But the colony is known for its strict application of the rules and for making extensive use of a separate and more severe punishment facility within its walls, where prisoners are not allowed to mix or even talk to each other, according to ex- prisoners and lawyers.
The site is typical of Russian colony-type prisons that have evolved, with some improvements, from the gulag camps established in the 1930s. Inmates collectively live in groups of several dozen, called brigades, in low-rise, two-story buildings surrounded by walls and barbed wire.
While guards oversee the prison, other prisoners maintain discipline within the brigades, either in cooperation with guards, a group known as “activists”, or as criminal gang leaders, known as “thieves”.
Penal Colony No. 2 is controlled by “activists” in collusion with the director, according to ex-convicts, an arrangement that will allow the prison administration to strictly control Navalny’s life at all times. Activist-controlled prisons are called “red zone” facilities, in Russian prison jargon.
Penal Colony No. 2 is, “the reddest of the red” prisons, a lawyer Maria Eismont, who represented a former convict on the site, he told Open Media, an opposition news site.
“Everything is done to make the person feel their total dependence” on the director, she said. Prisoners are even denied immediate visits by lawyers, which is technically illegal, she said. “Everything is done to isolate political prisoners.”
Dmitri Dyomushkin, a nationalist politician who served time in the colony, described conditions in the separate punishment brigade, where Navalny could end up for infractions as minor as failing to button his jacket, as psychologically distressing.