"I decided to record my feelings right away, because all year I had been training for situations like today, developing what I call my 'prison Zen.'"

"Whatever way you look at it, nine years, especially in 'strict' conditions, is an extremely long sentence. In Russia, the average punishment for murder is seven years. A prisoner sentenced to an extra term of nine years is going to be upset, to say the least. When I got back to the prison, everyone—who of course already knew about the sentence—furtively gave me a particular kind of look. How was I taking it? What was the expression on my face? It is, after all, intriguing to see someone’s reaction when they have just been told they will be serving the longest sentence of anyone in the entire prison complex. And that they are going to be sent somewhere especially grim and usually reserved for murderers. Nobody is going to come over and ask how I feel, but everyone is curious to see how this plays out. It’s an occasion when a person might hang themselves or slash their wrists. But I am completely fine. Even 'my' jailer said in the course of a really annoying full strip search, 'You don’t look to me to be all that upset.' I am really O.K. I am writing this not because I am willing myself to keep up a pretense of being carefree and blasé but because my prison Zen has kicked in...."

From "Alexei Navalny’s Prison Diaries/The Russian opposition leader’s account of his last years and his admonition to his country and the world" (The New Yorker).

"Mr. Navalny was able to send hundreds of handwritten letters, thanks to the curious digitalization of the Russian prison system..."

"... a relic of a brief burst of liberal reform in the middle of Mr. Putin’s 24-year rule. Through a website, people could write to him for 40 cents a page and receive scans of his responses.... In a letter... Mr. Navalny explained that he preferred to be reading 10 books simultaneously and 'switch between them.'... Describing prison life... he recommended nine books on the subject, including a 1,012-page, three-volume set by the Soviet dissident Anatoly Marchenko. Mr. Navalny added in that letter that he had reread 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich'.... the searing Alexander Solzhenitsyn novel about Stalin’s gulag.... 'Everyone usually thinks that I really need pathetic and heartbreaking words,' he wrote... 'But I really miss the daily grind — news about life, food, salaries, gossip'.... 'I really like your letters,' Mr. Navalny wrote in the last message that [his friend, the Russian photographer Evgeny Feldman, received. 'They’ve got everything I like to discuss: food, politics, elections, scandalous topics and ethnicity issues.'"

Writes Anton Troianovski, in "Inside Aleksei Navalny’s Final Months, in His Own Words/Trump. Indian food. Matthew Perry. And books, books, books. Excerpts from letters obtained by The Times show Mr. Navalny’s active mind, even amid brutal prison conditions" (NYT)(free access at that link).

Why is Matthew Perry in the headline? We're told that Navalny had never watched "Friends" — a show with plenty of food, gossip, and scandalous topics — but he'd read the actor's obituary in The Economist, "Matthew Perry changed the way America spoke" ("[I]n the audition it was he who had nailed it, reading the words in that unexpected way, 'hitting emphases that no one else had hit'; making everyone laugh. It was less that he, Matthew Perry, could play Chandler than that he was Chandler. He changed the part—and then the part changed him").

The NYT piece tells us that that Navalny's prison library had the classics — Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky or Chekhov — and “Who could’ve told me that Chekhov is the most depressing Russian writer?”

There's also some material here about Trump, but it's a little hard to understand. Perhaps it was enigmatic in the original. There's "Mr. Navalny confided that the electoral agenda of former U.S. President Donald J. Trump looked 'really scary.'" Not the man, the "electoral agenda"? And then he went on to say "Please name one current politician you admire."

"Aleksei A. Navalny’s political allies on Saturday confirmed his death...."

The NYT reports.

Kira Yarmysh, Mr. Navalny’s spokeswoman, said in a statement on X that Russian investigators had transferred Mr. Navalny’s body from a penal colony in the Arctic to the nearby town of Salekhard, where it is being examined....

In their statement about his death, Russian prison authorities said that its causes were “being determined.” Local investigators said that they launched a “procedural check” into Mr. Navalny’s death....

"We have no reason to believe state propaganda. If this is true, then it’s not 'Navalny died,' but 'Putin killed Navalny,' and only that."

Said Leonid Volkov, Aleksei A. Navalny’s longtime chief of staff, quoted in a NYT article that seems to need a better headline, "Aleksei Navalny, Putin Critic, Dies in Prison, Russian Authorities Say/The opposition leader, who was poisoned in 2020, had spent months in isolation" (NYT).

What good would it do Putin to lie about this? Does the NYT know that it's not a lie? What good would it do the NYT to report this as a fact if it were not verified?

Also in the NYT:

"Modern-day Russian penal colonies have become moneymaking enterprises... [E]very correctional facility has a production unit such as a sewing factory..."

"... or a woodworking or metalworking shop, with most of the profits going to intermediary companies buying and selling on low-cost goods, or to the prison authorities 'through kickbacks by companies that purchase the goods directly.'... [O]pposition politician Alexei Navalny... painted a grim picture of life inside Penal Colony No. 2, calling it 'our friendly concentration camp.' He accused guards of denying him proper medical care or the chance to sleep and described dehumanizing surveillance. Media investigations have reported abuse of prisoners at such facilities."

From "Brittney Griner may go to a Russian penal colony. Here’s what you need to know" (WaPo).

Here's the article linked at "our friendly concentration camp": "Putin foe Navalny once described prison life with dark humor. Now his messages are just dark" (WaPo). The "posts" in social media were made, we're told, by "anonymous members of his team," who have somehow received messages from Nalvany, messages written in his "familiar wry style":

Biden declined to do a joint press conference with Putin, so Putin had the stage to himself.

From the NY Post report of the event:

Putin reframed accusations of harboring cybercriminals with the dubious claim that the US is more responsible than Russia for hacking... “I’m talking about something that’s already well known, but not known to the broader public, not from American sources, I’m afraid,” Putin said through a translator....

The Russian leader changed the topic when a journalist asked about his government imprisoning opposition leader Alexei Navalny, pointing to the prosecution of more than 400 supporters of former President Donald Trump for allegedly storming the Capitol on Jan. 6 to disrupt Biden’s victory. “People came to the US Congress … they face prison sentences, up to 20, maybe the 25 years — they’re being called domestic terrorists,” Putin said....

He also cited alleged US “torture” of detainees at Guantanamo Bay and at secret CIA prisons established in Europe after 9/11 and the Black Lives Matter movement as evidence of American violations of human rights. The US “recently had very severe events … after the killing of an African American and an entire movement developed known as Black Lives Matter,” he said.

"What item of clothing was the emphasis on? What is the most risky piece of clothing?"/"Underpants... The insides, the crotch."

From "Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny dupes spy into revealing how he was poisoned" (CNN).

Toxicologists consulted by CNN say that if applied in granular form to clothes, the [lethal nerve agent] Novichok would be absorbed through the skin when the victim begins to sweat....

"In Russia, the dissident Aleksei Navalny uses withering sarcasm in his efforts to bring democracy to Russia."

"Navalny, now recovering in Germany from what apparently was an attempt by Russian officials to murder him with Novichok nerve gas, responded to Russian suggestions that he had poisoned himself: 'I boiled Novichok in the kitchen, quietly took a sip of it in the plane and fell into a coma,' he wrote on Instagram. 'Ending up in an Omsk morgue where the cause of death would be listed as "lived long enough" was the ultimate goal of my cunning plan. But Putin outplayed me.'... 'The grins of the people are the nightmares of the dictators,' wrote Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese dissident who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 while in prison."

From "To Beat Trump, Mock Him/The lesson from pro-democracy fighters abroad: Humor deflates authoritarian rulers" by Nicholas Kristof (NYT).