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Tech executives are rallying around nuclear energy to fuel the demands of the AI revolution.

From Amazon to Google, tech giants at the forefront of the AI boom are investing in companies building nuclear reactors and forming partnerships with energy providers to power their data centers.

Many of these companies are generating energy through nuclear fission, which involves splitting atoms from elements like uranium and plutonium to release energy. It's cleaner than fossil fuels and more reliable than solar. But fission can release harmful radioactive waste that needs to be disposed of safely and mining uranium can have deleterious effects on the environment.

The solution, in the view of a growing number of leaders in the tech industry, is nuclear fusion, which involves fusing the nuclei of two atoms to release energy. It's considered a safer method because it releases less radioactive waste and greenhouse gases.

Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates distilled the differences between fission and fusion on a recent episode of the Possible podcast. Fission, he said, is "where you take the big atoms like uranium, and as they split, you get energy." Fusion occurs when "you take the small atoms, primarily hydrogen, and as you put them together, you release energy."

Scientists have proven that nuclear fusion is feasible. Experiments at the National Ignition Facility in California over the last year, for instance, hit a milestone when they generated more energy than what was used. Fusion plants, in theory, could produce almost 4 million times as much energy as burning coal or oil — without carbon emissions. However, there are still obstacles to it becoming a widespread energy source.

Tritium, one of the hydrogen isotopes used in fusion reactions, is rare and expensive. It also has radioactive properties. Another challenge is that fusion requires extremely high temperatures, as high as the "center of the sun, millions of degrees," Gates said.

AI tools are now helping to make fusion a reality. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, in which Gates is an investor, is on track to have a system for fusion in 10 years, he said.

"But at some point, fusion energy will be extremely cheap, and it doesn't have the same waste problems that fission does," he said.

Gates, who is also an investor in another nuclear fusion company called Pacific Fusion — which launched in 2023 and announced a more than $900 million Series A funding round this month — believes supporting nuclear will help reduce clean energy costs.

"We, society as a whole, even though a lot more money is coming into it, we're still under-investing in fission and fusion, given that the value of cheap electricity specifically is so fundamental to society," he said.

Venture firm General Catalyst led the funding round for Pacific Fusion, which included participation from Gates's climate solutions investment fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and individual investors like Citadel founder Ken Griffin, Stripe cofounder Patrick Collison, venture capitalist John Doerr, and Mustafa Suleyman, the head of Microsoft AI.

Other veterans in the industry are betting on an even shorter timeline for fusion technology to become a reality.

At TechCrunch Disrupt this week, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla said, "I'll take a bet with anybody, five years from now, we won't be talking about whether fusion is real or not."

He said he hopes that by then fusion will be proven as an economic possibility. "They're engineering all the systems to go directly into production without having to first prove the technology and then do the engineering," he said.

Crows in Vancouver: Unusual Attacks Spark Fear and Curiosity Amid Gathered Crowds

In recent months, residents in Vancouver have found themselves grappling with an unexpected problem: asymmetrical aggression from their local crow population. Lisa Joyce, a local woman, recounted a terrifying experience as crows dive-bombed her multiple times while she screamed for help during a crowded July fireworks celebration. “I’m not a fraidy-cat, I’m not generally nervous of wildlife,” Joyce explained, but the relentless attacks forced her to alter her daily commute to dodge the avian intruders.

Joyce’s plight is echoed in accounts from across North America, with more than 8,000 reports of crow attacks logged on the website CrowTrax, founded by local resident Jim O’Leary. While the aggression seems localized to Vancouver, similar incidents in Los Angeles and Brunswick, Maine, highlight a larger behavioral trend among these intelligent birds, known for their ability to mimic human speech, use tools, and recognize individual faces.

As the summer unfolds, experts note that most aggressive behavior is typically linked to parental instinct during nesting season. Yet, the extent of these attacks raises questions — could it be more than mere territory defense? For some, it’s a reminder of a truth echoed in scripture: “Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable are you than birds!” (Luke 12:24, NIV).

The understanding of crows as both intelligent and vindictive — capable of holding grudges for years — becomes apparent through anecdotal tales. Gene Carter’s year-long ordeal of being harassed after he defensively deterred a marauding crow from a robin’s nest illustrates the depth of their memory and retribution, ultimately leading to his relocation to escape the torment.

Notably, some reports indicate a potential for mistaken identity, as was the case for Lynne Peeples, who speculated that she may have been confused with a man exhibiting aggressive behavior toward birds. This connection highlights the importance of awareness and understanding in our interactions with wildlife, paralleling biblical principles of compassion and discernment, as Jesus taught in the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Meanwhile, in the face of these threatening avian encounters, residents have had mixed responses. While some victims, like Ruben Jimenez, sought to ward off attacks with reflective surfaces and decoys with little success, others like Jill Bennett have turned to a more relational approach. By feeding crows during her walks, Bennett found herself accompanied by a protective entourage of crows, suggesting a form of coexistence reminiscent of community and connection highlighted in many biblical stories.

The city’s environmental specialist echoed this notion of coexistence, asserting that community appreciation for crows is a reflection of a healthy ecosystem. This aligns with the biblical wisdom found in Romans 12:18, “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.”

As urban dwellers navigate their encounters with these feathered foes, it presents a unique opportunity to reflect on our interactions with creation. The crows, with their persistence, remind us of the value of resilience, the necessity of understanding, and the importance of peaceful coexistence — not just with fellow humans but also with the intricate tapestry of life that surrounds us.

As we ponder this unusual phenomenon, we are invited to consider the broader lessons of patience, awareness, and community. How can we, much like Jill Bennett, turn potential conflict into a shared experience? Perhaps there’s a subtle invitation within these struggles, guiding us towards a deeper appreciation of living harmoniously, fostering relationships even with those who may not initially seem to share our values.

As we navigate our lives and respond to the challenges we encounter — whether from the skies or within our communities — let us be reminded of the wisdom in Proverbs 12:10: “A righteous man cares for the needs of his animal.” Embracing this principle may just transform our approach, paving the way for new understanding and deeper connections in a world that often feels divided.

What Sank the Tech Tycoon’s ‘Unsinkable’ Yacht?

By Jeffrey Gettleman, James Glanz, Emma Bubola, Elisabetta Povoledo, Pablo Robles, Josh Holder and Sarah Hurtes Oct. 30, 2024

It all happened so fast.

Karsten Borner was planted on the halfdeck of his sailboat in the slanting rain. A grizzled mariner who had survived many storms, he was anchored in the same cove as Mr. Lynch’s yacht, at the same time, as the squall blew in during the early hours of Aug. 19.

Luckily, he was already awake. As the wind picked up, he and his crew scurried around closing hatches, clearing the decks and firing up the engines to keep his boat steady.

He couldn’t see much, but in flashes of lightning, he kept catching glimpses of Mr. Lynch’s long, sleek sloop bobbing behind him. It was only a few hundred feet away and its super-tall aluminum mast — one of the tallest ever made — was lit up with bright white lights, swaying in the wind.

Then he lost sight of it. The rain fell like gravel, drawing a curtain around his boat. When he looked up again, he was stunned. The Bayesian was disappearing, at a very odd angle, into the sea.

In the weeks since, Mr. Borner, who has sailed for more than half a century, still can’t believe the yacht sank in front of him. There weren’t any big waves that night, he said. Both boats were close to shore. His own sailboat — a converted tugboat built in East Germany 66 years ago — weathered the same squall just fine. And that other craft was a superyacht of the superrich, gleaming blue, 184 feet long and drawing stares wherever it went.

“It’s a mystery,” Mr. Borner said.

The seven victims of the Bayesian sinking, clockwise from top left: Hannah Lynch, Mike Lynch, Judy Bloomer, Jonathan Bloomer, Christopher Morvillo, Neda Nassiri and Recaldo Thomas.

via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; via Reuters; Patrick McMullan, via Getty Images

That mystery has rippled around the globe as several investigations into the tragedy unfold. It has vexed maritime experts and compounded the grief of family and friends of the seven people who perished, including Mr. Lynch and his teenage daughter, Hannah, whose bodies were found trapped below deck.

The investigations turn on three central questions: Why did the Bayesian, which now lies 160 feet at the bottom of the Mediterranean, sink so fast? Did the yacht have any design flaws? Did the captain or crew make any fatal mistakes?

The Bayesian was a one-of-a-kind sailboat, built by Perini Navi, a famous Italian yacht maker. The company says the group of 10 superyachts that the Bayesian belonged to was “the most successful series of large sailing yachts ever conceived.”

But the Bayesian was different. Its original buyer — a Dutch businessman, not the Lynches — insisted on a single, striking mast that would be taller than just about any other mast in the world, according to the Italian yacht maker and three people with detailed knowledge of how this boat was built.

That decision resulted in major engineering consequences that ultimately left the boat significantly more vulnerable than many comparable superyachts, The Times investigation has found.

— More than a dozen naval architects, engineers and other experts consulted by The Times found glaring weaknesses in the Bayesian’s design that they said could have contributed to the disaster.

— Basic design choices, like the two tall doors on the side of the deck, increased the Bayesian’s chances of taking on dangerous amounts of water if high winds pushed the boat over toward its side, several naval architects said.

— Witness and survivor accounts revealed how this deadly sequence unfolded in real time: The yacht fell completely on its side and sank within minutes.

The Bayesian’s vulnerabilities

How the Bayesian could have sunk

The large aluminum mast and rigging made the boat more likely to capsize in a strong gust of wind, a computer model shows.

The Bayesian was pushed onto its side in strong winds.

1

STRONG GUST

At this angle, experts say water would have gushed in through open vents, doors and hatches.

2

Two tall glass doors could have let water in if they were left open.

A sunken deck reduced the boat’s buoyancy, naval architects said.

It had many air vents that could let water in when the boat was pushed toward its side.

As flooding worsened, the yacht would have tilted further before sinking.

3

The retractable keel, which helped to keep the boat stable, was not fully extended when it sank.

The Bayesian’s vulnerabilities

The large aluminum mast and rigging made the boat more likely to capsize in a strong gust of wind, a computer model shows.

Two tall glass doors could have let water in if they were left open.

It had many air vents that could let water in when the boat was pushed toward its side.

A sunken deck reduced the boat’s buoyancy, naval architects said.

The retractable keel, which helped to keep the boat stable, was not fully extended when it sank.

How the Bayesian could have sunk

The Bayesian was pushed onto its side in strong winds.

1

STRONG GUST

At this angle, experts say water would have gushed in through open vents, doors and hatches.

2

As flooding worsened, the yacht would have tilted further before sinking.

3

The Bayesian’s vulnerabilities

The large aluminum mast and rigging made the boat more likely to capsize in a strong gust of wind, a computer model shows.

Two tall glass doors could have let water in if they were left open.

It had many air vents that could let water in when the boat was pushed toward its side.

A sunken deck reduced the boat’s buoyancy, naval architects said.

The retractable keel, which helped to keep the boat stable, was not fully extended when it sank.

How the Bayesian could have sunk

The Bayesian was pushed onto its side in strong winds.

1

STRONG GUST

At this angle, experts say water would have gushed in through open vents, doors and hatches.

2

As flooding worsened, the yacht would have tilted further before sinking.

3

Sources: Perini Navi (technical drawing of the yacht) and New York Times reporting.

Seemingly small details on any boat — like how close air vents are to the waterline, or where a ship’s ballast is placed in the hull — might not sound decisive on their own. But when taken together, experts said, they appear to have compromised this vessel.

Such built-in vulnerabilities may not have been solely responsible for the yacht’s sinking, of course. The storm’s unexpected ferocity definitely played a part in the calamitous stew of events. Italian investigators are also looking hard at the actions of the Bayesian’s captain and crew.

Giovanni Costantino, the chief executive of the Italian Sea Group, the company that owns Perini Navi, said that when operated properly, the Bayesian was “unsinkable.” He maintains that the yacht was carefully engineered to survive bad storms, and he has put the blame for the tragedy squarely on the crew, accusing them of making a chain of fatal errors.

“I know, all the crew knows, that they did not do what they should have done,” he said. (Crew members have not revealed much, saying they are under a “gag order.”)

Mr. Costantino said the design was not at fault and that the towering mast, which stood 237 feet tall, had not created “any kind of problem.”

“The ship was an unsinkable ship,” he said. “I say it, I repeat it.”

The world of superyachts is incredibly opaque, the exclusive realm of some of the richest people on the planet, and exactly how these multimillion dollar boats are designed, approved and owned remain closely guarded secrets.

Making sure a superyacht is fit for the seas is a job left to a network of private companies and public agencies, and the Bayesian’s design was approved by the American Bureau of Shipping and the British Maritime and Coastguard Agency.

All the attention this tragedy has received could result in a closer look at yachting regulations. Several naval engineers in different countries who have gained access to the Bayesian’s documents say that as yachts have become more elaborate and subject to owners’ whims, others may be in danger as well.

The Bayesian’s technical documents show just how vulnerable it was. Even without major errors by the crew, the ship could have sunk in a storm that other boats survived, engineers say.

“We can look at it in hindsight and say they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. No, that’s not true,” said Tad Roberts, a Canadian naval architect who has nearly 40 years of experience designing boats, including superyachts.

“This boat had definite shortcomings that kind of uniquely made it vulnerable to what happened.” The Victory Voyages

A cruise on the Bayesian was a voyage into luxury. The days were typically warm, sunny and calm, and finished off with plates of fresh langoustine and sumptuous chocolate. Hours would pass lounging on sun chairs, swimming in the sea or maybe taking out a kayak while the Bayesian crew, in branded polo shirts, watched vigilantly from the deck.

“It felt like a beautiful hotel that was floating on water,” remembers Abbie VanSickle, a New York Times reporter who was invited aboard in July because her husband, Jonathan Baum, was part of Mr. Lynch’s legal defense team.

Mr. Lynch had been acquitted in June in a criminal case in which he was accused of fraudulently inflating the value of his software company when he sold it to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion. He could have been sent to prison for years. To celebrate his win — and his freedom — he asked friends and lawyers to cruise the Mediterranean with him.

Mr. Lynch seemed proud that his boat had one of the world’s tallest masts — a little booklet in her cabin even said as much, Ms. VanSickle remembered. Whenever they chugged into a harbor, she said, “people would take photos of it constantly because it was so crazy-looking in comparison to other boats.”

Most of the time, though, the Bayesian operated like a motorboat, powered by two enormous diesel engines. During her five-day voyage, Ms. VanSickle said they sailed only once, for just a few hours. But when they did, the boat moved through the water so smoothly, she said, it felt like they were “gliding.”

A promotional photo from Perini Navi of the Bayesian, which Mr. Lynch named after an 18th-century theory on probability.

EPA, via Shutterstock

A few weeks after Ms. VanSickle got off and returned to her life as a reporter in Washington, Mr. Lynch welcomed aboard his next batch of guests. This was the second celebratory voyage, beginning in mid-August, and Mr. Lynch had planned to get back to London, where he lived, around Aug. 20.

Among the 12 passengers were Mr. Lynch; his wife, Angela Bacares; their 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, who was soon off to Oxford; one of his lead lawyers, Chris Morvillo, and his wife, Neda Nassiri, who designed handcrafted jewelry; Jonathan Bloomer, an international banker and trusted adviser, and his wife, Judy, a psychotherapist celebrated for her charity work.

Mr. Lynch also invited some younger colleagues, including a couple who brought a baby on board. The crew was led by James Cutfield, an experienced New Zealand sailor, backed up by a first mate, a ship engineer, several deckhands and hostesses, totaling 10 in all.

Mr. Lynch was on the rebound, fired up about the possibility of starting a nonprofit to help exonerate people wrongly accused of crimes, said Sir David Davis, a friend and prominent conservative British politician.

Mr. Lynch sent Sir David a text message offering the choice of lunch or dinner in London on Aug. 22, when he was back. An Unanticipated Storm

The Mediterranean Sea was flat on Aug. 18. But bad weather was moving south, from Naples toward Sicily. The Italian Air Force’s Meteomar forecast warned of scattered thunderstorms, gusts of wind and a rough sea. Several yacht captains said the weather warning was far from specific or extraordinary.

Mr. Borner, the captain who for decades has been running cruises and diving excursions on his old sailboat, the Sir Robert Baden Powell, was finishing up his own trip, picking his way west along the Sicilian coast.

The wind was blowing from the northwest and Mr. Borner figured that the curvature of Sicily’s rugged coastline at Porticello, a small fishing village built around a cove, would shelter him. He arrived in the cove that afternoon, went ashore with his guests and grabbed some pizza.

“It was a nice evening,” he remembered.

While they were in town, the Bayesian chugged into the same cove. It dropped anchor at 9:35 p.m., about a third of a mile from land. As Mr. Borner went to sleep around 11, the night was clear. The lights of the Bayesian’s mast glowed behind him.

Lights illuminating the mast of the Bayseian on Aug. 18.

Baia Santa Nicolicchia/Fabio La Bianca, via Reuters

At midnight on Aug. 19, the Italian Coast Guard put out a warning for a northwesterly Gale Force 8, a serious storm in which winds could reach 46 miles per hour. But the gale was predicted to hit hundreds of miles from Sicily.

Around 3 a.m., Mr. Borner woke up to help some of his passengers catch an early flight from Palermo, Sicily’s biggest city. But as the winds picked up rapidly, whipping the cove into a frothy chop, he scratched his plan to go ashore.

He and his crew shut the portholes and skylights and started the engine, to keep the bow pointed into the wind and prevent the boat from being hit on its side.

On the Bayesian, a young deckhand, Matthew Griffiths, later told the authorities that when the wind hit 20 knots, he woke up the captain, according to a person close to the crew (who said that neither of them was allowed to speak publicly). The captain then gave the order to wake up others, the person said.

At 3:51 a.m., the Bayesian started to drift — first 80 meters one way, then 80 meters another, its data transmitter shows. Maritime experts said this meant it was being blown around and probably dragging its anchor. It’s unclear whether the engines had been started.

At 4:02 a.m., a camera mounted on a boat in Porticello’s cove shows bright blue flashes of lightning. Three minutes later, another at a Porticello cafe captures the wind tearing down deck umbrellas. So much rain hits one of the cameras, it looks as if it’s being blasted with a hose.

Mr. Borner estimated that the wind gusts reached 60 knots, or nearly 70 miles an hour — just below hurricane strength — and said they had pushed his boat onto its side about 15 degrees, a serious lean but nothing close to capsizing.

Reports immediately after the disaster raised the possibility that the Bayesian had been hit by a tornado-like disturbance called a waterspout, but the authorities don’t think that happened. Still, the wind was doing something dangerous: It was changing direction.

According to a nearby weather station, it was blowing west-southwest then southwest, then north-northwest. This increased the chances of getting ambushed by a random gust that could slam into the side of a boat, which can tilt even a big vessel.

A third video shows the Bayesian rocking back and forth and beginning to lean. Then the lights on its giant mast blink out — all but the top one, which was powered by a battery.

By 4:06 a.m., the rain has turned into a blinding cascade. That same minute, the Bayesian’s location signal cuts out. Mr. Borner’s crew squinted through the nearly impenetrable haze of sea spray and rain and spotted a large object in the water. They first thought it was a reef.

“But I knew there was no reef,” Mr. Borner said.

It was the Bayesian, they now believe, knocked onto its side. “Two Minutes” to Tragedy

At 4:34 a.m., a red emergency flare, bright as a meteor, shot into the sky. The storm had passed, and Mr. Borner and his first mate jumped into a small boat, zooming across the black water.

First they saw cushions floating. Then a flashing light. Then a life raft built for 12 packed with 15 people, bloodied and soaked to the skin, including a baby.

One person had a cut on the head, another on his chest. Some had already been bandaged. They were cold, wet and dazed. They were too shocked, Mr. Borner said, to say what happened.

As he loaded the survivors into his boat and began to head back to the Sir Robert, one woman pleaded with him not to leave.

“Please,” she told him. “Continue searching.”

Some people were still missing.

Mr. Borner decided to unload the survivors onto the Sir Robert, then send his small boat back. His crew gave them blankets and dry clothes. Some survivors were so shaken they needed to be led below deck by hand.

Nobody said much, Mr. Borner remembered.

One man told him: “I was the captain of this.”

Another said the boat had “sunk in two minutes.”

The woman who had begged him to keep searching sat huddled on the deck.

“Are you OK?” Mr. Borner asked her.

“No,” she replied. “I am not OK at all.’’

Capt. Karsten Borner, who rescued the survivors of the Bayesian.

Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters

Mr. Borner said he later realized it was Angela Bacares, wife of Mr. Lynch and mother of Hannah Lynch. Neither had made it onto the life raft. (Salamander Davoudi, a spokeswoman for Lynch family, told The Times that Ms. Bacares was not speaking to the media because she was grieving and wanted privacy.)

A few hours after, a string of ambulances arrived at Palermo’s main hospital. Dr. Domenico Cipolla, the head of pediatric emergency, evaluated the youngest survivor, a 1-year-old girl.

The baby was OK, Dr. Cipolla said, but she had experienced quite an ordeal. She and her mother had been sleeping on a sofa on deck because of the rough sea, Dr. Cipolla said, when the boat suddenly lurched and threw them to the deck.

A moment later the boat turned completely on its side, the baby’s father told the doctor, flipping his hand as he described it. The doctor said the mother told him that she and her baby were hurled into the water and that her baby nearly slipped away. But then she grabbed her and swam to a nearby life raft, which was designed to deploy automatically.

The parents were later identified as Charlotte Golunski, a colleague of Mr. Lynch, and James Emslie. Ms. Golunski did not respond to several messages left for her, and efforts to reach Mr. Emslie were unsuccessful.

Mistakes by the Crew?

The biggest question that investigators are focused on is how the Bayesian filled with water so fast. To many in the yachting world, it doesn’t make sense.

The boat had been built with several watertight compartments under the deck, to prevent water from spreading from one area to others. And it had been approved as safe by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, part of Britain’s Department for Transport, and by the American Bureau of Shipping, a private company that reviews boat designs.

On top of that, one Italian official and underwater video footage broadcast on Italian television indicated that there were no holes or other structural damage visible in the hull.

Even so, the Bayesian, like many superyachts, had all kinds of openings in which water could theoretically get in: big air vents for the engines; smaller ones for the kitchen, crew quarters and guest cabins; large glass doors at the back and the sides so that people could walk onto the deck; and various hatches for crew and passenger access.

In interviews with Mr. Costantino, the chief executive of the Italian Sea Group, and his spokeswoman, the company accused the crew of leaving hatches open during the storm, including a doorway-size opening on the left rear of the hull, close to the water line. The spokeswoman claimed that hatch was the only place where so much water could have come gushing in.

The company speculated that the crew did not close a watertight door between this hatch and the engine room. A flooded engine room might explain the sudden blackout that killed the mast lights and then, a few minutes later, the location transmitter.

But witnesses, an Italian official familiar with the investigation and the underwater video challenged the company’s versions of events. The footage appeared to show the watertight door to the engine room closed, and the Italian official said the divers had not seen any open hatches on the hull.

Mr. Borner also said that after rescuing the captain, he asked him if he had shut the hatches. The captain said he had. Mr. Borner shared pictures taken by his guests a few moments before the Bayesian sank that appear to show that hull hatches were closed. A Compromised Design?

The Bayesian’s origins go back to 2000. That year, Perini hired Ron Holland Design, a premier naval architectural firm, to design a series of 56-meter sailboats, said a person with knowledge of the timeline. As the superrich have become even richer, yachts have grown steadily bigger, and Perini was emerging as one of the world’s best-known builders of superyachts, often defined as motor yachts or sailboats longer than 24 meters, or 79 feet.

The Ron Holland firm, based in Ireland at the time, drew up plans for the hull, keel, rudder and, crucially, the placement of the masts — two masts. All other features, like the cabins, decks and vent system, were designed by Perini, according to the person, who did not want to be identified because of the possibility of legal action connected to the sinking.

In 2003, the first yacht in the series hit the water, the Burrasca (which means storm in Italian). Over the next four years, Perini built three more 56-meter superyachts from these blueprints, all with two masts. On Perini’s website, they look nearly identical.

Then came the Bayesian.

Construction on its hull began in 2005 at a shipyard in Tuzla, Turkey, according to the boat’s documents. But the original buyer for this yacht didn’t want the standard two-mast design. Instead, the Italian Sea Group said, he wanted the boat to be built with one large mast for better sailing performance.

That led to a radically different design, said three people with knowledge of what followed, and a cascade of modifications — some to accommodate the gigantic mast, and some apparently for stylistic or other reasons.

A promotional photo from Perini Navi showing the Bayesian’s mast and sails.

EPA, via Shutterstock

The most obvious departure from the previous Perini ships was the mast itself. Beyond being exceptionally tall — more than 40 feet higher than the original foremast — it was also very heavy, at least 24 tons of aluminum, possibly more. This alone would have challenged the boat’s stability, because so much weight was high above deck.

Since then, many yacht makers have switched to lighter, carbon-fiber masts.

“Technology moved on,” Mr. Costantino said.

Naval engineers pointed out that the heavier a yacht is up high, the more ballast it often needs down low — weight at the bottom of the boat to lower its center of gravity and resist its tendency to lean over.

Small notes on hull diagrams in the Bayesian’s documents show that the Turkish shipyard revised the ballast in July 2006, nearly 10 months after the keel was laid, which is one of the first steps of production.

“Values updated as from information by Yildiz,” the notes say in all caps, naming the shipyard.

But where this ballast was placed was curious, maritime experts said. Rather than spreading the ballast evenly across the bottom of the boat — which would have guaranteed the best stability — the builders stacked it toward the rear of the ship’s hull.

“When I first saw this, I couldn’t believe it,” said Mr. Roberts, the naval architect. “It made no sense to me.”

The ballast seems to have been pushed toward the rear of the boat to offset the single, heavy mast closer toward the front, Mr. Roberts concluded. He said he had never seen the main ballast used in such a design tactic before.

That was not the only change, experts said. A single mast would have plunged almost directly through the wheelhouse, an interior station where the ship can be controlled, so that was moved, too. A deck lounge was added, along with two tall doors on the sides. None of the other Perini yachts in the 56-meter series have these design elements.

If the boat tipped over with these tall doors open, water could pour across the deck and down the main staircase.

Sources: Perini Navi (technical drawing of the yacht) and New York Times reporting.

The Bayesian sat lower in the water than other yachts in the same Perini series, said Stephen Edwards, the Bayesian’s captain from 2015 to 2020. Naval architects said this by itself would make it easier for water to pour through vents and other openings when the boat leans on its side.

Whenever a boat leans too far and water starts gushing in through open doors or vents, it can set off a dangerous downward spiral that is hard to stop and that can sink a boat in minutes.

Such risks are calculated and laid out in a lengthy, proprietary document — kind of a safety bible — for many vessels certified to ply the seas.

The Times has obtained that safety bible, called a stability book, for the Bayesian. Copies of the 88-page book are also sweeping through a global community of experts who are obsessively trying to solve the puzzle of how and why the boat sank. More than a dozen of those experts, including naval architects and engineers, found weaknesses in the Bayesian’s design that they said could have contributed to the disaster.

The stability book obtained by The Times was written before the Lynches bought the boat in 2014, when the yacht was called the Salute and owned by John Groenewoud, a Dutch businessman. In an email, he confirmed signing a contract for “the boat with 1 mast” in 2005, but declined to discuss any safety implications that may have had.

The Times obtained the stability book for another 56-meter Perini yacht, with two masts instead of one. A comparison of the boats showed that the Bayesian was significantly less stable.

Specifically, the data shows that the two-masted ship could lean at least 10 degrees farther onto its side before taking on dangerous amounts of water.

The documents also show that the Bayesian could begin taking on some water at angles that appeared to violate the safety threshold set by the British Maritime and Coastguard Agency.

The Italian Sea Group responded that the boat was in line with regulations and had been approved. When asked how that happened, an agency spokesman refused to clarify, citing the continuing investigations.

The other boat’s documents also showed that the sister yacht sat a little higher in the water than the Bayesian did, as Mr. Edwards emphasized. And under many circumstances, experts said, the sister ship had a better center of gravity and was more resistant to capsizing, two additional factors that would have made it safer.

“The other boat is, at least on paper, a better boat,” Mr. Roberts said.

To make boats safer, naval architects said they religiously ensured that vent openings are far from the water line. When showed a picture of a 56-meter Perini yacht that, like the Bayesian, had vents built into the hull, Philipp Luke, a Dutch naval architect, started violently shaking his head.

“No, no, no,” he said. “You don’t do that.”

In the end, several naval architects said, all these flaws may have come together at the worst time — in a sudden storm.

Two Spanish naval engineers, Guillermo Gefaell and Juan Manuel López, calculated that the sheer size of the Bayesian’s mast and rigging made the yacht a wind catcher, even with the sails down.

Writing for the Association of Naval and Ocean Engineers of Spain, they used a computer model to calculate what would have happened to the Bayesian if a strong gust of roughly 54 knots, around 62 mph, hit its side. Under those conditions, the Spanish engineers estimated, the Bayesian could lean dynamically and take on nearly a ton of water each second through an engine room vent.

In an interview, Mr. Gefaell noted that he, like almost everyone else, did not know everything that happened that night. But if the gusts were as strong as Mr. Borner estimated — 60 knots — the punch would have pushed the boat to an even more severe angle, his calculations showed, very quickly knocking the boat all the way over onto its side, as the witnesses recounted.

At that point, Mr. Gefaell said, “the boat was certainly lost.”

A Watery Maze

Within hours of the sinking, emergency divers plunged in. Their mission: Find survivors.

The Bayesian sat 160 feet below the surface, leaning on its right side on the seabed. The once-gleaming cabins were clogged with chairs, clothes, curtains and the enormous number of seat cushions that Ms. Bacares had brought onboard to make the boat more comfortable. The search was made even more difficult and dangerous, divers said, by the many mirrors installed below deck that now reflected back their lights in a disorienting, watery maze.

On the first day, divers found the body of the yacht’s chef, Recaldo Thomas, floating near the boat. Over the next three days, they found the bodies of Mr. Lynch and four other passengers in a small cabin near the foot of a narrow staircase leading down from the deck to the passenger’s quarters. Finally, divers discovered the body of the last missing person, Hannah Lynch, trapped behind furniture in a nearby cabin.

One Italian official said the six passengers might have been trying to climb the main guest staircase when a surge of water poured down the stairs and knocked them back into the cabins. With the boat flipped on its side, water gushing in, and total darkness, it would have been nearly impossible for anyone below deck to escape, experts said.

The Italian authorities plan to raise the wreck to inspect it more closely. That could take months. In the meantime, at least two major investigations are unfolding, one by Italian prosecutors and the other by the British Marine Accident Investigation Branch.

Rescue workers bringing the body of the final Bayesian victim to shore, in Porticello, Italy, on Aug. 23.

Igor Petyx/EPA, via Shutterstock

From the first weeks after the accident, Italian prosecutors said that Mr. Cutfield, the captain, and two of his crew were under investigation.

Mr. Cutfield hasn’t said a word publicly and did not respond to messages asking for comment. Several crew members, when approached at a hotel in Sicily in August, said they had all been put under a gag order. When asked who imposed it, they responded: “No comment.”

In the yachting world, Mr. Cutfield has some solid references. Turgay Ciner, a Turkish industrial magnate and sailing enthusiast, employed him to run his yacht for 12 years.

“He never made any mistakes,” Mr. Ciner said.

Mr. Ciner, speaking by phone from Istanbul, recounted a bad storm near Capri about 10 years ago that Mr. Cutfield handled. They were sailing on another 56-meter Perini yacht, the Melek, a two-masted boat in the same series as the Bayesian. He said that Mr. Cutfield performed very well and was “one out of a hundred.”

Why Mr. Cutfield left in a lifeboat with the other survivors when a half dozen passengers were still missing is a matter Italian prosecutors are looking into.

But several yacht captains have defended Mr. Cutfield, saying that whatever happened that night, it happened very quickly.

When a boat sinks fast, said Adam Hauck, an American yacht captain, there’s not much hope for anyone still onboard. The adage of the captain going down with the ship, he said, is antiquated and unrealistic.

“It’s not like a Titanic movie where you’re going through the water and you can just look in the rooms,” Mr. Hauck said. “At some point, you can’t go back for people.”

About three weeks after Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, #RIPTwitter started trending. Musk had gutted the staff, and more workers quit when he gave them an ultimatum: Work "hardcore" hours or leave. With the platform on the brink, its users held a funeral. They spent the evening saying goodbye to their followers, shitposting on the #hellsite for the last time, and rounding up the best and worst tweets they had saved in the platform's 16-year history. They were somber, giddy, and anxious about the future of online dialogue. It seemed certain that a competitor would rise.

Right then, Gabor Cselle, a former director at Google and employee at Twitter, was working on a rival app. First called T2 and later Pebble, the goal was to make a trustworthy, safe site to fill the gap left by Twitter.

Cselle was far from alone. As the bird app's outlook grew more bleak, several alternative conversation platforms hatched: Narwhal, Spoutible, Spill, Post, and Cohost among them. In July 2023, Meta tried to seize the moment by launching Threads. Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey tried to fix what he saw as Twitter's wrongs by launching Bluesky. (He quit in May 2024, saying the platform was "literally repeating all the mistakes" Twitter had made.)

Meanwhile, Twitter continued to teeter. Musk told advertisers "go fuck yourself," abandoned most content moderation, and infamously changed the logo from a friendly blue bird to a cold X. At the end of last year, The Verge published a news package declaring that 2023 would go down as "The Year Twitter Died."

But two years after Musk took over, the platform is still the room where it happens. Misinformation has skyrocketed and growth has stagnated; the market-intelligence firm Sensor Tower says its number of active daily users dropped by 28% from October 2022 to September 2024 while Threads' users have grown. But when big news hits, like a major sporting event or a sitting president's decision to drop out of the race or the attempted assassination of a former president, X is where the conversation erupts.

Most of Twitters' upstart challengers have folded. I talked to several founders about what they learned trying to compete with Musk, and the state of civil discussion online. Related stories

"You can't start a Twitter alternative by saying, 'We want to be the new public square.'"
Pebble founder Gabor Cselle

"I sort of misread that moment," Cselle says today. He thought all those mourners wanted something that was just like Twitter but that would reliably work — somewhere without excessive trolling and hate speech and deepfakes. "What #RIPTwitter was about, in retrospect," he says, was a panicked "sense of 'I might lose my status and my following and my handle and all of this network I've built up.'"

Cselle says he's learned that for social media platforms, "trust and safety is a secondary value proposition."

"It becomes important to you as a user — imminently and immediately important — once something goes really bad," he says. But he's learned that people "don't join a new space that is otherwise empty for it. You can't start a Twitter alternative by saying, 'We want to be the new public square.'"

Pebble got about 20,000 registered users before stagnating and shutting down in November 2023. It lives on as a smaller server on Mastodon, which itself peaked at 2.5 million active users in December 2022 but is down to about 865,000. Cohost, made by the Anti Software Software Club (which describes itself as "a not-for-profit software company that hates the software industry"), said last month that it was running out of money and would become read-only by the end of the year.

When Post, a platform "built for news," launched in fall 2022, publishers like Politico, The Boston Globe, and Fortune signed up, and hundreds of thousands of people joined the waitlist. Founded by former Waze CEO Noam Bardin and funded in part by Andreessen Horowitz, the idea was that people could pay small amounts to read individual news articles rather than subscribing to many outlets. "I believe the future newspaper is the feed and want to make it more civil for users, profitable for publishers and better for society," Bardin said in a tweet announcing Post. But it shut down in April 2024, citing slow growth that gave it no path toward becoming a "significant platform."

Several of these alternative conversation platforms were born from a similar ethos, searching to fix the chaos and bile that legacy social media had incentivized. Narwhal, backed by Laurene Powell Jobs' Emerson Collective, marketed itself as a platform for "productive discussions grounded in good faith." It began as invite-only, and dialogue centered on topics of the day that Narwhal would determine — sometimes about the environment, politics, or tech. Nicholas Thompson, the CEO of The Atlantic and a cofounder of Narwhal, says that while the conversations among the hundreds of users were substantive and engaging, Narwhal lacked Twitter's bite. "That was also the tradeoff," Thompson says. "If there had been a way to make it more fun while also thoughtful, that would have been the road to success."

After a few months, Narwhal pivoted to become an AI software-as-a-service platform, Speakeasy AI, which aimed to enable civil, engaging dialogue on other platforms. Thompson says the goal wasn't to replace Twitter but to fix toxicity online. He wanted to build something that Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook might use. The company didn't grow much, and in April, Speakeasy's tech was acquired by Amplica Labs.

But Thompson says the civil conversations on Narwhal gave him hope. Social media is fracturing — even if it's a leak rather than a flood. That gives people opportunities to find different communities or uses for social sites. A legacy platform like X or a large one like TikTok, have their advantages, too, and might become a crowded center for discussion, but users are left to the whims of its CEO. "There's a ton of power in whoever controls" a big social media platform, Thompson says. Last week, Musk shared an image edited to show an Atlantic story with the headline "Trump is literally Hitler." The post has more than 25 million views. Musk hasn't deleted the tweet, though a community note posted below it clarifies that the headline is fabricated.

Some places where Twitter's former users went are still growing. Spill, a Black-owned social platform, has been downloaded more than half a million times. Like other Twitter alternatives, it set out to solve the problems with hate speech on big platforms. But its mission is broader: Its cofounder Alphonzo Terrell says that while the app is open to everyone, it prioritizes elevating minority communities, like Black and LGBTQ+, and protecting them from harassment and hate Spill has raised nearly $5 million in pre-seed funding, with the actor Kerry Washington recently investing.

Spill uses large language models and AI for content moderation, Terrell tells me. As with Narwhal, its algorithm rewards positive posts. But there's still room for political discussion: When President Joe Biden announced this summer that he would not seek reelection and Vice President Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, Spill saw a flurry of activity, Terrell says. Black women on the platform in particular talked about preparing themselves for an onslaught of racism and misogyny as the result of Harris' rise. It's a more nuanced political conversation than what might trend on something like X, but it worked on Spill. "People don't need to code switch" on Spill, Terrell says.

The rush to become the next Twitter has slowed — though there's still a chance an alternative could become popular enough to replace it. Threads has the potential to lure advertisers, but culturally it hasn't proved the Twitter killer many thought it might be. A lot of these brand-safe or news-focused apps have tended to feel more like homework than recess, though Spill may be the exception for now.

I've been on Twitter since 2010. Recently I've found it less useful for my work as a journalist, but I'm still lurking. And early this month, when my beloved Phillies tanked their playoff chances spectacularly, I turned to X. The algorithm knew I cared about this; it knew I wanted to commiserate with fellow fans and look at memes and watch highlights from the one game where the team played well over and over and over, which I'll be doing until opening day in 2025. I wasn't engaging in elevated, thought-provoking dialogue, nor was I spreading misinformation or hate. I was doing something in the middle — something cathartic. It was just what I was looking for.

John Graham-Cumming doesn’t ping me often, but when he does I pay attention. His day job is the CTO of the security giant Cloudflare, but he is also a lay historian of technology, guided by a righteous compass. He might be best known for successfully leading a campaign to force the UK government to apologize to the legendary computer scientist Alan Turing for prosecuting him for homosexuality and essentially harassing him to death. So when he DM’d me to say that he had “a hell of a story”—promising “one-time pads! 8-bit computers! Flight attendants smuggling floppies full of random numbers into South Africa!”—I responded.

The story he shared centers around Tim Jenkin, a former anti-apartheid activist. Jenkin grew up “as a regular racist white South African,” as he described it when I contacted him. But when Jenkin traveled abroad—beyond the filters of the police-state government—he learned about the brutal oppression in his home country, and in 1974 he offered his help to the African National Congress, the banned organization trying to overthrow the white regime. He returned to South Africa and engaged as an activist, distributing pamphlets. He had always had a penchant for gadgetry and was skilled in creating “leaflet bombs”—devices placed on the street that, when triggered, shot anti-government flyers into the air to be spread by the wind. Unfortunately, he says, in 1978 “we got nicked.” Jenkin was sentenced to 12 years in prison.

Jenkin has a hacker mind—even as a kid he was fiddling with gadgets, and as a teen he took apart and reassembled his motorcycle. Those skills proved his salvation. Working in the woodshop, he crafted mockups of the large keys that could unlock the prison doors. After months of surreptitious carpentry and testing, he and two colleagues walked out of the prison and eventually got to London.

It was the early 1980s, and the ANC’s efforts were flagging. The problem was communications. Activists, especially ANC leaders, were under constant surveillance by South African officials. “The decision was taken to get leadership figures back into the country to be closer to the activists, but to do that they still had to be in touch with the outside,” says Jenkin, who was given a mandate to solve the problem. Rudimentary methods—like invisible ink and sending codes by touch-tone dials—weren’t terribly effective. They wanted a communication system that was computerized and unbreakable. The plan was dubbed Operation Vula.

Working in his small council flat in the Islington neighborhood in London—nicknamed GCHQ, after the top-secret British intelligence agency—Jenkins set about learning to code. It was the early days of PCs, and the equipment by today’s standards was laughably weak. Breakthroughs in public key cryptography had come out a few years earlier, but there was no easily available implementation. And Jenkin was suspicious of prepackaged cryptosystems, fearing they might harbor back doors that would provide governments access.

Using a Toshiba T1000 PC running an early version of MS-DOS, Jenkin wrote a system using the most secure form of crypto, a one-time pad, which scrambles messages character by character using a shared key that’s as long as the message itself. Using the program, an activist could type a message on a computer and encrypt it with a floppy disk containing the one-time pad of random numbers. The activist could then convert the encrypted text into audio signals and play them to a tape recorder, which would store them. Then, using a public phone, the activist could call, say, ANC leaders in London or Lusaka, Zambia, and play the tape. The recipient would use a modem with an acoustic coupler to capture the sounds, translate them back into digital signals, and decrypt the message with Jenkin’s program. Most Popular

One potential problem was getting the materials—the disks and computers—to Africa. The solution, as Graham-Cumming noted, was accomplished by enlisting a sympathetic Dutch flight attendant who routinely flew to Pretoria. “She didn't know what she was taking in, because everything was packaged up; we didn't talk about it at all,” says Jenkin. “She just volunteered to take the stuff, and she took in the laptops and acoustic modems and those sorts of things.” This is an edition of Steven Levy's Plaintext newsletter. SIGN UP for Plaintext and tap Steven's unique insights and unmatched contacts for the long view on tech.

Operation Vula gave the ANC the confidence to sneak some leaders back into the country to supervise anti-government actions, coordinating efforts with the top leaders abroad. The Vula coding system even made it possible for the ANC brain trust to establish contact with the incarcerated Nelson Mandela. He received local visitors who came in carrying books that hid the decrypted dispatches—another product of Jenkin’s MacGyver-esque powers. “We smuggled these specially doctored books—innocuous looking books, maybe about flowers or travel—with a secret hidden compartment in the cover,” says Jenkin. “If you knew how to do it, you could extract the message and put another one back in there.”

Jenkin’s system allowed countless messages to be sent securely, as the ANC reached closer to its goal of defeating apartheid. He is unaware of any instance where the authorities decoded a single communication. When the ANC was ultimately unbanned in 1991, it credited Operation Vula as a key factor in its victory. In April 1994, Nelson Mandela became the president of South Africa.

You might be thinking that Jenkin’s story is so amazing that someone should make a movie out of it. Someone already has—focusing on the prison break. It’s called Escape From Pretoria and stars Daniel Radcliffe as Jenkin. There’s also a short documentary about Jenkin and Operation Vula. But until this year one thing had not been documented—Jenkin’s artisanal cryptosystem.

That’s where Graham-Cumming enters the picture. Years ago, he’d heard about Operation Vula and found the story fascinating. Earlier this year, he came across a mention of it and wondered—what happened to the code? He felt it should be open-sourced and uploaded to GitHub for all to see and play with. So he contacted Jenkin—and heard a sad story.

When Jenkin returned to South Africa in 1992, he had been worried about taking his tools with him, as some elements of the operation were still ongoing. “I didn't want to just walk in with all this communication equipment and have this coding wind up in their hands, so I compressed everything into single files, zipped it with passwords, and brought in the disks like that.” He had no problem at the border. Eventually, people felt safe meeting face-to-face and no longer needed Jenkin’s system. “Then life caught up with me,” he says. “I got married, had kids and all that. And one day, I thought, 'Let me have a look at this thing again.’ And I couldn't remember the password.” Over the years, Jenkin and others tried to break the encryption, and failed. Most Popular

Rather than being disappointed, Graham-Cumming was thrilled. “I’ve got to have a go at this,” he told himself, and asked for the files.

When Graham-Cumming received them on May 20, he was encouraged that they were compressed and encrypted in the old encrypted PKZIP format. It had a known flaw you could exploit if you knew some part of the original unencrypted message. But you’d have to know where in the zipped file that text is represented. He asked if Jenkin had any unencrypted versions of the code files, and indeed there were a few. But they turned out to be different from what was in the zip file, so they weren’t immediately helpful.

Graham-Cumming took a few days to think out his next attack. He realized the zip file contained another zip file, and that since all he needed was the right original text for a specific part of the scrambled text, his best chance was using the first file name mentioned in the zip within the zip. “You could predict the very first bit of that zip file using that name,” he says. “And I knew the names he was using. I was like, ‘Oh, I'm gonna try out a name,’ and I wrote a little program to try it.” (This is a much simplified explanation—Graham-Cumming provides more details in a blog post.)

On May 29, Graham-Cumming ran the program and stepped away to eat a breakfast of scrambled eggs. Twenty-three minutes later, the program finished. He’d broken the encryption and unzipped the file. The workings of Jenkin’s cryptosystem were exposed. It had been nine days since he first exchanged emails with Jenkin.

The next step was to actually run the code, which Graham-Cumming did using an emulator of the ancient version of MS-DOS used in the Toshiba T1000. It worked perfectly. Jenkin had feared that a professional coder like Graham-Cumming might find his work hopelessly amateurish, but his reaction was quite the opposite. “I’m pretty amazed, given the limitations he had in terms of knowledge, in terms of hardware, that they built something that was pretty credible, especially for the time,” says Graham-Cumming. Even more impressive: It did a job in the wild.

Jenkin, who has spent the past few decades in South Africa as a computer programmer and web designer, has now uploaded the code to GitHub and open-sourced it. He plans to unzip and upload some of the messages exchanged in the ’80s that helped bring down apartheid. Most Popular

“The code itself is a historical document,” says Graham-Cumming. “It wasn't like, ‘Oh, I'm going to create some theoretical crypto system.’ It was like, ‘I’ve got real activists, real people in danger. I need real communications, and I need to be practical.’” It’s also, as he promised me, a hell of a story. Time Travel

In November 2014, I wrote for Backchannel about Graham-Cumming’s campaign to evoke an apology from the UK for its shameful actions against Alan Turing.

On September 10, Graham-Cumming was sick with the flu. He stayed in bed most of the day. Late in the afternoon, he dragged himself to his computer to check his email. Sitting there, in rumpled gym garb, he found the following message from one Kirsty McNeill, a person he did not know. The email signature, as well as the email domain, indicated an association with 10 Downing Street.

Graham-Cumming, even in his flu-addled state, knew that this might just be some prank. It wasn’t hard to spoof an address, even from the Prime Minister’s office. He Googled the telephone number in the signature. It was the switchboard to 10 Downing Street. He dialed, asked for Ms. McNeill, and was quickly connected. “We are doing the apology tonight,” she told him. Was it all right if she read him the text? Somewhat stunned, he listened and approved.

On August 20, 2020, during a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow, the Russian opposition leader and anticorruption campaigner Alexei Navalny thought he was dying––he was disoriented, and felt his body shutting down. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, and Navalny was hospitalized. Two days later, thanks to the persistence of his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, and international pressure, the Russian authorities allowed a German plane to take him to Berlin for treatment.

Navalny emerged from a coma on September 7th. A week later, he announced his intention to return soon to Russia, despite the obvious danger. Doctors concluded that Navalny had been poisoned with a deadly nerve agent called Novichok. While recovering in the German countryside, he began writing his memoir, “Patriot,” and investigating the attempt on his life. He had no doubt that it had been the decision of Vladimir Putin and the work of the F.S.B., the Russian security services, but he was determined to uncover the details. During an unforgettable telephone call, which was filmed for a documentary about his life, Navalny duped an F.S.B. agent into describing how agents had broken into his hotel room in Tomsk and dosed his clothing with the poison.

On January 17, 2021, Alexei and Yulia flew back to Moscow. Navalny was arrested at the airport. Despite international protests on his behalf, Navalny immediately entered a netherworld of trumped-up criminal charges (embezzlement, fraud, “extremism,” etc.), prison cells, and solitary confinement. By the end of 2023, he landed in the “special regime” colony known as Polar Wolf, north of the Arctic Circle. In captivity, he managed to keep a diary and even had his team post some entries on social media. In one Facebook post, he explained why he refused to live out his life in the safety of exile: “I have my country and my convictions. I don’t want to give up my country or betray it. If your convictions mean something, you must be prepared to stand up for them and make sacrifices if necessary.” 2022

January 17th

Exactly one year ago today I came home, to Russia.

I didn’t manage to take a single step on the soil of my country as a free man: I was arrested even before border control.

The hero of one of my favorite books, “Resurrection,” by Leo Tolstoy, says, “Yes, the only suitable place for an honest man in Russia at the present time is prison.”

It sounds fine, but it was wrong then, and it’s even more wrong now.

There are a lot of honest people in Russia—tens of millions. There are far more than is commonly believed.

The authorities, however, who were repugnant then and are even more so now, are afraid not of honest people but of those who are not afraid of them. Or let me be more precise: those who may be afraid but overcome their fear.

There are a lot of them, too. We meet them all the time, in all sorts of places, from rallies to the media, people who remain independent. Indeed, even here, on Instagram. I recently read that the Ministry of the Interior was firing staff who had “liked” my posts. So in Russia, in 2022, even a “like” can take courage.

In every period, the essence of politics has been that a tin-pot tsar who wants to arrogate to himself the right to personal, unaccountable power needs to intimidate the honest people who are not afraid of him. And they, in turn, need to convince everyone around them that they should not be afraid, that there are, by an order of magnitude, more honest people than the mean little tsar’s security guards. Why live your whole life in fear, even being robbed in the process, if everything can be arranged differently and more justly?

The pendulum swings endlessly. Or the tug-of-war. Today you are brave. Tomorrow they seem to have scared you a bit. And the day after tomorrow they have scared you so much that you despair and become brave again.

I have no idea when my journey into space will end, if ever, but on Friday I was informed that another criminal case is being brought against me and going to court. And there is yet another coming up, in which I am supposedly an extremist and a terrorist. So I’m one of those cosmonauts who don’t count the days until the end of their term. What is there to count? People have been kept in prison for as long as twenty-seven years.

But I find myself in this company of cosmonauts precisely because I tried my utmost to tug my end of the rope. I pulled over to this side those among the honest people who would not be or could no longer bear to be afraid.

That is what I did. I don’t for a second regret it. And I will continue to do it.

Having spent my first year in prison, I want to tell everyone exactly the same thing I shouted to those who gathered outside the court when the guards were taking me off to the police truck: Don’t be afraid of anything. This is our country and it’s the only one we have.

The only thing we should fear is that we will surrender our homeland to be plundered by a gang of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. That we will surrender without a fight, voluntarily, our own future and the future of our children.

Huge thanks to all of you for your support. I can feel it.

I’d just like to add: This year has gone by incredibly quickly. It seems only yesterday I was boarding the plane to Moscow, and now I’ve already completed a year in prison. It’s true what they say in science books: time on earth and in space passes at different speeds.

I love you all. Hugs to everyone.

March 22nd

Nine years of strict regime. Today, on March 22nd, a new sentence was announced. Before that, I ran a sweepstakes with my lawyers. The losers would have to buy whoever won a drink. Olga reckoned eleven to fifteen years. Vadim surprised everyone with his prediction of precisely twelve years and six months. I guessed seven to eight years and was the winner.

I decided to record my feelings right away, because all year I had been training for situations like today, developing what I call my “prison Zen.”

Whatever way you look at it, nine years, especially in “strict” conditions, is an extremely long sentence. In Russia, the average punishment for murder is seven years.

A prisoner sentenced to an extra term of nine years is going to be upset, to say the least. When I got back to the prison, everyone—who of course already knew about the sentence—furtively gave me a particular kind of look. How was I taking it? What was the expression on my face? It is, after all, intriguing to see someone’s reaction when they have just been told they will be serving the longest sentence of anyone in the entire prison complex. And that they are going to be sent somewhere especially grim and usually reserved for murderers. Nobody is going to come over and ask how I feel, but everyone is curious to see how this plays out. It’s an occasion when a person might hang themselves or slash their wrists.

But I am completely fine. Even “my” jailer said in the course of a really annoying full strip search, “You don’t look to me to be all that upset.” I am really O.K. I am writing this not because I am willing myself to keep up a pretense of being carefree and blasé but because my prison Zen has kicked in.

I knew from the outset that I would be imprisoned for life—either for the rest of my life or until the end of the life of this regime.

Regimes like this one are resilient, and the most foolish thing I could do is pay attention to people who say, “Lyosha, sure, the regime is going to last at least another year, but the year after that, two at most, it will fall apart and you will be a free man.” And everything along those lines. People write that to me frequently.

The U.S.S.R. lasted seventy years. The repressive regimes in North Korea and Cuba survive to this day. China, with a whole bunch of political prisoners, has lasted so long that those prisoners grow old and die in prison. The Chinese regime does not relent. It releases no one, despite all the international pressure. The truth of the matter is that we underestimate just how resilient autocracies are in the modern world. With very, very rare exceptions, they are protected from external invasion by the U.N., by international law, by the rights of sovereignty. Russia, which right now is waging a classic war of aggression against Ukraine (which has increased tenfold the predictions of the regime’s imminent collapse), is additionally protected by its membership in the U.N. Security Council and its nuclear weapons.

Economic collapse and impoverishment await us most likely. But it is far from obvious that the regime will come crashing down in such a way that its falling debris breaks open the doors of its prisons.

My approach to the situation is certainly not one of contemplative passivity. I am trying to do everything I can from here to put an end to authoritarianism (or, more modestly, to contribute to ending it). Every single day, I ponder how to act more effectively, what constructive advice to give my colleagues who are still at liberty, where the regime’s greatest vulnerabilities lie. As I said, giving in to wishful thinking (about when the regime will collapse and I will be released) would be the worst thing I could do. What if I’m not free in a year? Or three years? Would I lapse into depression? Blame everyone else for not trying hard enough to get me released? Curse world leaders and public opinion for having forgotten me?

Relying on being released anytime soon, waiting for it to happen, is only a way of tormenting myself.

I decided from the beginning that if I was going to be released as a result of pressure or a political scenario it would happen within six months of my arrest, “while the iron was hot.” And, if it didn’t, I was up the creek for the foreseeable future. I needed to adjust my thinking so that when they did extend my sentence I would feel even more sure I was doing the right thing when I boarded that plane back to Moscow.

“Sam, I need you to be less of a Deadhead and more of a take-initiative head.”

Cartoon by Sarah Kempa

Here are the techniques I worked out. Perhaps others may find them helpful in the future (but let’s hope they are not needed).

The first is frequently to be found in self-help books: Imagine the worst thing that can happen, and accept it. This works, even if it’s a masochistic exercise. I can imagine that it’s not suitable for people suffering from clinical depression. They might do it so successfully that they end up hanging themselves.

It’s a fairly easy exercise, because it involves a skill everyone developed in childhood. You may remember crying your eyes out in your bed and exultantly imagining you are going to die right then and there just to spite everyone. Imagine the look on the faces of your parents! How they will cry when it finally dawns on them who they have lost! Choked with tears, they’ll beg you, as you lie quiet and still in your little coffin, to get up and come and watch TV, not just until ten o’clock but until eleven, if only you would be alive. But it is too late, you are dead, which means you are unrelenting and deaf to their pleas.

Well, mine is much the same idea.

Get into your prison bunk and wait to hear “Lights out.” The lights are switched off. You invite yourself to imagine, as realistically as possible, the worst thing that could happen. And then, as I said, accept it (skipping the stages of denial, anger, and bargaining).

I will spend the rest of my life in prison and die here. There will not be anybody to say goodbye to. Or, while I am still in prison, people I know outside will die and I won’t be able to say goodbye to them. I will miss graduations from school and college. Tasselled mortarboards will be tossed in the air in my absence. All anniversaries will be celebrated without me. I’ll never see my grandchildren. I won’t be the subject of any family stories. I’ll be missing from all the photos.

You need to think about this seriously, and your cruel imagination will whisk you through your fears so swiftly that you will arrive at your “eyes filled with tears” destination in next to no time. The important thing is not to torment yourself with anger, hatred, fantasies of revenge, but to move instantly to acceptance. That can be hard.

I remember having to stop one of my first sessions at the idea that I will die here, forgotten by everybody, and be buried in an unmarked grave. My family will be informed that “in accordance with the law the burial site cannot be disclosed.” I had difficulty resisting an urge to start furiously smashing everything around me, overturning bunks and bedside tables and yelling, You bastards! You have no right to bury me in an unmarked grave. It’s against the law! It isn’t fair! I actually wanted to shout that out.

Instead of yelling, you need to think about the situation calmly. So what if that comes to pass? Worse things happen.

I’m forty-five. I have a family and children. I’ve had a life to live, worked on some interesting things, done some things that were useful. But there’s a war on right now. Suppose a nineteen-year-old is riding in an armored vehicle, he gets a piece of shrapnel in his head, and that’s it. He has had no family, no children, no life. Right now, dead civilians are lying in the streets in Mariupol, their bodies gnawed at by dogs, and many of them will be lucky if they end up in even a mass grave—through no fault of their own. I made my choices, but these people were just living their lives. They had jobs. They were family breadwinners. Then, one fine evening, a vengeful runt on television, the President of a neighboring country, announces that you are all “Nazis” and have to die because Ukraine was invented by Lenin. The next day, a shell comes flying in your window and you no longer have a wife, a husband, or children—and maybe you yourself are also no longer alive.

And how many guiltless prisoners there are here! While you are sitting with your bagful of letters, other prisoners have never had a letter or package from anyone. Some of them will get sick and die in the prison hospital. Alone.

The Soviet dissidents? Anatoly Marchenko died from a hunger strike in 1986, and a couple of years later the satanic Soviet Union fell to pieces. So even the worst possible scenario is not actually all that bad. I resigned myself and accept it.

Yulia has been such a help in this. I didn’t want her to be tormented by all that “perhaps they’ll let him out after a month” stuff. Most important, I wanted her to know I was not suffering here. On her first extended visit, we walked down a corridor and spoke at a spot as far removed as possible from the cameras wired for sound that are tucked in all over the place. I whispered in her ear, “Listen, I don’t want to sound dramatic, but I think there’s a high probability I’ll never get out of here. Even if everything starts falling apart, they will bump me off at the first sign the regime is collapsing. They will poison me.”

“I know,” she said with a nod, in a voice that was calm and firm. “I was thinking that myself.”

At that moment I wanted to seize her in my arms and hug her joyfully, as hard as I could. That was so great! No tears! It was one of those moments when you realize you found the right person. Or perhaps she found you.

“Let’s just decide for ourselves that this is most likely what’s going to happen. Let’s accept it as the base scenario and arrange our lives on that basis. If things turn out better, that will be marvellous, but we won’t count on it or have ill-founded hopes.”

“Yep. Let’s do it.”

As usual, her voice sounded as if it belonged to a character in a cartoon, but she was dead serious. She looked up at me and batted her eyes with those big eyelashes, at which point I swept her up in my arms, hugging her in delight. Where else could I ever have found someone who could discuss the most difficult matters with me without a lot of drama and hand-wringing? She entirely got it and, like me, would hope for the best, but expect and prepare for the worst.

Yulia laughed and broke free. I kissed her on the nose and felt much better.

There is, of course, a hint of trickery and self-deception in all this. You have accepted the worst-case scenario, but there is an inner voice you can’t stifle: Come off it, the worst is never going to happen. Even as you tell yourself your direst fate is unavoidable, you’re hoping against hope that someone will change your mind for you.

The process going on in your head is by no means straightforward, but if you find yourself in a bad situation, you should try this. It works, as long as you think everything through seriously.

The second technique is so old you may roll your eyes heavenward when you hear it. It is religion. It is doable only for believers but does not demand zealous, fervent prayer by the prison barracks window three times a day (a very common phenomenon in prisons).

I have always thought, and said openly, that being a believer makes it easier to live your life and, to an even greater extent, engage in opposition politics. Faith makes life simpler.

The initial position for this exercise is the same as for the previous one. You lie in your bunk looking up at the one above and ask yourself whether you are a Christian in your heart of hearts. It is not essential for you to believe some old guys in the desert once lived to be eight hundred years old, or that the sea was literally parted in front of someone. But are you a disciple of the religion whose founder sacrificed himself for others, paying the price for their sins? Do you believe in the immortality of the soul and the rest of that cool stuff? If you can honestly answer yes, what is there left for you to worry about? Why, under your breath, would you mumble a hundred times something you read from a hefty tome you keep in your bedside table? Don’t worry about the morrow, because the morrow is perfectly capable of taking care of itself.

My job is to seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of his family to deal with everything else. They won’t let me down and will sort out all my headaches. As they say in prison here: they will take my punches for me.

March 26th

The ghastliest days in prison are the birthdays of close family, especially children.

What sort of pathetic greeting is it to send a letter to your son on his fourteenth birthday? What kind of memory will that be of being close to his father?

“For my birthday my dad took me on a hike.”

“Well, on my birthday, my dad taught me how to drive a car.”

“For my birthday my dad sent me a letter from prison on a piece of notepaper. He promised that when he gets out he’ll teach me how to boil water in a plastic bag.”

Let’s face it, you don’t get to choose your parents. Some kids get stuck with jailbirds.

But it is on my children’s birthdays that I am particularly aware of why I’m in jail. We need to build the Beautiful Russia of the Future for them to live in.

Zakhar, happy birthday!

I really miss you and love you very much!

April 3rd

It’s a real Russian spring day. That is, the snowdrifts are up to my waist, and it’s been snowing all weekend. Snow is something prisoners hate, because what do they do when it snows and after it snows? That’s right, they clear the snow away. Arguing that it is, after all, April, and in at most ten days it will all just melt anyway, not only doesn’t work but draws heartfelt indignation from the prison administration. If anything is lying anywhere in violation of the regulations and the normal routine of doing things, it must be shovelled up, scraped off, and removed. That said, clearing snow actually is one of the most meaningful activities in prison life, because most of the others are an inane response to the need to generate work at all costs. The prisoners have a saying: “It doesn’t matter where what gets chucked, as long as the con feels completely fucked.”

This describes my feeling every weekend, because, although you can find at least an inkling of sense in shovelling snow in April, the work is genuinely exhausting. Because I am classified as a nontrusted prisoner, they don’t allow me to shovel the snow like everyone else and to break the ice on the “main line,” the camp’s principal street, along which the commandant walks. In my local area and with my own squad, though, I have to shovel.

We all have that classic labor-camp look that belongs in a movie about the Gulag. The heavy jackets, fur hats, and mittens, the enormous wooden shovels, each of which is so heavy you would think it was made of cast iron, especially after it gets saturated with water, which freezes. They are the selfsame shovels used by the soldiers who cleared the streets of my military home town when I was a child. You might have thought that in the thirty years that have passed since then shovel technology would have progressed toward production of lighter shovels, but in Russia, as with so many other things, we didn’t hack it. We were brought a couple of lightweight shovels that immediately broke. The response was the usual “Oh, well, what the hell, let them use the wooden shovels. We’ve used them for shovelling snow all our lives. They are reliable.” As if to say, Our grandfathers invented these shovels and far be it from us to doubt their wisdom by trying to improve something that is already ideal.

So there I was, scowling, wearing a heavy winter jacket, and wielding a wooden shovel with snow frozen to it. The only thing that amused me, and at least partly enabled me to accept this reality, is that on these occasions I feel like the hero of my all-time favorite joke. It is a Soviet joke, but has a certain relevance today.

A boy goes out for a stroll in the courtyard of his apartment block. Boys playing soccer there invite him to join in. The boy is a bit of a stay-at-home, but he’s interested and runs over to play with them. He eventually manages to kick the ball, very hard, but unfortunately it crashes through the window of the basement room where the janitor lives. Unsurprisingly, the janitor emerges. He is unshaven, wearing a fur hat and quilted jacket, and clearly the worse for a hangover. Infuriated, the janitor stares at the boy before rushing at him.

The boy runs away as fast as he can and thinks, What do I need this for? After all, I’m a quiet, stay-at-home sort of boy. I like reading. Why play soccer with the other boys? Why am I running away right now from this scary janitor when I could be lying at home on the couch reading a book by my favorite American writer, Hemingway?

Meanwhile, Hemingway is reclining on a chaise longue in Cuba, with a glass of rum in his hand, and thinking, God, I’m so tired of this rum and Cuba. All this dancing, and shouting, and the sea. Damn it, I’m a clever guy. Why am I here instead of being in Paris discussing existentialism with my colleague Jean-Paul Sartre over a glass of Calvados?

Meanwhile, Jean-Paul Sartre, sipping Calvados, is looking at the scene in front of him and thinking, How I hate Paris. I can’t stand the sight of these boulevards. I’m sick and tired of all these rapturous students and their revolutions. Why do I have to be here, when I long to be in Moscow, engaging in fascinating dialogue with my friend Andrei Platonov, the great Russian writer?

Meanwhile, in Moscow, Platonov is running across a snow-covered courtyard and thinking, If I catch that little bastard, I’ll fucking kill him.

Although, of course, I am no Andrei Platonov, I have the quilted jacket and the fur hat, and I, too, am writing a book. Next, I’ll finish the chapter about how I met Yulia.

July 1st

I live like Putin and Medvedev.

At least I think so when I look at the fence around my barracks. Everyone has the usual fence, and inside there are rods to dry the laundry on. But I have a six-metre-high fence, the kind I have only seen in our investigations of Putin’s and Medvedev’s palaces.

Putin both lives and works in such a place—in Novo-Ogaryovo or Sochi. And I live in a similar place. Putin lets ministers sit in the waiting room for six hours, and my lawyers have to wait five or six hours to see me. I have a loudspeaker in my barracks that plays songs like “Glory to the F.S.B.,” and I think Putin has one, too.

That’s where the similarities end, though.

Putin, as you know, sleeps until 10 a.m., then swims in the pool and eats cottage cheese with honey.

But, for me, 10 a.m. is lunchtime, because work starts at 6:40 a.m.

6:00—Wake up. Ten minutes to make my bed, wash, shave, and so on.

6:10—Exercise.

6:20—Escorted to breakfast.

6:40—Searched and escorted to work.

At work, you sit for seven hours at the sewing machine on a stool below knee height.

10:20—Fifteen-minute lunch break.

After work, you continue to sit for a few hours on a wooden bench under a portrait of Putin. This is called “disciplinary activity.”

On Saturday, you work for five hours and sit on the bench under the portrait again.

Sunday, in theory, is a day off. But in the Putin administration, or wherever my unique routine was set up, they are experts at relaxation. On Sunday, we sit in a room on a wooden bench for ten hours.

I don’t know who can be “disciplined” by such activities, except a cripple with a bad back. But maybe that’s their goal. But you know me, I’m an optimist and look for the bright side even in my dark existence. I have as much fun as I can.

While sewing, I’ve memorized Hamlet’s soliloquy in English.

However, the inmates on my shift say that when I close my eyes and mutter something in Shakespearean English, like “in thy orisons be all my sins remembered,” it looks as if I were summoning a demon.

But I have no such thoughts: summoning a demon would be a violation of the prison regulations. 2023

January 12th

In my two years behind bars, my only truly original story is the one about the psycho. Everything else has been told and described numerous times. If you open any book by a Soviet dissident, there will be endless stories of punishment cells, hunger strikes, violence, provocations, lack of medical care. Nothing new. But my story about the psycho is fresh; at least, I’ve never seen or heard anything like it.

“It turns out that the person we had never heard of, who does the thing we just learned about, is the most famous human on the planet right now.”

Cartoon by Colin Tom

So, let me give you an idea about the SHIZO, the place where I sit all the time. It is a narrow corridor with cells on either side. The metal doors offer little to no soundproofing, plus there are ventilation holes above the doors, so two people sitting in opposite cells can have a conversation without even raising their voices. This is the main reason there has never been anyone in the cell opposite mine, or in my entire eight-cell section. I am the only one there, and I have never seen any other punished convicts the whole time.

And then, about a month ago, they put a psycho in the cell across from mine. At first, I thought he was faking it. He was very active. If you tell a kid to act like a madman, that’s what he’ll come up with. Screaming, growling, hitting, barking, arguing with himself in three different voices. But, in the case of my psycho, seventy per cent of the words are obscene. There are a lot of videos online of people who think that they’ve been possessed by demons. This is very similar—the growling wail (my favorite of his three personas) comes on periodically and doesn’t cease for hours. That’s why I stopped thinking he was a faker; no normal person can yell for fourteen hours every day and three hours at night for a month. And, when I say “yell,” I mean the kind of yelling that makes your neck veins swell up.

For the past month, I’ve been going nuts and starting every checkup by demanding this lunatic be transferred elsewhere. It’s impossible to sleep at night or read during the day. They don’t transfer him, and they go out of their way to emphasize that he is a convict just like me.

And then I find out a wonderful detail: this nutcase was incarcerated (he got twenty-four years for killing someone) in another place, and a month ago they moved him here, and now they keep him in a punishment cell so that he can, so to speak, keep me entertained.

I have to admit that this plan is working: I never get bored, nor do I ever get a good night’s sleep. Being ill here is something else: during the day you suffer in a cell with a fever and long for it to be night, when they lower your bunk bed and give you a mattress, but at night you listen to the cheerful barking of your neighbor. As you know, sleep deprivation is one of the most effective tortures, but formally I can’t complain: he’s an inmate like me, he was also put in a punishment cell, and it’s up to the administration to decide who gets put into which cell.

But as usual in such situations I am amazed at something else.

This was all planned. Someone thought of this and implemented it at the regional or federal level. You can’t transfer a convict for no reason at all; there’s a rule about serving your whole term in one camp. So there was an order from above: Put pressure on him. And the generals and colonels at lower levels held a meeting: So, how shall we put pressure on him? And someone wanting to distinguish himself said, We have a madman in such-and-such prison; he screams day and night. Let’s take him to Navalny.

What a great idea, fellow-officers. Comrade Colonel, proceed and report on it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that they took a raving madman from a prison hospital and declared him sane, just to keep him in a cell across from mine.

The moral of this story is simple: The Russian prison system, the Federal Penitentiary Service, is run by a collection of perverts. Everything in their system has a sick twist: the infamous mop rapes, sticking things up people’s anuses, and so on. It wouldn’t occur to a bad-but-sane person to do such a thing. Everything you read about the horrors and fascist crimes of our prison system is true. There’s just one correction needed: the reality is even worse.

January 17th

It has been exactly two years since I returned to Russia. I have spent these two years in prison. When you write a post like this, you have to ask yourself: How many more such anniversary posts will you have to write?

Life and the events around us prompt the answer: However many it may take. Our miserable, exhausted motherland needs to be saved. It has been pillaged, wounded, dragged into an aggressive war, and turned into a prison run by the most unscrupulous and deceitful scoundrels. Any opposition to this gang—even if only symbolic in my current limited capacity—is important.

I said it two years ago, and I will say it again: Russia is my country. I was born and raised here, my parents are here, and I made a family here; I found someone I loved and had kids with her. I am a full-fledged citizen, and I have the right to unite with like-minded people and be politically active. There are plenty of us, certainly more than corrupt judges, lying propagandists, and Kremlin crooks.

I’m not going to surrender my country to them, and I believe that the darkness will eventually yield. But as long as it persists I will do all I can, try to do what is right, and urge everyone not to abandon hope.

Russia will be happy!

June 4th

It’s my birthday today. When I woke up, I joked to myself that I can now add the SHIZO to the list of places where I’ve celebrated it over the years. And then, like many other people who reach a certain age (I turned forty-seven today, wow), I thought about my accomplishments over the past year and my plans for the next.

I haven’t accomplished much, and this was best summed up the other day by the psychologist at our penal colony. The procedure requires that before you are sent to the SHIZO you must be examined by a medical officer (to check whether you will be able to withstand it) and a psychologist (to make sure you don’t hang yourself). Well, after our meeting, the psychologist said, “This is the sixteenth time we’ve put you in the SHIZO, but you keep cracking jokes, and your mood is much better than that of the commission members.” That’s true, but on the morning of your birthday you have to be honest with yourself, so I ask myself the question, Am I really in a good mood, or do I force myself to feel that way?

My answer is, I really am. Let’s face it, of course I wish I didn’t have to wake up in this hellhole and could, instead, have breakfast with my family, receive kisses on the cheek from my children, unwrap presents, and say, “Wow, this is exactly what I dreamed of!” But life works in such a way that social progress and a better future can be achieved only if a certain number of people are willing to pay the price for their right to have their own beliefs. The more of them there are, the less everyone has to pay. And the day will come when speaking the truth and advocating for justice will be commonplace and not dangerous in Russia.

But, until that day comes, I see my situation not as a heavy burden or a yoke but as a job that needs to be done. Every job has its unpleasant aspects, right? So I’m going through the unpleasant part of my favorite job right now.

My plan for the previous year was not to become brutalized and bitter and lose my laid-back demeanor; that would mean the beginning of my defeat. And all my success in this was possible only because of your support.

As always, on my birthday, I want to thank all the people I’ve met in my life. The good ones for having helped and still helping me. The bad ones for the fact that my experience with them has taught me something. Thanks to my family for always being there for me!

But the biggest thank-you and biggest salute I want to give today goes to all political prisoners in Russia, Belarus, and other countries. Most of them have it much harder than me. I think about them all the time. Their resilience inspires me every day.

June 19th

Some people collect stamps. Some collect coins. And I have a growing collection of amazing court trials. I was tried in the Khimki police station, where I was sitting under the portrait of Genrikh Yagoda. I was tried in a standard regime penal colony, and they called it an “open trial.”

And now they’re trying me in a closed trial in a maximum-security penal colony.

In a sense, this is the new sincerity. They now say openly, We are afraid of you. We are afraid of what you will say. We are afraid of the truth.

This is an important confession. And it makes practical sense for all of us. We must do what they fear—tell the truth, spread the truth. This is the most powerful weapon against this regime of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. Everyone has this weapon. So make use of it.

August 4th

Nineteen years in a maximum-security penal colony. The number of years does not matter. I understand perfectly well that, like many political prisoners, I am serving a life sentence. Where “life” is defined by either the length of my life or the length of the life of this regime.

The sentencing figure is not for me. It is for you. You, not I, are being frightened and deprived of the will to resist. You are being forced to surrender your country without a fight to the gang of traitors, thieves, and scoundrels who have seized power. Putin must not achieve his goal. Do not lose the will to resist.

November 13th

When you are looking for a wife, be sure to check the potential spouse to see whether she has been registered as a juvenile delinquent. I didn’t do that and here I am.

On a daily basis, the administration informs me that they are unable to deliver another letter from Navalnaya Y. B. The correspondence was seized by the censor because it contained evidence of preparation for a crime. It applies to all recent correspondence.

I wrote to her, saying, “Yulia, stop preparing crimes! Instead, cook some borscht for the kids.”

However, she can’t stop. She carries on inventing new crimes and keeps writing to me about them in her letters.

Once upon a time, about a hundred years ago, she told me that in her school days, she, along with her friends, conspired to steal a briefcase from a classmate and study the trajectory of an object flying out of a second-floor window. Just to clarify, the flying object was the briefcase, not the classmate. Although, actually, I’m not so sure now.

Even back then, her criminal inclinations were evident. Not a spouse, but more like some kind of outlaw.

December 1st

I have no idea which word to use to describe my latest news. Is it sad, funny, or absurd?

I am brought letters and the conversation begins:

“Any letters from my wife?”

“Censored.”

“Any papers from my lawyer?”

“Censored.”

“So what do you have?”

“There’s one from the investigator.”

I open the letter from the State Investigative Committee: “We inform you that a criminal case has been opened against you for a crime under Part 2 of Article 214 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. Two episodes.”

They initiate a new criminal case against me every three months. Rarely has an inmate in solitary confinement for more than a year had such a vibrant social and political life.

I have no idea what Article 214 is, and there’s nowhere to look. You’ll know about it before I do.

Nevertheless, this seems to be a case of positive feedback, as the scientists might say. If this Kremlin gang of corrupters, traitors, and occupiers does not like what I (we) are doing, we must be on the right path.

December 26th

I am your new Santa Claus.

Well, I now have a sheepskin coat and an ushanka fur hat, and soon I will get felt boots. I have grown a beard during the twenty days of my travels under escort. Unfortunately, there are no reindeer, but there are huge, fluffy, and very beautiful German shepherds.

And the most important thing: I now live above the Arctic Circle in the village of Kharp, on the Yamal Peninsula. The nearest town has the delightful name of Labytnangi.

I don’t say, “Ho ho ho,” but I do say, “Oh oh oh,” when I look out the window, where I can see night, then evening, and then night again.

The twenty days of my trip were pretty exhausting, but I’m in a good mood, as befits a Santa Claus.

They brought me here on Saturday night. I was transported with such precautions and by such a strange route (Vladimir—Moscow—Chelyabinsk—Yekaterinburg—Kirov—Vorkuta—Kharp) that I didn’t expect anyone to find me here before mid-January.

So I was very surprised when the cell door was opened yesterday with the words “A lawyer is here to see you.” The lawyer told me that you had lost track of me, and some of you were quite worried. Thanks very much for your support!

I can’t regale you with stories about polar exotica yet, because I can only see the fence, which is very close.

I also went for a walk. The “exercise” yard is a neighboring cell, a bit bigger, with snow on the ground. And I saw guards, not like in central Russia, but like in the movies, with machine guns, warm mittens, and felt boots. And with the same beautiful fluffy German shepherds.

Anyway, don’t worry about me. I’m fine. I’m totally relieved that I’ve finally made it here.

Thanks again to everyone for your support. And happy holidays!

Since I’m Santa Claus, you’re probably wondering about the presents. But I am a special-regime Santa Claus, so only those who have behaved really badly get presents.

December 31st

This is the third New Year’s Eve. I have taken the traditional family New Year’s Eve photo using Photoshop. I am trying to keep up with the times, and on this occasion I asked to be drawn by artificial intelligence. I hope it turned out fantastic; I won’t see the picture myself until the letter reaches Yamal.

“I miss you terribly” is kind of incorrect from the point of view of Russian syntax. It’s better to say, “I miss you a lot,” or “I miss you so much.”

But, from my point of view, it is more accurate and correct. I miss my family terribly. Yulia, my children, my parents, my brother. I miss my friends, my colleagues, our offices, and my work. I miss you all terribly.

Cartoon by Liza Donnelly

I have no feelings of loneliness, abandonment, or isolation. My mood is great and quite Christmassy. But there is no substitute for normal human communication in all its forms: from jokes at the New Year’s feast to correspondence on Telegram and comments on Instagram and Twitter.

I miss being able to argue with people who send stupid, identical greetings and pictures via their WhatsApp list on New Year’s Eve. It used to annoy me, but now I just think it’s cute. Imagine someone sitting down and sending everyone a couple of kittens with hats under a Christmas tree.

Happy New Year to everyone.

Don’t miss anyone. Not terribly, not much, or very much. Don’t miss your loved ones, and don’t let your loved ones miss you. Continue to be a good, honest person, and try to be a little better and more honest in the coming year. That’s pretty much what I wish for myself. Don’t get sick, and take care of yourself.

Arctic hugs and polar greetings. Love you all. 2024

January 9th

This idea I had, that Putin would now be satisfied with the simple fact of having me in a cell in the far north rather than just keeping me in the SHIZO, was not only overoptimistic but also naïve.

I had just come out of quarantine when it was reported that “the convict Navalny refused to present himself according to the regulations, did not respond to the educative work, and did not draw appropriate conclusions for himself.” I got seven days in a SHIZO.

A wonderful detail: in a punishment cell, the daily routine is slightly different. In a normal cell, your “exercise” takes place in the afternoon. Even though it is a polar night, it is still a few degrees warmer in the afternoon. In the SHIZO, however, “exercise” starts at six-thirty in the morning. But I have already promised myself that I will try to go for a walk no matter what the weather is.

My “exercise” yard is eleven steps from one wall and three to the other; not much of a walk, but at least there’s something, so I go outside.

It hasn’t gotten colder than −32°C [−25.6°F]. Even at that temperature you can walk for more than half an hour, but only if you are sure you can grow a new nose, ears, and fingers.

Few things are as refreshing as a walk in Yamal at six-thirty in the morning. And what a wonderful breeze blows into the courtyard despite the concrete fence, it’s just wow!

Today I went for a walk, got frozen, and thought of Leonardo DiCaprio and his character’s dead-horse trick in “The Revenant.” I don’t think it would work here. A dead horse would freeze in about fifteen minutes.

Here you need an elephant. A hot or even a roasted elephant. If you cut open the belly of a freshly roasted elephant and crawl inside, you can keep warm for a while. But where am I going to get a hot, roasted elephant in Yamal, especially at six-thirty in the morning? So I will continue to freeze.

January 17th

Exactly three years ago, I came back to Russia after treatment following my poisoning. I was arrested at the airport. And for three years I’ve been in prison.

And for three years I’ve been answering the same question.

Prisoners ask it simply and directly.

Prison officials inquire about it cautiously, with the recording devices turned off.

“Why did you come back?”

Responding to this question, I feel frustrated in two ways. First, there’s a dissatisfaction with myself for failing to find the right words to make everyone understand and put an end to this incessant questioning. Second, there’s frustration at the political landscape of recent decades in Russia. This landscape has implanted cynicism and conspiracy theories so deeply in society that people inherently distrust straightforward motives. They seem to believe, If you came back, there must have been some deal you made. It just didn’t work out. Or hasn’t yet. There’s a hidden plan involving the Kremlin towers. There must be a secret lurking beneath the surface. Because, in politics, nothing is as straightforward as it appears.

But there are no secrets or twisted meanings. Everything really is that simple.

I have my country and my convictions. I don’t want to give up my country or betray it. If your convictions mean something, you must be prepared to stand up for them and make sacrifices if necessary.

And, if you’re not prepared to do that, you have no convictions. You just think you do. But those are not convictions and principles; they’re only thoughts in your head.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that everyone who’s not currently in prison lacks convictions. Everyone pays their price. For many people, the price is high even without being imprisoned.

I took part in elections and vied for leadership positions. The call for me is different. I travelled the length and breadth of the country, declaring everywhere from the stage, “I promise that I won’t let you down, I won’t deceive you, and I won’t abandon you.” By coming back to Russia, I fulfilled my promise to the voters. There need to be some people in Russia who don’t lie to them.

It turned out that, in Russia, to defend the right to have and not to hide your beliefs, you have to pay by sitting in a solitary cell. Of course, I don’t like being there. But I will not give up either my ideas or my homeland.

My convictions are not exotic, sectarian, or radical. On the contrary, everything I believe in is based on science and historical experience.

Those in power should change. The best way to elect leaders is through honest and free elections. Everyone needs a fair legal system. Corruption destroys the state. There should be no censorship.

The future lies in these principles.

But, for the present, sectarians and marginals are in power. They have absolutely no ideas. Their only goal is to cling to power. Total hypocrisy allows them to wrap themselves in any cover. So polygamists have become conservatives. Members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union have become Orthodox. Owners of “golden passports” and offshore accounts are aggressive patriots.

Lies, and nothing but lies.

It will crumble and collapse. The Putinist state is not sustainable.

One day, we will look at it, and it won’t be there. Victory is inevitable.

But for now, we must not give up, and we must stand by our beliefs.

Alexei Navalny died on February 16, 2024. ♦

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