Three days after Alexei Navalny, Russian President Vladimir Putin's fiercest political opponent, died under unexplained circumstances at a notorious Arctic penal colony, his cause of death still has not been revealed – with Navalny’s family claiming he had been poisoned with a nerve agent on the Kremlin’s orders.
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Since his arrest on charges of espionage just over a month ago, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has been held in Russia’s most notorious prison, Lefortovo, located in a leafy residential district of Moscow. Its impenetrable walls once muffled the cries of Soviet-era political prisoners tortured and executed by security officers during Stalin’s purges. While bullets no longer fly in Lefortovo’s holding cells, the prison’s central role in Russia’s system of political repression has remained unchanged. “Lefortovo is famous for putting maximum psychological pressure [on inmates],” said Igor Rudnikov, a journalist and ex-local official who spent 10 months in Lefortovo in 2017 and 2018. “The goal is simple: to break the detainee.” Like other prisoners, Gershkovich, a former journalist for The Moscow Times, is likely experiencing extreme isolation in Lefortovo.