Navalny’s final agony at the Polar Wolf gulag

One winter’s night before the Ukraine war, I was on a train that stopped at a remote station deep in the Russian arctic. It was late November. The mercury stood at 15 degrees below zero – the hard, dry frost of the far north. The train stood silent, wreathed in the coal smoke of the stoves that heated every carriage. The village’s name was Kharp. Though I did not know it at the time, Kharp is home to the FKU IK-3 penal colony, a Soviet-era arctic facility known as Polar Wolf where Alexei Navalny has just died.

I wanted to catch a glimpse of the Northern Lights, so I pulled on a couple of coats and headed outside. There was nobody on the snowbound platform except a single female stationmaster who stood, swaddled in sheepskin, holding a triangular flag ready to send the locomotive on its way after the approved number of minutes’ stop. The sky was a purest black and arrayed with stars of an extraordinary brightness. Beyond a screen of pines a low-rise scattering of Soviet five-storey prefabricated buildings was visible. In the moonlight to the east rose the distant massif of the Urals.

Low on the northward horizon – we were just a couple of degrees below the Arctic Circle – I caught a glimpse of flickers of ethereal green fire in the sky. I cannot describe their strangeness. This was a world of round-the-clock polar night, illuminated by eerie magnetic flares in the heavens. A more hostile environment for human life would be impossible to imagine. Yet the windows of the huddled apartment buildings were illuminated with warm electric light. Somewhere between me and the Northern Lights, unknown to me, the 1,300 prisoners of Polar Wolf slept the sleep of the damned.