by Aleksei A. Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, published a letter Tuesday describing an arduous transfer to his new Arctic penal colony, the first time his supporters heard from him in three weeks.
Mr. Navalny’s comments, posted on their social media accounts and written with a heavy dose of irony and humor, it highlighted his good humor and seemed intended to calm concerns among allies who had become anxious about his health and condition since his sudden disappearance from the public eye on December 5.
“I am your new Santa Claus,” Navalny wrote, referring to the Russian version of Santa Claus. “I have a sheepskin coat, a hat with ear flaps; I should put on felt boots soon and I have grown a beard during the 20-day transit.”
But he added: “The main thing is that I now live above the Arctic Circle.”
Navalny, 47, is a longtime antagonist of President Vladimir V. Putin, who has been subject to increasingly harsh punishments over the past year. His transfer to one of Russia’s high-security “special regime” penal colonies had been expected since September, when he lost an appeal against the 19-year sentence he is serving.
But his lawyers and allies were not notified in advance that he would be transferred, sparking fears and speculation about his health after the legal team was unable to contact him. His ability to pass a letter from a new prison suggested Navalny would likely remain a fixture in Russia’s public life as the country approaches another presidential election that Putin is poised to win amid little genuine competition.
Navalny has been in custody since his arrest in January 2021 at a Moscow airport, where he arrived after spending months in Germany recovering from nerve agent poisoning. Navalny and Western governments have accused the Kremlin of the poisoning, a charge Russian officials have denied.
Formerly the site of a Gulag labor camp, Navalny’s new, snow-swept penal colony in the town of Kharp is one of the most remote in Russia. Known as the “polar wolf” colony, it is surrounded by polar tundra and mountains. Cold, dark winters give way to cool summers with swarms of mosquitoes. Daylight is scarce, a fact you alluded to in your letter on Tuesday.
“I don’t say ‘Ho-ho-ho’, but I do say ‘Oh-oh-oh’ when I look out the window,” Navalny said, “where I can see it’s night, then night, then night again.” .
Navalny said he had not yet seen much of his new Arctic permafrost environment, but had noticed that the prison guards there were different from their colleagues in central Russia. They wore warm gloves and felt boots, carried machine guns and were helped by “these very beautiful, shaggy sheepdogs,” he said.
A 2019 video report From the prison a municipal news agency said that there was a library with 8,000 books, a shop, a church and an inmate cook who loves to make big cakes.
The journey to Kharp from Moscow takes more than 40 hours on a train that leaves every other day. But Navalny described a more complicated 20-day journey through the Russian prison system.
He went to Moscow from his penal colony in the nearby Vladimir region, then to Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains and then through Kirov north to Vorkuta before finally arriving in Kharp on Saturday, according to his letter.
“I didn’t expect anyone to find me here until mid-January,” he said.
“I was very surprised when the cell doors opened yesterday with the words: ‘There is a lawyer for you.’”
