Opposition leader says prisoners forced to listen to ‘I am Russian’ by Shaman as part of 5am regime
Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has complained of being poisoned, assaulted and deprived of proper medical care, but this week he disclosed he faced a new challenge: being forced to listen to a pro-Putin pop singer at 5am every morning.
Navalny, 47, a former lawyer who rose to prominence more than a decade ago by lampooning president Vladimir Putin’s elite and voicing allegations of vast corruption, is now in a jail about 60 km (40 miles) north of the Arctic Circle.
Sentenced to stay in prison until he is 74 on charges he says were trumped up to keep him out of politics, Navalny said on Monday his morning regime now consists of listening to the Russian national anthem before being played “I am Russian,” a patriotic song performed by a pro-Putin singer called “Shaman“.
Shaman, whose real name is Yaroslav Dronov, has ridden a wave of war-fuelled patriotism to become a staple on state TV and is one of the celebrities officially putting Putin forward to run again for the presidency in March.
