"Your personality deforms": Navalny sent to notoriously harsh prison

Dmitri Dyomushkin, a nationalist politician who served time in the colony, described conditions in the separate punishment brigade, where Mr. Navalny could wind up for infractions as minor as failing to button his jacket, as psychologically harrowing.

Inmates, for example, must shave every morning but are not allowed to do so themselves because they are not allowed to hold razors; instead, “activists” wield the razors and cuts and nicks are common, he said.

Inmates spend hours standing with their hands clasped behind their backs, looking at their feet, forbidden from making eye contact with the guards, Mr. Dyomushkin said in an interview on the Echo of Moscow radio station.

“They will find many ways to pressure him,” Mr. Dyomushkin said of Mr. Navalny’s term in Penal Colony No. 2. In these conditions, he said, “your personality deforms.”