Alexei Navalny kept his sanity in a Russian prison by cracking jokes and “mocking border guards,” according to a survivor of the same gulag.
Four decades ago, Soviet dissident and former Israeli minister Natan Sharansky, 76, endured nine years in the same chilling Arctic facilities where Navalny died.
Although they never met, the intergenerational activists formed a historic friendship revealed through deeply personal letters. They exchanged in 2023.
They bonded over a shared sense of humor and how little the Russian prison system has changed since Sharansky was imprisoned, which is detailed in his memoir, Fear No Evil.
Navalny, 47, said it was Sharansky’s book that gave him “hope” for Russia’s future in his final year behind bars in the IK-3 colony, about 155 miles east of Moscow.
Speaking to DailyMail.com following his death, Sharanksy praised Navalny as a “hero” and revealed the methods each used to stay sane in the midst of horrific conditions.
Alexei Navalny (pictured) kept his sanity in Russian jail by cracking jokes and “mocking border guards”, according to a survivor of the same gulag and his friend Natan Sharansky, 76.
It was recently reported that Navalny died of “sudden death syndrome,” but no details were given to support this claim.
Sharansky was a chess prodigy as a child, and he said playing the board game in his head was what got him through 100 days of near-starvation and solitary confinement in the 1980s.
Meanwhile, enduring the same torture methods 40 years later, Navalny managed to “mock the border guards” employed to enforce the Orwellian system.
“I was in a small room, about six square meters, very cold, they took off all my warm clothes,” Sharansky told DailyMail.com on Thursday.
‘Three pieces of bread, three glasses of water a day, no one to talk to, nothing to write or read, no bed, no normal table.
“You have to remind yourself through all of this why you are there and find a way to feel very deeply that you are in the middle of the fight, continue to say no to the KGB and not give in to this pressure that you experience.” every moment.
‘In my case, I also played a lot of chess mentally; In the case of Navalny, I think he spent a lot of time joking (and) mocking the border guards.
“But you really have to find a way to be very serious and feel at the center of the fight, and at the same time laugh at the system, dismiss it and overcome it.
‘You are becoming weaker and weaker physically, you are losing weight, but it is important not to lose your moral integrity.
‘It’s surprising how similar our experiences were… that’s why it was very easy for us (to become friends) without knowing each other before.’
Sharansky praised Navalny for “maintaining his six meters of freedom against all odds” in his cell, and condemned his murder as “a horrible and cynical murder of a true hero.”
The two activists were strangers when Navalny began their correspondence, writing his first letter to Sharansky since IK-3.
“Navalny wrote to me in his letter that ‘your book makes me feel very optimistic because a regime has already fallen,'” Sharansky added.
‘He knew they could kill him, but this regime is doomed, and that’s what gave him optimism.
‘And the same thing happened to me: we knew that the (Soviet) regime was doomed. “I didn’t know if I would make it out alive, but I knew the regime was doomed.”
Four decades ago, Soviet dissident and former Israeli minister Natan Sharansky, 76, endured nine years in the same chilling Arctic facility where Navalny died.
Civil rights activist, Soviet dissident from the USSR Natan Sharansky (wearing fur hat) and American ambassador Richard Burt after his release in West Germany on the Glienicker Bridge connecting Potsdam (East Germany) and Berlin (West)
Canadians protesting in support of Sharansky on his 35th birthday, the 115th day of his hunger strike in a Soviet prison.
“You decide that your freedom does not belong to them, it only belongs to me,” he added. “By saying no to the KGB, you are part of this historic fight against this regime… the fight continues.”
Sharansky named former Washington Post columnist Vladimir Kara-Murza and Russian opposition leader Ilya Yashin as two prominent activists who carried the torch from Navalny.
He added that “more and more ordinary people inside Russia” are also increasingly uncomfortable with Putin’s increasingly authoritarian hold on them.
“The more uncomfortable people feel, the more they resist and the more efforts the regime has to make to keep them under control,” he said. “Will fall.”
Sharansky said there are several networks inside and outside Russia that are keeping up the fight against Putin, including those that write letters to prisoners inside the gulags.
Crowdfunding efforts to support political prisoners have also raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, including a telethon organized by several independent media outlets last summer and which raised 34.5 million rubles ($415,000).
Born in Donestk, eastern Ukraine, Sharansky was imprisoned in the former Soviet Union in 1977 while campaigning for the rights of Jews to immigrate to Israel.
He was convicted on a trumped-up charge of spying for the Americans and spent nine years enduring torture and solitary confinement in the Siberian prison where Navalny died on February 16, 2024.
Sharansky became the first political detainee freed by former Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev in a prisoner swap in 1986, following an international campaign for his freedom led by his wife, Avital.
He wrote a book called Fear No Evil, which Navalny, 47, read in prison and said gave him “hope” for Russia’s future. Sharansky pursued a decades-long political career, rising to the level of deputy prime minister of Israel in 2001.