Originally published at: Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny in remote prison camp - Boing Boing
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Yes, alive. And reportedly “doing well.” What an amazing person.
Moscow Times:
Navalny has urged Russians to “vote for any other candidate” besides Putin in the March 15-17 election.
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This is such a joke with any and all opposition either death, in jail, or banned. Putin should just declare himself king so he may have a chance at the end not so dissimilar from his monarch predecessors.
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Some people find Siberia nice.
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I once saw an interview with the head of a Russian private school catering to children of oligarchs and the new rich, who said that Putin should become tsar. I don’t know if he said this out of monarchist principle (the school’s mission was to revive pre-Revolutionary aristocratic culture) or out of a fatalistic resignation that Putin was going to rule as a tsar and might as well be crowned as one.
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… but he’s ruling more like a paranoid usurper with a guilty conscience
I mean, it doesn’t matter which prison Navalny rots in — it’s a sort of solipsistic performative cruelty, by and for the same person 
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So… like a tsar.
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I mean these days who hasn’t lost or misplaced an imprisoned political dissident? Totally understandable mistake you guys.
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It still surprises me that Putin hasn’t simply murdered Navalny (or allowed him to die of neglect, which amounts to the same thing). There’s considerable evidence that the FSB tried to murder him at least once before, so presumably at one point that seemed like a good option. Yet now that the state has Navalny entirely in its power, he has not (yet) been murdered, he has not disappeared without trace, and he even has intermittent access to his lawyers. At the moment, it seems that Putin is happy to simply shuffle him from one gulag to another indefinitely, and doesn’t need to go further than that.
I don’t know whether this is a form of complicated sadism, whether Putin is trying to keep Navalny out of play while still paying lip service to the rule of law, whether he has some scruples after all, or whether there is just enough institutional integrity left in the Russian system that Putin can’t do absolutely whatever he wants.
Of these explanations, ‘lip service to the rule of law’ seems perhaps the most likely, but I still wonder why he bothers. His regime is already under massive Western sanctions, so he can hardly fear what the West might think if he decided to off Navalny. Given his near total stranglehold on the media and the political apparatus, he’s probably not greatly concerned about creating a martyr. It all seems rather inexplicable.
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Exactly. There are just so many of them, it’s easy to loose track of some every now and then.
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I ass u me that’s it’s a combination of all of the above, plus maybe the option of having a big show trial when the time is right. Also, incertitude is a very effective way to mess with people’s heads.
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Whatever it is, it’s also a message to other Russians who’d dare challenge his regime.
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My guess is that Navalny exists as an implicit threat to others. He can be wheeled out as a reminder that an opponent may fall out a window onto polonium, or may disappear and be kept in inhumane conditions indefinitely. There’s also the remote possibility that Pooty is hoping the man breaks and turns lapdog.
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I doubt you would in a Siberian prison camp… 
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Obvs, but then I wouldn’t be able to tout the virtues of the movie or Werner Herzog. 
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