Devastating letters shared between late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and gulag survivor Natan Sharansky have been uncovered, RadarOnline.com has learned.
Navalny, who was known for his opposition of Vladimir Putin, died last week at age 47 while detained at the notorious "Polar Wolf" prison colony in Siberia.
Between March and April 2023, Navalny and the Soviet dissident exchanged letters. Navalny's writings, obtained by The Free Press, featured dark humor, religious references and details of his grim reality behind bars.
In his first letter, sent almost a year before his death, Navalny wrote, "I understand that I am not the first, but I really want to become the last, or at least one of the last, of those who are forced to endure this."
Sharansky was an active Jewish refusenik who was charged with treason and imprisoned for nine years in Soviet forced labor camps. The refusenik was denied permission to leave then-Soviet Union for Israel. The pair often reflected on how little life in Russia has changed in their letters.
Navalny's correspondence began after he read Sharanksy's memoir, Fear No Evil, behind bars.
Navalny joked about Sharansky's time spent at Polar Wolf in his first letter, "I am not sure if you have retained warm memories of it."
"Now there will probably be a plaque saying "Natan Sharansky was held here,'" Navalny continued. "Please forgive the intrusion and a letter from a stranger, but I believe it's permissible in author-reader relations."
The late Putin opposition leader went on to thank Sharansky for his memoir, which he noted "has helped me a lot" during his imprisonment.
Navalny later elaborated the memoir gave him "hope" because of the "similarity between the two systems — the Soviet Union and Putin's Russia" which highlighted "the hypocrisy that serves as the very basis of their essence."
Navalny said the similarities "guarantees an equally inevitable collapse" of Putin's regime like the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
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"I was laughing when I was reading the passage where you wrote, “I was penalized with a series of 15 days at SHIZO, and then, as an offender who broke prison rules, they sent me to the PKT for 6 months," Navalny wrote. "I was amused by the fact that neither the essence of the system nor the pattern of its acts has changed."
Sharansky wrote back to Navalny and described himself as "an admirer."
"'Aleksei, you are not just a dissident—you are a dissident “with a style,'" Sharansky added.
