Alexey Navalny, the Russian opposition politician, has been in prison for almost two months and on hunger strike for two weeks. Regular updates from his lawyers chronicle his constant physical decline. After visiting Navalny in prison on Monday, lawyer Olga Mikhailova mentionned that he had lost fifteen kilograms (thirty-three pounds). He loses feeling in his hands; he has already lost partial use of his legs. He is coughing and has a fever. Navalny continues to refuse food and other nutrients until he requests to be seen by a medical specialist of his choice – a right guaranteed by Russian law – is granted. In response, the prison administration threatens to start force-feeding him.

On January 17, Navalny was stopped at Moscow Sheremetyevo Airport. He was returning from Germany, where he had spent five months recovering from poisoning with the nerve agent Novichok. He knew he was going to be arrested, as Russian authorities had broadcast their intentions through state media, apparently in the hope of persuading him to stay out of the country. Navalny also knew what conditions he was likely to experience behind bars. Since the Kremlin cracked down in response to the 2011-12 protests against rigged elections, Russian activists have become familiar with the country’s prison system. In 2014, members of the protest art group Pussy Riot – the first of many activists to be jailed for demonstrating peacefully –Mark their release from prison by launching an online media that documented human rights violations in Russian prisons. (The newspaper, Mediazone, is still active, but it has broadened its scope in recent years.) One of the pillars of the protest movement that began in 2011 is a group called Russia behind bars, who helped dozens of non-political prisoners. Its leader, Olga Romanova (who lives in exile in Berlin), has written extensively on the functioning of the prison system.

Navalny’s anti-corruption work also prepared him for imprisonment. In a recent letter posted on his Instagram account he wrote: “The meat was stolen from our rations before they even left Moscow. Butter and vegetables were stolen from Vladimir [the regional center]. Finally, on site, in Pokrov, the staff brought home the last crumbs. All that was left for the inmates was glue-like porridge and frozen potatoes. That’s what Navalny does: he tracks the money – or, in this case, the contents of the prison rations.

He knows the system better than anyone; he knows that human life has no value in it, and he never imagined that the system would make an exception for him. A few weeks after his arrest, he sent a Note to her friend and mentor, journalist Yevgenia Albats. He was reading :

Zhenya, everything is fine The story goes. Russia is going through it and we are moving forward. We will (probably) get there. I’m fine and have no regrets. And you shouldn’t worry either. Everything will be alright. And, even if we don’t, we will have the consolation of having lived honestly. Cuddles!

Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, is also under no illusions. Last week, she sent a letter to the head of the penal colony where Navalny is serving his sentence. The letter, which Navalnaya posted on his Instagram account, concluded with a reminder: “If the worst happens to Alexey, then you will have his death on your conscience, and Putin will have it on his conscience, but your Putin will eat you alive and put the blame on you too.” “It’s scary to see Navalnaya use the word ‘dead’ when she writes about her husband, but that note didn’t require a leap of the imagination. She had already spent weeks sitting by Navalny’s bed, ne not knowing if he would speak again or walk again.

In the days of the USSR, the pro-democracy dissident movement lived by the rule that, given the choice between prison and exile abroad, one had to choose exile. At the start of the Putin era, when some former dissidents were still around, they passed this wisdom on to members of the new opposition. The late dissident Elena Bonner, for example, persuaded the late oligarch Boris Berezovski to leave the country rather than risk arrest. The idea was that you could do more good living abroad than death at home. This argument was based on the assumption that the Soviet totalitarian state would last forever, or at least a very long time, and that the battle against it would be eternal.

Putin, who became prime minister in August 1999 and president in early 2000, held power longer than any Soviet leader except Stalin. Yet Navalny, who was fifteen when the Soviet Union collapsed, understands that Putinism will not last forever. During her arrest hearing in January, Navalny told the judge that she would likely outlive Putin and go to jail for sanctioning Navalny’s arrest (the judge later reprimanded him). Navalny’s memo to Albats makes it clear that he is uncertain whether he will live to see a post-Putin Russia. But he thinks that Russia after Putin will be – or at least maybe – a fundamentally different place. Unlike his dissenting ancestors, who believed they were fighting for principle and personal integrity but could never defeat the system, Navalny believes his actions can help shape a future Russia. He also believes that by acting with courage and determination, he can inspire others to put their fears aside. And then, as he almost invariably says in public statements and private notes, “everything will be fine.”

At a hearing in February, during his closing statement, Navalny spoke about his vision of this future Russia:

I want Russia to be as rich as it has the potential to be. I want this wealth to be distributed more equitably. I want us to have normal health care. I want to see men live long enough to retire; half of them these days can’t. I want us to have a normal education system, and I want people to be able to receive an education. I want people to earn as much money as they would for comparable work in a European country.

For a decade, the slogan of the anti-Putin movement has been “Russia will be free”. Now, however, Navalny has suggested rethinking it.

We must fight not only against the lack of freedom in Russia, but against our total lack of happiness. We have everything, but we are a miserable country. . . . So we should change our slogan. Russian should be not only free but also happy. Russia will be happy. That’s all.

Last week, police raided the office of the Navalny organization in St. Petersburg and confiscated a number of large stickers bearing the phrase “Russia will be happy”. According to Leonid Volkov, who heads Navalny’s political organization, police removed the stickers to conduct an expert analysis to determine whether the slogan constitutes extremist speech, which is illegal in Russia.

Yulia Navalnaya visited her husband in prison on Tuesday. In an Instagram post, she wrote that he was weak and thinner than he had been after weeks in a coma. “He said to say hello to everyone,” she wrote. “He didn’t have the strength to add that everything will be fine. So I add that. He is the best. Everything will certainly be fine. “