Inside Polar Wolf, the sadistic centrepiece of Putin’s gulag archipelago
Even within Russia’s notorious penal colony system, prison FGU IK-3, or the Polar Wolf as it is more commonly known, has a reputation for cruelty.
In winter temperatures of -30C, prisoners are ordered to gather outside for morning roll call wearing only light clothing. In spring, swarms of mosquitoes bite through their uniforms. If any of the prisoners flinch, the group is hosed down with water.
Beatings and naked stints in isolation cells are common. Guards force prisoners to march between blocks, sing patriotic songs and recite the Russian national anthem.
The prison, where Alexei Navalny, Russia’s top opposition leader, died in mysterious circumstances, is part of a network of about 700 penal colonies scattered across the country.
Among the more than 460,000 inmates locked up inside are the Kremlin’s political prisoners – Russian opposition leaders, Western journalists, civil society leaders and activists – who fell foul of Vladimir Putin’s regime.
According to Memorial, once Russia’s foremost human rights before it was banned, the number of people designated as political prisoners in Russia has more than tripled since 2018, reaching 676.
Since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the ranks of political prisoners have grown, with dozens of people being sentenced under tough new laws punishing dissent over the war.
Tantamount to a death sentence
The conditions they are subjected to in prison are often tantamount to a death sentence.
In the words of one Russian lawyer, the Polar Wolf colony, high in the Russian Arctic, is “essentially legalised torture”, designed to break prisoners physically and mentally.
“It’s a disgusting colony,” he told the Russian news website Meduza.
When he flew back to Russia from the relative safety of Germany three years ago, having survived poisoning with the Novichok nerve agent, Navalny knew that the Kremlin wanted him dead.
There is perhaps nowhere more efficient at killing off the Kremlin’s opponents than Russia’s sprawling system of prison colonies.
These lice and mosquito-infested remote outposts freeze in winter and boil in summer. Guards prod, bully and torture. The daily regime grinds, bores and humiliates.
Riots are common and thousands of inmates die each year, mainly from suicides or heart attacks. Even the option of fighting as cannon fodder on the frontlines in Ukraine, where thousands are being killed, appeals to Russian inmates beyond staying in prison.
And within this system, Polar Wolf stands out as one of the worst.
It lies at the end of the road and was built as a Soviet prison labour camp to quarry stone in the 1960s in one of the country’s most inaccessible and isolated Arctic regions.
It houses 1,000 prisoners, mainly rapists and murderers. Rare photographs from the prison show rows of inmates with shaved heads sitting in a classroom listening to women giving lectures from behind a grill.
Oleh Sentsov, a Ukrainian filmmaker, spent five years at the nearby prison colony Polar Bear, which supposedly has a lighter regime than Polar Wolf.
He said that prisoners were at the mercy of guards, who dished out beatings, electric shocks and threats of rape with impunity. Prisoners who were considered troublemakers were locked in a box in the foetal position and forced to urinate on themselves.
“You are in purgatory, where you have no rights, and there is no use and no one to complain to,” he said in 2019 after being released in a prisoner exchange.
Tatiana Stanovaya, a Russia-focused analyst, said that if a Russian prison colony didn’t kill inmates, it would crush their spirits.
“Renowned for their austere conditions, Russian penal institutions inflict profound and lasting physical and psychological harm on inmates, effectively maiming their lives and rendering many individuals permanently disabled,” she said.
Navalny’s route to Polar Wolf had been circuitous. He disappeared for 20 days in December from a prison in the Vladimir region near Moscow, a comparatively benign regime, before reappearing in Polar Wolf.
Despite the hardships, Navalny had been determinedly cheerful since arriving at Polar Wolf shortly before Christmas, posting messages through lawyers that mocked Putin and joked about being Santa Claus.
Analysts said that even in prison, Navalny’s defiance threatened Putin.
“No other post-Yeltsin political leader built from scratch the infrastructure of mobilisation that Navalny built. No one else had the charisma,” said Samuel Greene, a professor of Russian politics at King’s College London.
Prof Greene warned that other political prisoners, Russian opposition leaders Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza, and the American journalist Evan Gershkovich, were increasingly vulnerable now that Navalny had died.
Even before Navalny’s death, they had good reason to fear.
Many opponents of Putin, like Boris Nemtsov, a politician, or Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist, have simply been shot dead. Others, like Alexander Litvinenko, have been poisoned.
Untold numbers have fallen from windows, died in car accidents or drowned.
But the majority of Putin’s critics and opponents are simply locked up and left to die in Russia’s prisons.
The Gulag system was massively extended by Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator, but Russia’s prisons have been used for generations to suppress dissent and control the population.
In his 1862 book The House of the Dead, Fyodor Dostoevsky detailed his own experiences in a fictionalised memoir of living for four years in the squalor of a prison camp in Siberia which he described as “one of the ulcers of society” and “one of the most powerful destructive agents”.
For Navalny, though, his anticipated death in a Russian prison was also an opportunity to challenge the Kremlin with a rallying call for his supporters.
“My message if I am killed is very simple,” he said in a video recorded before he left Germany for Russia in 2021. “Don’t give up.”
