One day in the death of Alexei Navalny

Ivan Denisovich Shukhov has been sentenced to hard time in a Siberian gulag for being a “spy”.

One morning he struggles out of his bunk late because he feels unwell. As punishment he is forced to clean the guardhouse, which means he gets to the sick bay too late to be exempted from work.

Work is building a brick wall in sub-zero temperatures, trying to get the mortar onto the bricks before it freezes. Later, he finds a piece of hacksaw blade which he smuggles back into the camp and doesn’t get caught. He filches an extra ration of supper. Someone gives him a piece of bread that he sews into his mattress.

Sound familiar? Did Alexei Navalny awake feeling “unwell”?

Will his widow and mother ever know, especially now that his body is apparently not going to be released for two weeks while the authorities carry out a “chemical analysis”?

Officials claim he died of “sudden death syndrome”, that he collapsed while “on a walk” and could not be revived.

It sounds like a line from Chris van Wyk’s poem In Detention, which begins with “He fell from the ninth floor” and ends with the detainee hanging himself “from a piece of soap while washing”.

The IK-3 “Polar Wolf” penal colony is 1,900km from Moscow, above the Arctic Circle. It’s quite possible that what happened at IK-3 will stay there. Except that not everyone believes Navalny died of “sudden death syndrome”.

Back in Shukhov’s gulag, it’s almost lights out in the barracks. As he tucks his frozen feet into the arms of his greatcoat and pulls it over his head, he reflects that it was, all told, a good day. He scrounged some extra food. No-one found his hacksaw blade. He has a piece of bread in his mattress. He didn’t die.