A Year’s Political Exile in Novaya Zemlya

The title of the article got me. I read it because of that. The article is an interview. It read like the plot of a spy thriller full of political intrigue, except that it’s real.

Robyn Dixon’s essay in The Washington Post published on January 2, 2021 tells how imprisonment has largely replaced assassination as a method of silencing the opposition. The Moscow bureau chief checks in on the opposition in Russia. Her article is titled ‘Polar bears and Arctic isolation: A Russian opposition activist describes military service as ‘political exile’’. 

Through an interview, the article detailed the experiences of Russian opposition politician, 24-year-old Ruslan Shaveddinov who was sent into desolate Novaya Zemlya for a year, for ‘dodging compulsory military conscription’. Shaveddinov is a close ally of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and he has been active in the Opposition's 'Smart Voting' campaign.

On a desolate archipelago in the Russian Arctic — so far from civilization that it was a Soviet nuclear bomb test site in the 1960s — sits a leaky metal hut shaped like a barrel with an icon and a photograph of President Vladimir Putin on the wall inside.

There are no trees, no Internet, no landline or mobile phone connection and no water on site except for melted snow and ice. Hungry polar bears are all around. So the outpost at Cherakino seems a perfect place to revive the practice of political exile in Putin's Russia, opposition leaders contend.

It’s here that Russia’s military sent one of the country’s most promising opposition politicians, Ruslan Shaveddinov, after security agents in black masks broke down his door and seized him from his home in December 2019.

“They called it political exile. They didn’t even try to train me in military skills,” Shaveddinov said in an interview with The Washington Post after his return to Moscow on Dec. 23, exactly a year after he was taken.

This is still Putin’s Presidency, and this fourth Presidential term will end in 2024. The September 2019 municipal and regional elections saw a crackdown of opposition protests. The opposition will gather its strength, and the incumbent will consolidate its powers. As with each election, people want change. When a President has been the government since 2012, I suppose the electorate wants change even more. Russia is in a state of flux and protests because parliamentary elections will happen sometime before 19 September this year. 

I’m most certainly not going to comment on Russian politics. I’m neither a citizen or a resident. I have no business there. I certainly have no idea now its social structures work, and how oppressive its politics are. However, one thing is certain- any incumbent government will always crush their opposition and pick off their opponents one by one. It’s all persecution; it’s just a matter of how it is done and how much they can get away with it. Some methods utitlize legal suits and bankruptcy and scandals. Others involve torture, exile and this obviously involved the threat of being eaten by polar bears and Arctic survival skills.

Three months later, Shaveddinov said he was flown to what he called the “botchka,” or barrel, at an even more remote, secret military location. Between three and five other conscripts were there at a time, and a chopper delivered food monthly and mail every two months.


“My job was to clear the landing strip and keep the polar bears away. They were very hungry,” he said. “They slept right on my doorstep. In reality, they’re very scary creatures.”


The barrel is branded onto his memory: One window with ancient yellow curtains frames a flat field. The other, a helipad and a mountain. For more than a month in the winter, the sun never comes up.

To drink or wash he cut a block of snow and melted it on the wood stove. In summer, he walked nearly two kilometers (1.2 miles) to the river and hauled back two 13-gallon cans of water, taking care to avoid the polar bears.


“It is clear why I was sent there: so that I would have no communication whatsoever with my family or friends. It’s huge psychological pressure. You’re alone with wild bears and dogs and two other people,” he said.


“You read books or you just stare out the window and watch your life passing by,” he added. “Probably, if I was a different person, I wouldn’t have made it. I would have become desperate.”


He spent a lot of time talking politics with the other conscripts, all from the northern region. He heard in a letter that Navalny was poisoned and in a coma, but for months did not know that his mentor had survived.