I’ve never had allergies. Not to food, not to pollen, not to anything else.
I can lie in a haystack in May and eat lemons stuffed with every kind of nut. At the same time, I know very well what allergies are. My wife is allergic to budding plants. Early spring is the time of year she hates most. So we watched our children for signs of allergies, and I’ve read quite a lot on the subject. That was the backstory. Now for the story itself.
It was the fourth day of my detention. I was eating the same food as everyone else. My living conditions were exactly the same as those of the other five detainees.
What’s more, I had spent ten days in this very same cell, on this very same bunk, quite recently—just two weeks earlier.
This was my ninth or tenth arrest. In all that time, I had asked to see a doctor only once, when I caught a cold and had a high fever. I use my own bed linen, from the prison bag I always keep ready. That bag also has soap, toothpaste, and all the rest. I had used all of it two weeks earlier.
During exercise time, my cellmates noticed that my neck was red. It was around lunchtime on Saturday. Everyone was out protesting, and I was catching fragments of the news on the radio and feeling jealous.
An hour later, I felt my forehead and the skin around my eyes burning. It was uncomfortable, but only mildly so—not enough to ask for a doctor; it would pass. There was no mirror in the cell, just a scrap of reflective film above the sink. You couldn’t really see anything in it. My cellmates said my forehead had turned red.
That night I woke up because my face, ears, and neck were burning and prickling.
Did this ever happen to you as a kid: you climbed onto a roof, grabbed fiberglass insulation with your bare hands, and then whenever you touched your face or any other part of your body, it kept prickling horribly for a long time afterward?
That’s what it felt like—as if someone had rubbed my head with fiberglass insulation. I couldn’t fall asleep; I just kept tossing and turning.
Honestly, remembering Kara-Murza and Verzilov, the thought crossed my mind: what if I’d been poisoned too? So I tried to lie still and monitor whether it was getting harder to breathe, so I could demand an ambulance immediately if that happened.
In the morning I got up, and my cellmate, when he saw me, stared wide-eyed and said: you need a doctor immediately.
The paramedic who came in looked at me the same way and immediately called an ambulance. One glance in the mirror was enough for me to understand why. Look at my photo after someone sprayed my face with brilliant green (a common antiseptic dye in Russia):
Now imagine that I was swollen five times worse. My eyes were reduced to slits, my eyelids were the size of ping-pong balls, and so on.
The ambulance doctors immediately said I had to be taken to the hospital. Back at the detention center, they gave me intramuscular injections of Suprastin and prednisolone. Then more prednisolone intravenously. At the hospital they put me on another IV with it.
Those massive doses brought the swelling down, and by lunchtime I looked merely like someone who had been on a nonstop drinking binge for two months.
Now I just look like someone who’s been drinking for a week. On the one hand, the hospital started treating me, and doctors came one after another; on the other hand, some strange nonsense began. Police at the door to my room. My own doctors weren’t allowed in. My lawyer wasn’t allowed in. My doctors and my lawyer were not told the diagnosis, supposedly because of medical confidentiality, yet a detailed comment to Interfax was released giving a diagnosis that had not been given to me.
In other words, they were acting as if something needed to be hidden, just in case. Why? I don’t understand. So what did the doctors ultimately say? Medical history does record cases in which a person suddenly develops an allergy. You live year after year, wash your hands with the same soap, and then suddenly—bang!—you swell up from it overnight.
So in my case, the diagnosis was contact dermatitis. I touched something—most likely soap or some other toiletry—and a sudden acute allergic reaction began.
As you can imagine, there isn’t much in the way of toiletries in a cell. So that means soap. And here I am writing this from the cell, once again washing my hands with that same soap just fine. I’m not getting any worse.
What do I think about all this? Or to put it more directly: do I think I may have been poisoned?
I think there’s a simple fork in the road here: did anyone enter my cell besides the staff of the detention center?
I rule out the possibility that the local cops poisoned me—they were more shocked by how I looked and by what was happening than I was.
There are cameras everywhere here, and we have formally requested the footage. We need the moments when everyone was taken out for exercise or phone calls. If some people entered the cell during those times, then the poisoning theory becomes very compelling. If not, then the theory of a unique medical case gains strength. Someday they’ll call it “Navalny’s one-time acute allergic reaction.”
And then another obvious question arises. Are they complete idiots, to poison you in a place where suspicion points only at them?
It’s a good question, and it belongs alongside the following ones:
are they really so stupid as to poison Kara-Murza?
are they really so stupid as to poison Kara-Murza a second time?
are they really so stupid as to poison Verzilov?
- are they really so stupid that the Skripal poisoning operation was planned and carried out by such fools that the whole world would laugh at them?
- are they really so stupid that senior officials in Moscow’s FSB directorate order friendly cops to plant drugs on a well-known journalist?
- are they really so stupid as to bar all independent candidates from the elections, including the most moderate ones?
- are they really so stupid that they would ban a protest rally and detain 1,400 people there?
For now, I can say one thing with confidence: Russia is run by some genuinely pretty stupid, foolish guys.
It may seem to you that their actions must contain some hidden meaning or rational core. But in reality, they’re just stupid, malicious, and obsessed with money.