 "Alexei Navalny's last walk and the haunting legacy of Russia's Arctic Circle Prison")
“Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” said Winston Churchill famously. And so are its prisons. The vast Siberian tundra that forms large parts of Russia allows for this macabre and unearthly narrative for the rest of the world.
There has been global bedlam, since Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Putin’s fiercest critic and opponent dropped dead while walking in the Russian prison, also known as the ‘Arctic Circle Prison”, where he was imprisoned since December 2023, sentenced to 19 years under a “special regime”. Western leaders have since pointed fingers at Putin, accusing him of being directly responsible for Navalny’s death, while Russia has claimed that Nevalny died under natural circumstances. In a statement, the federal penitentiary service for the region where Navalny was incarcerated said, “He felt unwell after a walk immediately after which he lost consciousness.”
The “Arctic Circle Prison”, or the “Polar Wolf” was officially named FKU IK-3 and is a men’s maximum security corrective colony located in the town of Kharp located in the Priuralsky district in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. It has an occupancy limit of 1,085 people.
Russia has an extensive and chimerical history of prisons since Stalin’s infamous Gulag(also slang for political prisons), and Kharp was indeed a town built by the convicts of the Gulag during the Stalin era. Located about 60 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, IK-3 was founded as part of the GULAG system of forced labour camps. The colony was founded on 21 August, 1961, on the former camp unit of the 501st Gulag construction site. It was initially known as YATs 34/3.
In 1964, the first residential building for convicts, a medical unit, a boiler room, a bathhouse, a laundry, a dormitory for the colony settlement section and a central checkpoint were constructed.
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More ShortsConvicts worked in quarries, loading sand and gravel for the railways, between 1966 and 1970, with the first batch of especially dangerous repeat offenders beings brought to the colony in 1967.
In 1971, warehouses, an icehouse and garages for the institution’s equipment were built. Since 1985, the IK 3 has been actively developing, with convicts employed in manufacturing at minimum wage. In 1999, the prison colony even opened their first temple, the Temple of St Sergius of Radonezh, built by the inmates.
Today, some 3,000 kilometres away from Moscow, IK 3 houses some 1,050 of Russia’s most dreaded and feared criminals. It is a known fact that the prison holds serial killers, rapists, convicted paedophiles, repeat offenders and others convicted of the most serious of crimes against humanity and serving sentences of 20 years or more. In cases like Navalny’s the government sends convicts who can be considered political prisoners there too. Apart from Navalny, another high-profile inmate was Platon Lebedev, who was convicted of tax evasion and other charges during the dismantling of the Yukos oil giant in the mid-2000s. Unlike Navalny though, Lebedev walked out alive after a few years in the Polar Wolf. Lucky man!
All you need to do is look at a map, to see that it is the northernmost prison in the world close to the Arctic Circle, no doubt one of the harshest as well.
For most of the year there are no flights to the region and accessing by railway is tough. Sitting in a tropical country, scenes from the movie Dr Zhivago come to mind when one imagines the terrain and its ingress.
Even Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service’s postal service is not operational at IK-3. The normal Russian postal service is the only mode of communication with the prison.
The prison system’s cell phone service Zonatelekom was also shut down recently by the time Navalny arrived.
Being north of the Arctic Circle, the region sees daylight only six months a year and in summer it is common to receive bites from mosquitoes and sandflies, as explained by Marc Elie, a researcher in the history of the Soviet Union at the Centre for Russian, Caucasian and Central European Studies in France.
One of the elements that endure is the use of the weather as a “tool of repression”, in Kharp where the temperatures can fall to as low as -30 degrees Celsius.
It is humanly impossible to escape this prison as there are just hundreds of kilometres of Tundra on one side with the mountains of the Polar Urals on the other side. The high iron fence surrounding this prison is more for protecting the inmates and prison workers from wild animals than the threat of runaways.
Human rights activist Sergei Davidis had once said, “There should be no prisons in Kharp”.
One tends to agree with him.
The author is a freelance journalist and features writer based out of Delhi. Her main areas of focus are politics, social issues, climate change and lifestyle-related topics. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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