Oleg Navalny is spending the night in Butyrka, a Tsarist-era prison in central Moscow that for centuries has held Russian criminals, dissidents, and revolutionaries. The writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn spent time inside its cold fortress walls, as did Yevgeniya Ginzburg, who wrote movingly of the Stalinist purges that saw vast swathes of the country’s population jailed in the 1930s. Oleg Navalny isn’t anyone particularly notable. He’s a 31-year-old father of two who has spent much of his adult life working for the post office. He’s never written a major novel, come out against the Kremlin, or tried to overthrow the government.
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