Alexei Navalny
On February 16, 2024, the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service announced the death of Russian lawyer, documentary filmmaker, anti-corruption activist and dissident Alexei Navalny. He died on the same day in the notorious penal camp no. 3 in Kharp, on the edge of the Arctic Circle – one of Russia's most climatically inhospitable penal colonies, where he would have faced another decade and a half of imprisonment. Prisoners have been housed here under extreme conditions since the Stalin era.
In August 2020, the opposition politician Navalny was attacked with the nerve agent Novichok. Since his transfer to the Russian gulag in spring 2021, Navalny had been locked up 27 times for the maximum period of fifteen days each time in the so-called penal isolator – a cell that is either damp and cold or oppressively hot, where there are only rudimentary sanitary facilities, where prisoners are not allowed to sit during the day and are given meagre food.
In connection with the documentary film "Navalny", which was made about him in 2022 by Canadian director Daniel Roher, Navalny called on his supporters to stand together in the event of his death.
Since yesterday, Dresden citizens have been spontaneously laying flowers and placing candles for Alexei Navalny at the Bautzner Straße Dresden memorial. The memorial also includes a former Soviet basement prison where similar methods were used against political prisoners of the occupying power. The Soviet secret service KGB had its headquarters across the street, where Vladimir Putin was also deployed against critics of Soviet communism.
