Alexey Navalny subjected to ‘Putin torture’ in prison, forced to listen to recorded speeches at top volume

The imprisoned opposition politician Alexey Navalny writes that the penal colony management has come up with a new way to make his prison life intolerable. Every evening, Vladimir Putin’s recorded speeches sound, at top volume, from loudspeakers throughout the building and in the penal cell that has become Navalny’s regular dwelling-place.

Putin’s voice gets in the way of reading, but Navalny derives some satisfaction from the prison officials’ recognition that having to listen to the Russian head of state is a form of torture. Moreover, to impose it on Navalny, they have to endure it themselves.

“Often,” Navalny writes,

the fragment where Putin says, ‘We didn’t start this war, it was them who started it and we’re trying to end it,’ sounds at the very moment when I have just lied down, pulled up the blanket to my chin and closed my eyes. Every time this happens, I give in and shake my head at the brazenness of this blatant lie, and then think to myself: I did the right thing. Better be in prison than put up with this kind of authority. And I fall asleep happy.