Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Reuters
After spending 128 days in a tiny punishment cell, anti-Putin dissident Alexei Navalny wrote to the man who would best understand his torment. The letter was addressed to Natan Sharansky, a rebel from the Soviet era, who holds the record for the most days locked up in a Russian solitary confinement cell.
Sharansky spent 405 days in a punishment cell before making history as the first political prisoner to be released as part of Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalization of the Soviet Union.
The days of political prisoners being sent to Russia’s icy wastelands to wither and die in silence were supposed to have crumbled with the Berlin Wall, but President Putin has ushered in a dark new period of anti-democratic brutality.