Alexei Navalny, the jailed Russian opposition leader, has said staff at the prison where he is being held play him pro-Vladimir Putin pop music every morning at 5am.
Navalny, 47, one of the Russian president‘s fiercest critics, is forced to listen to I Am Russian by Shaman, he said on X, in a message his supporters helped release.
In the post, he said: “Every day at 5 o’clock in the morning, we hear the command: ‘Get up!’ followed by the Russian national anthem and then immediately afterwards, the country’s second most important song is played – ‘I am Russian’ by Shaman.”
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“The singer”, he said, “came to prominence when I was already in prison so I could neither see him nor listen to his music. But I knew he had become Putin’s main singer. And that his main song was ‘I am Russian’.
“Of course I was curious to hear it, but where could I listen to it in prison?”
His curiosity was satisfied, he revealed, after he was moved to Yamal, an Arctic prison, about 40 miles (60 km) north of the Arctic Circle, where guards began playing him the unusual wake-up call.
Navalny, a former lawyer, is due to stay in prison until he is 74 on charges that he says are false.
Shaman, whose real name is Yaroslav Dronov, has ridden a wave of war-fuelled patriotism to become a staple on Russian state TV and is one of the celebrities officially putting Putin forward to run again for the presidency in March.
His signature song, which he sometimes performs dressed in a black leather outfit with an arm band in the colours of the Russian flag, I Am Russian talks of how Russians cannot “be broken” and “go to the end” and carry the blood of their fathers.
The 32-year-old singer courted controversy in November when he simulated setting off a nuclear bomb at a concert broadcast on state TV, pushing a red button in a mock nuclear suitcase before fireworks erupted around him.
The irony, said Navalny, was that state propaganda had once highlighted the fact that he used to march with Russian nationalists on annual marches and now, years later, he was being played an ultra-nationalist pop song for educational purposes while doing his morning prison exercises.
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He said: “To be honest, I’m still not sure that I correctly understand what post-irony and meta-irony are. But if that’s not it, what is it?”
His spokesman revealed on Monday that Navalny had been placed in solitary confinement for 10 days for “incorrectly introducing himself” to a guard.
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Mr Navalny was praised by Russia’s disparate opposition for returning to the country in 2021 from Germany, where he was treated for what Western tests showed was an attempt to poison him with a nerve agent.
He says he was targeted in Siberia in August 2020 with novichok – the same substance used in the Salisbury poisonings – but the Kremlin denies trying to kill him and said there is no evidence to support his claims.
