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.