The death of Russia’s leading opposition activist Alexei Navalny, 47, in an Arctic penal colony brought to a tragic close an idealistic life of non-violent struggle against an entrenched tradition of authoritarianism going back centuries. It was not a coincidence that the harsh Siberian prison where Navalny perished while serving a thirty-and-half-years long sentence had been constructed on the site of Gulag number 501, the notorious labour camp that housed political prisoners during the Communist dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. To rewind further back in time, Navalny met the same fate as thousands of dissidents and rebels who had staged uprisings against the Czarist empire and were subjected to the Katorga punishment system in Siberia since the 17th century