between the war in Ukraine and Russia's larger population of political prisoners, regardless of when they were deprived of their freedom.
"All of Russia's political prisoners are in jail because of their opposition to Putin," she said, "and without Putin, there would be no war in Ukraine today."
The isolation cell replica currently on display in Prague offers visitors a tangible representation of those prisoners' everyday reality, right down to the presence of a surveillance camera that records every square centimeter of the cell, including the corner occupied by the squat toilet.
"Alexey's brother, Oleg, also did time in an isolation cell, and he helped us recreate exactly what one looks like from the inside," Guseva said. "When we started putting together the reconstruction, the hardest part was explaining to contractors that it should not look beautiful, that the components needed to be put together unevenly, just as they are in a real life isolation cell in Russia."
Oleg Navalny served three and a half years in a Russian prison from 2015-2018 for a fraud conviction which the European Court for Human Rights determined in 2017 to have been "arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable." Alexey Navalny was found guilty in the same case, but was given a suspended sentence which required him to regularly check in with a parole officer.
Alexey Navalny is currently serving out a nine-year sentence issued following his conviction in a different fraud case. That Russian legal decision, issued in March 2022, came just over a year after a separate ruling found that the elder Navalny had violated the conditions of his earlier sentence by failing to register with his parole officer from September 2020 through January 2021.
During the time in question, Alexey Navanly had been recuperating from the effects of an assassination attempt utilizing a nerve agent that was widely believed to have been carried out by officers of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). Navalny's February 2021 conviction carried with it a sentence of only two and a half years.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov denies that the cases against Navalny are politically motivated. In a March 2022 interview with CNN's Christina Amanpour, Peskov said that, "No one is afraid of [Navalny]. If people [sic] is a criminal, he should be in prison. This is the same thing that is happening in the United States and in European countries."
The Kremlin did not respond to Newsweek's request for further comment.
Despite his outspoken criticism of Putin's Kremlin, Navalny himself has been regarded with skepticism in some Western circles after declining to denounce his participation in outwardly racist, anti-immigrant videos filmed in the late 2000s.
As part of an interview for the film Navalny, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary this past January, he explained his past behavior by saying, "in a normal political system, of course I would never be in the same party with [neo-Nazis and nationalists], but we are creating a broader coalition to fight a totalitarian regime, just to achieve the situation where everyone can participate in elections...I consider that it's my political superpower; I can talk with everyone."
Negative attitudes towards Navalny are even more widespread in Ukraine, where selectively edited clips of the Kremlin critic's October 2014 comments regarding Crimea are often cited as proof that the Russian opposition harbors the same imperial ambitions as the Putin regime.
"What is Crimea, a kielbasa sandwich that can be passed back-and-forth?" Navalny answered rhetorically in response to a question about whether he, as president, would return the peninsula to Ukraine. He then proposed a "normal referendum" as the best means of settling the dispute, and speculated that the Ukrainian state might actually be better off without Crimea's "pro-Russia inclined population...[the government in Kyiv] rid themselves of 2 million voters who were putting the brakes on their movement [towards Europe]."
In the same 2014 interview, however, Navalny also made clear that "Crimea was seized in an egregious violation of international norms," and he called for Russia to "stop sponsoring this war," a reference to the conflict in the Donbas that the Kremlin precipitated in April 2014.
Since 2014, Navalny has clarified his position on Crimea and Ukraine, issuing a 15-point manifesto in February 2023 that included the tenet: "What are Ukraine's borders? They are similar to Russia's—they're internationally recognized and defined in 1991. Russia also recognized these borders back then, and it must recognize them today as well. There is nothing to discuss here."
Still, volunteers staffing the isolation cell exhibition in Prague say that they have encountered skepticism from some Ukrainian visitors.
"Most Ukrainians who come up to the exhibition are interested in what's happening with Alexey," Vladimir, a student from Russia who moved to Prague before the start of the full-scale war, told Newsweek. "But there are also those who somehow believe that he personally stole Crimea in 2014. There are Ukrainians who are victims of propaganda, too."
Alyona, another Russian volunteer in Prague, told Newsweek of a similarly memorable, but different, encounter.
"Not long ago, a young man from Kharkiv visited the exhibition," she said. "He completely supported Alexey and hoped he would be freed as soon as possible. A lot of Ukrainians do understand that we really can't do anything to protest inside of Russia itself."
The belief that grassroots action inside Russia is a futile effort has contributed to the outmigration of some one million citizens since February 24, 2022. Although the site OVD-info, which tracks politically motivated arrests in Russia, recorded 15,354 detentions for anti-war activities during the first month of the Kremlin's self-described "special military operation," the figure for most months since then has failed to register in the triple digits.
There is a common phrase used in Russian dissident circles that highlights the largely arbitrary nature of justice in Putin's Russia. It was repeated by Anna Veduta, Vice President of Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation, in an interview with NPR this past April.
"We have no illusions at this point that Navalny's term is a life term," she said, "and it's either his life or Putin's life."
This reality is not lost on the Russian volunteers at the Prague exhibition, who see their efforts to inform Western publics about realities in Russia as the most they can reasonably do to affect the situation back home.
"The more people know about Alexey," Vladimir said, "the harder it will be for the Russian authorities to kill him in prison."
