Russian dissident Alexei Navalny shared an unflinching account of his life inside brutal penal colonies in prison diaries before his sudden death in February.

The opposition leader, who died at a grisly ‘special regime’ camp this year, reveals in a posthumous memoir how he told his wife he believed Putin would poison him ‘at the first sign the regime is collapsing’ during a tender moment on her first visit.

He wrote in March 2022 that above all he wanted her to know he was not suffering as he tried to help her to accept he was unlikely to ever leave prison.

‘At that moment I wanted to seize her in my arms and hug her joyfully, as hard as I could. That was so great! No tears! It was one of those moments when you realize you found the right person. Or perhaps she found you,’ he reflects in a pained extract published included in the New Yorker. 

Navalny’s intimate observations of prison life talk through his daily regime, how he stayed sane in spite of the expectation he would never leave, the brutal reality of prison rape – and how his conditions reminded him of Leonardo DiCaprio’s The Revenant.

One of Navalny’s last appearances, seen from the penal colony in Kharp in January 2024

Alexei Navalny (left) with his wife (centre left) and their two children

Navalny, pictured with his wife Yulia in happier times, crusaded against official corruption and staged massive anti-Kremlin protests – drawing the ire of the Kremlin

Navalny died at the prison colony in the Russian town of Kharp (pictured) in February 2024

Alexei Navalny died after suddenly falling unwell at the penal colony in Kharp earlier this year while being held on charges of ‘extremism’.

A staunch opponent of the Putin regime, many international onlookers denounced Russia over his death and alleged he may have been assassinated in prison.

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Russian authorities ruled that the 47-year-old’s cause of death was caused by ‘combined diseases’ and an irregular heart beat, and ‘not criminal in nature’.

The fierce Putin critic, who was serving a 19-year sentence on charges of ‘extremism’, had only recently been moved from his former prison in the Vladimir region of central Russia to a penal colony above the Arctic Circle when he died. 

He was arrested in January 2021 upon returning to Russia after suffering a major health emergency from being poisoned in 2020 while reporting on local corruption in Russia – again piling pressure on Russia, which did not accept responsibility.

In his new memoir, Navalny shares how he believed he would ‘spend the rest of his life in prison and die here’ by March 2022, and expressed the difficulty he had in urging his wife, Yulia, to accept the possibility.

He describes her first extended visit to see him in prison, whispering into her ear that ‘there’s a high probability I’ll never get out of here’.

Navalny described his relief at her acceptance, telling him ‘I was thinking that myself’.

‘Let’s just decide for ourselves that this is most likely what’s going to happen. Let’s accept it as the base scenario and arrange our lives on that basis,’ he told her.

In other entries, Navalny describes the gruelling conditions of his imprisonment and the steps he took to find his ‘prison Zen’.

In 2024, having been moved to the brutal colony in Kharp, he says he went for a walk around the Arctic camp after being moved out of ‘the Shizo’ – an isolation cell deemed Russia’s most severe legal form of punishment.

Navalny says he ‘promised’ himself that he would take walks ‘no matter what the weather is’ around his exercise yard, which he said measured just 11 steps from one wall and three to the other.

He writes that he was reminded of Leonardo DiCaprio and his horse in The Revenant, battling against the elements to survive. 

‘I don’t think it would work here,’ he jokes. ‘A dead horse would freeze in about fifteen minutes.’

Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny stands inside a defendant dock during a court hearing in 2021

Alexei Navalny, right, embraces his wife Yulia, as he was released by a court in Kirov in 2013

A view of the prison colony in the town of Kharp, about 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow

In other entries, Navalny talks through his prison routine, waking up at 6am, eating at 6.20am and starting work at 6.40am.

‘At work, you sit for seven hours at the sewing machine on a stool below knee height,’ he wrote.

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‘After work, you continue to sit for a few hours on a wooden bench under a portrait of Putin. This is called ‘disciplinary activity.’

The book also contains harrowing observations on the normalcy of prison rape. Navalny does not say that he was raped in the book.

He described the prison service as being run by ‘perverts’.

‘Everything in their system has a sick twist: the infamous mop rapes, sticking things up people’s anuses, and so on.’

‘Everything you read about the horrors and fascist crimes of our prison system is true,’ he adds. ‘There’s just one correction needed: the reality is even worse.’

Navalny also talks about how he found some acceptance of his situation by repeatedly trying to ‘imagine the worst thing that can happen, and accept it’.

At ‘Lights out’, he said he would sit in bed and try to imagine the worst case scenario.

Through acceptance, he said he could find some peace.

The Putin critic also describes how religion helped him through difficult points.

‘Faith makes life simpler.’

Patriot will be released on October 22. Publisher Knopf is also planning a version in Russian. 

‘It’s impossible to read Navalny’s prison diary without being outraged by the tragedy of his suffering, and by his death,’ wrote New Yorker editor David Remnick.

Navalny reveals in a new memoir how he told his wife he believed Putin would poison him

Navalny fell ill on a plane following a trip to an airport cafe (pictured) where his friends said at the time they suspected he could have been poisoned 

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny poses with his wife Yulia and their children at the German hospital where he is being treated after being poisoned with Novichok 

People lay flowers at the grave of Alexei Navalny following his funeral, in March

Yulia Navalny (pictured in February) stood by her husband and vowed to continue his work

Navalny was arrested in 2020 after returning to Russia from Germany, having been treated for Novichok poisoning in a Berlin hospital – a controversial decision he talks through in the memoir.

The European Union sanctioned Russian officials over the suspected attempted assassination of Navalny, citing the use of forbidden chemical weapons. 

Bellingcat and The Insider, in cooperation with Der Spiegel and CNN, revealed data that they said implicated Russia’s Federal Security Service in the poisoning.

In Russia, he was detained for violating parole conditions while in hospital in Germany, where he was comatose, after receiving a suspended sentence for embezzlement – cases both considered to be politically motivated.

In the years that followed, Navalny would remain a fierce critic of Putin while reporting from prison his deteriorating condition. 

In 2021, his attorneys said he had herniated two discs in his spine and lost sensation in his hands while in prison. 

A month after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Navalny was hit with a nine year sentence in a ‘strict regime penal colony’ after being found guilty of fraud and contempt of court during a trial in February. 

Prosecutors accused him of stealing $4.7m (£3.5m) of donations given to clandestine organisations, including his anti-corruption foundation.

The ruling was to replace his previous term, meaning he would have to spend another seven years in a remote maximum-security prison, facing even harsher conditions than in Moscow.

He said in 2022 that he had been placed in permanent solitary confinement at the IK-6 prison in Melekhovo, Vladimir Oblast.

A year later, Navalny was sentenced to a further to another 19 years in a ‘special regime’ colony on various charges including financing extremist activity and ‘rehabilitating Nazi ideology’. 

He was found guilty on all charges in a closed-door trial. 

A month later his lawyers said they had not had any contact with him for six days after ‘disappearing’ from the IK-6 prison in Melekhovo, Vladimir Oblast.

The Putin critic said he’d spoken to his lawyer and was ‘totally relieved’ to have arrived safely

Navalny took to Twitter to confirm he was safe and had provisions in the dire prison

The entrance of the IK-3 penal colony, where Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny had been held since December 2023

Flowers, lights and portraits sit at the memorial site for Alexei Navalny at Carl Fredrik Reutersward’s sculpture ‘Non-Violence’, at Anna Lindhs Place, in Malmo, Sweden in February

Navalny’s final message: The Kremlin critic posted Valentine’s message to his wife, Yulia, on Wednesday (pictured). ‘Baby, everything is like in a song with you: between us there are cities, the take-off lights of airfields, blue snowstorms and thousands of kilometers,’ it read. ‘But I feel that you are near every second, and I love you more and more’

After weeks of silence, Navalny finally tweeted to say that he was being held in the IK-3 penal colony in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenets region about 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow.

The remote region is notorious for long and severe winters. Kharp is about 100 kilometers (60 miles) from Vorkuta, whose coal mines were part of the Soviet gulag prison-camp system.

Navalny died on February 16, aged just 47, after allegedly falling unwell and losing consciousness after a walk.

Paramedics reportedly came to try to rehabilitate him without success. An autopsy claimed he died from complications due to ‘combined diseases’.