WORLD
Where is Polar Wolf Prison? The IK-3 penal colony where Alexei Navalny died
Located in the north of Russia within the Arctic Circle, the prison is usually used for the most dangerous of inmates with temperatures well below freezing.
Russian political prisonor Alexei Navalny has died in the Siberian prison where he was serving his sentence. According to the prison service, the dissident began to feel unwell after a walk and lost consciousness. He died north of the Arctic Circle, almost 2,000 kilometers from his hometown, in one of the northernmost prisons in the world, IK-3, also known as ‘Polar Wolf’.
The ‘Polar Wolf’ was built in 1961 and was part of the penal system of the gulags, the forced labor camps where the USSR sent political opponents and prisoners. This prison was numbered Gulag 501 and retains some characteristics “that date back to the Stalinist era,” Emilia Koustova, a professor at the University of Strasbourg, explained to France 24. One of the elements that endure is the use of the weather “as a tool of repression.” The prison is located in the municipality of Kharp, far north of Russia, where temperatures can be as low as -30ºC.
Being north of the Arctic Circle, the municipality only has six months of daylight a year and in summer it is common to receive bites from mosquitoes and sand flies , as explained to the aforementioned media by Marc Élie, a researcher in the history of the Soviet Union at the Center for Russian, Caucasian and Central European Studies (CERCEC) in France.
The ‘Polar Wolf’ is a very isolated place. According to Koustova, by sending a prisoner so far away an attempt is made to “cut the ties between prisoners and their loved ones”. Navalny was sent there from a prison in the Vladimir region, near the Russian capital of Moscow. For several weeks, the Russian penitentiary service and the Kremlin refused to explain the whereabouts of the dissident, who at that time was on his way to his new prison in Siberia.
“They give me two cups of boiling water and two pieces of disgusting bread,” Navalny said in January. “I want to drink this water normally and eat this bread. I have 10 minutes to eat. And I am forced to swallow the boiling water.”