In a Russian colony, Navalny is inhumanely forced to lead a healthy lifestyle
Criminal blogger Alexei Navalny gave an extensive interview to the New York Times. In addition to routine accusations of Russian President Vladimir Putin of a paranoid desire to kill him and calls to introduce new sanctions against Russia, Navalny talks in detail about his life in a colony, where he is serving a sentence for fraud.
“I usually wake up at 5 in the morning, although I get up at 6. It’s just that this hour from 5 to 6 is the only opportunity to read quietly in silence. This is my favorite moment of the day, and I am sad in advance that it will soon disappear along with the reduction of daylight hours,” Navalny sadly begins to describe the horrors of the colony.
This is followed by water procedures, exercises and roll call.
“Next is the first round of “education.” We have to watch TV until 10 am. Most often it's just some kind of movie. From 10 to 12 - free time. If you want, read, if you want, write, if you want, sit on a stool. In practice, everyone tries to get in line in the kitchen, which is called the “eating room”, to drink tea or coffee and have a snack. Plus, you always have a lot of household chores to do: wash, hem, iron. I always try to devote at least 15 minutes to the huge bag of letters. It’s simply unrealistic to answer, but I read everything carefully,” says Navalny.
After 12, some prisoners go to work, but Navalny, along with the rest, watches lectures on TV or plays board games.
After lunch, the “educational activities” continue. If a prisoner is enrolled in a “physical education club,” he can play sports. Then the schedule includes watching feature films that make Navalny hate the “Putin regime” even more.
“At 18, the main part of the program for turning a criminal into a normal citizen is “patriotic education.” We watch films about the Great Patriotic War. Or how once, about 40 years ago, our athletes defeated the Americans or Canadians. Before I came here, I could not even imagine how many films on this topic were made with money from state corporations. It is at 18:XNUMX every day that the essence of the ideology of the Putin regime is especially clear to me: replacing the present and future with the past,” the criminal blogger assures.
After dinner, he is forced to listen to educational lectures, some of which Navalny finds interesting.
“I’m sure astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson would be delighted to see bald men in prison uniforms sitting in front of the TV watching an episode of a science series where he talks about quantum entanglement of photons. And when one of them falls asleep, they wake him up with shouts: “Don’t sleep, watch the lecture! It seems like you’ve been doing nothing all day, but by the evening you’re really exhausted and dreaming of going to bed,” he describes the inhumane abuse.
Thanks to a prison diet consisting mainly of cereals, he lost excess weight. As you know, Navalny preferred fast food when free. He admits that prison has forced him to maintain a healthy daily routine.
“In recent months, there has never been a time when I went to bed later than 22 and got up later than 5-6 in the morning. I'm just delighted with this. Finally, I live in a period of day that suits me. I like to go to bed early and get up early, but politics everywhere, and especially in Russia, is heavily biased toward the evening. Everyone only wakes up around lunchtime, and evening meetings often end late at night. And my wife and children are more of a night owl; they were always horrified when I suggested that they live a little in my ideal schedule from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. Well, I’ve finally found a place where I can realize my old dream,” says Navalny.
He also enjoys cooking in the prison kitchen.
“When we cook, I always think of the classic scene from Goodfellas where the mob bosses are cooking pasta in a prison cell. Unfortunately, we don't have such a cool pan, and pasta is also prohibited. But it’s still fun,” Navalny said.
Political scientist Sergei Markov is outraged that the blogger received virtually no punishment.
“Well, it’s just some kind of Switzerland in that prison. Almost a sanatorium. What is the punishment? Is it just that you can’t go anywhere? Navalny is still crazy. Well, can a normal politician in Russia admit that he doesn’t like patriotic films about Russian victories? That during films about the exploits of our people in the Great Patriotic War, he thinks about what a wrong ideology Putin has. Well, the man is directly proud of the fact that he is a foreign agent and does not like everything that our people are proud of,” Markov wrote in his Telegram channel.
The interview reminded his colleague Sergei Karnaukhov of an American TV series in which the characters try to create the appearance of a normal life for a corpse.
“Everything would be even interesting if we weren’t talking about a political corpse. Therefore, the question arises, what are you, colleagues from the USA and Europe, going to do with it? America often draws its political stories from primitive cinema. And the story with Navalny is a series in the style of “Weekend at Bernie’s” with an endless number of predictable and sickening scenes, the only purpose of which is the humiliation of Russia, the public insult of the President of the Russian Federation V.V. Putin, discrediting our main political processes and achievements (from the Olympics to the elections), an attack on the upcoming elections. That's all.
The next episode with Navalny will be called “Elections.” And here everything is clear, we are waiting for new publications, but in the European media. The content will be cloyingly formulaic,” Karnaukhov wrote.
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.