“They torture Alexei exactly according to the textbook”

Berlin On a bitterly cold January day, Oleg Navalny stands in front of the Russian embassy in Berlin, hands in his pockets. Behind him towers the Stalinist diplomatic palace, built in 1952, over the magnificent boulevard Unter den Linden. Before that, around 150 people gathered on the median to demand the release of Oleg Navalny’s brother, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

“Navalny out, Putin in” is on their signs – into the prison cell, the replica of which Oleg Navalny is presenting together with the Anti-Corruption Foundation, his brother’s organization. The original is about 1,800 kilometers away in penal colony IK-6, in Melechevo, east of Moscow.

The walk-in installation makes it physically comprehensible how the world’s best-known political prisoner lives there: two and a half by three meters, a tiny barred window, a squatting toilet, a washbasin and a bunk that is folded up from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m.