Bravery behind bars: Alexei Navalny imprisoned

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist in London. I'm John Fassman and in the very.

Same studio, I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

According to the UN, the world's 8 billionth person will be born on November 15. In that person's lifetime, the world's population will hit 2, 10 billion. But that rise will not be evenly distributed. Some regions will grow quickly, others will decline. Each trend brings its own set of challenges.

And you might have noticed more white wine on store shelves appearing in clear glass. It's supposed to be more enticing. We've got the science on this one and it's a bad idea.

But first, Russia has ruthlessly crushed internal dissent since it invaded Ukraine four months ago. The hammer has fallen especially hard on Alexei Navalny, Russia's most prominent opposition leader, who chose to return to Moscow last year. He had been recovering in Germany after being poisoned with Novichok, a family of chemical agents developed in Soviet labs and used against at least one other person who fell afoul of the Kremlin. He was arrested as soon as he landed and since then has had little contact with the outside world. Occasionally he has appeared in court via a video link. Most recently last month. Locked behind a steel cage, he looked haggard. For him, a bad situation has got worse.

So Alexei Navalny has been transferred to a maximum security prison now not far from Moscow, from another penal colony, which in itself was pretty harsh. But this is completely different.

Arkady Ostrovsky is the Economist Russia in Eastern Europe editor.

Not only he's in the maximum security prison, which amongst Russian vast prison population is better known as a torture chamber. Not only that, they've set up a prison within a prison. So he has a 6 meter fence surrounding him and he has a sewing machine which is what he's supposed to be doing pretty much in his barrack next to him, and he's forced to sit there for seven hours on a very, very uncomfortable position. And Navalny is suffering from bad back, so he is in a lot of pain. And even when he is not working, he's supposed to be sitting on a bench watching Russian television, or as he described it, listening to songs like Glory.

To the FSB and Arkady. What do we know about how he's holding up under these conditions?

You're describing the messages that he is getting out. He described his condition as almost unbearable. And Navalny is somebody who never complains. And for him to say that something is almost unbearable, it really is beyond what most people would consider unbearable. So it's prompted members of his team, including his chief of staff, Leonid Volkov, who's based in Vilnius, to write a post saying, this is extremely serious and very worrying and this is time to ring alarm bells. So that's what's happening.

So extremely serious, very worrying. Time to ring alarm bells. That suggests to me that his life may be at risk. Is that the case, John?

Navalny's life has been at risk for a very long time. As you remember, he survived the poisoning attack with Novichok. They did try to kill him. They arrested him as soon as he returned to Russia, having convalesced in Germany, and he is now imprisoned by the people who tried to poison him. So the prison authorities are subjecting him to extreme suffering. This is the fsb, the Russian secret police, trying again to show that they are completely in charge, that they have all the power over him. And I think they are extremely furious at his spirit, that he is refusing to buckle, that he is refusing to shut up, that he is still getting messages out. And the purpose of this latest transfer is to limit access to his lawyers. So they tell him to come at the times when either he is working or there is meal time. So he has to choose, choose between meals and seeing his lawyers. He has now been also refused telephone calls to his mother and to his wife. It's just petty but awful vengefulness.

It does sound miserable. When we've spoken before, Arkady, you've said that Russia does not want Alexei Navalny to die for fear that he might become a martyr and so strengthen opposition. Has that calculus changed?

Well, a lot of things have changed. Obviously, on the 24th of February. Navalny's movement at that point moved from just being political opposition into an anti war movement. I'm not sure what the calculus in the Kremlin is. We are in A different situation. We're at war. And I think what they're preparing, John, is a sort of a big political trial come the autumn. Not necessarily a show trial, but a big political sort of a purge campaign to show that this is war on two fronts. This is not just a war in Ukraine. This is also a war against the fifth column national traitors. So I think they need him in a way. They probably do need him to be alive, at least for that.

Clearly, Alexei Navalny is suffering far beyond what most other prisoners in Russia are. But is this sort of treatment, by which I mean imprisonment for political reasons, is that unique to him or what's happening with other opposition leaders?

First of all, John, I don't think that what Navalny is suffering is actually the worst. You know, they're inflicting a lot of pain on him and psychological pressure and psychological torture. But he is the most famous prisoner, and the world attention is still focused on him. So there is a limit to what they can do. But in terms of the conditions in Russian prisons, in terms of torture, of the sexual abuse, of killings in Russian jails, it's not that far off the Soviet gulag system. In fact, the authority which is in charge of Russian prisons is a successor to that authority that ran gulag. So there are people who are physically tortured, something they would not actually probably dare to do with Navalny because it would attract so much attention. And these people like to act in darkness and in secrecy, as we know from the way they try to poison him. They don't like light. They don't like publicity.

So are we seeing a lot of political prisoners being taken?

In terms of other political prisoners? The Kremlin's policy since the beginning of the war has been to squeeze people out. They would rather people just left. In fact, before Navalny came back, the Kremlin was messaging all it could. Don't come back. Stay where you are. Stay abroad. We don't want you back. They know that when people leave the country, they get marginalized, and whatever they say their message is gets weaker, the signal getting weaker and weaker. And Navalny's strength as a politician is that he is inside Russia, is that he is in prison. This is not what the Kremlin wanted. It's now, just a few days ago, Detained arrested another opposition politician called Ilya Yashin. They put him in jail for 15 days on a completely ridiculous charge that he tried to pick up fight with police, which was plainly untrue. They've arrested another man called Vladimir Karamurza, who they also tried to poison. And as Yashin said in court, this is another clear message, get out of the country. It's a sort of strong invitation to immigrate from Russia.

And let me ask one last question about the implications of these sorts of actions. The last time we spoke was in the early days of the invasion, and there were still then pockets of very brave protesters coming out against the war. Is that still happening, or have these sorts of clampdowns been effective in keeping people quiet?

This is a very good question, John. I mean, you can't get out to protest in Russia on the street now. The forces are completely uneven. You know, you're faced with people with arms, with truncheons, with arms. You'd get arrested, you'd get beaten up, you'd get imprisoned. But people are continuing to protest in their own way. There are flash mobs, there are some sort of artistic action, artists, poets, and a lot of young, brave people continuing to put out Ukrainian flags, come out in the streets. These are single actions. These are, of course, not mass protest movements. Things are moving in a very much in the wrong direction, in the dark direction. And my sense is we're not even halfway there yet.

That is grim. Arkady, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you, John.

After news broke that he had fathered twins, Elon Musk, who has nine children, tweeted last week that a collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far. New figures published by the United nations should give Mr. Musk some reassurance.

Well, the UN came out with its latest global population projections, and what they're saying is that, well, first of all that the world's population is going to hit 8 billion on November 15 this year, and then it's going to keep on growing up until about 10.4 billion people by the mid-2880s, and it'll sort of stay roughly that level until the end of the century.

Brooke Unger is an international correspondent for the Economist.

But, you know, even though the global population is growing at the same time, you're seeing a very dramatic decline in the number of babies that each woman has.

So the world's population is hitting 8 billion this year and 10 billion in 60 years. My instinct is that the falling fertility rate isn't something to be worried about. Is that right?

Well, yes and no. I mean, the birth rate has been falling pretty dramatically for decades. In 1950, the average woman had five children. By last year, that was down to just 2.3. So less than half that rate of the 1950s. And that rate is expected to reach 2.1 by 2050. And that's basically the rate at which the number of births just offsets the number of deaths. But it's very, very different depending on where in the world you are. I mean, there are some countries where the population is shrinking or on the verge of shrinking. China is expected perhaps to begin shrinking as soon as the next year or two. But then there are other countries with a pop is going to continue growing for years and years to come, even while the fertility rate is declining. And for those countries, that decline in fertility rate is pretty much unambiguously a good thing.

And what about overall, what do those falling fertility rates in a broad sense mean for the world's demography?

Well, what they mean is, you know, first of all, ultimately the global population is not going to continue rising forever. They also mean that the world is going to grow at very different rates depending on where you are. I mean, Africa is going to grow at a much faster rate rate than Europe, which in fact is not going to grow at all. And third of all, it's going to mean that the world is gradually going to get older. That plus an increase in life expectancy is going to mean that populations will gradually get older. And overall, the number of people age 65 and older is going to rise from about 10% of the total population to about 16% in 2050. But you're going to have some countries where that proportion is as high as 25, 26, 27%.

And Brooke, you gave us a hint of this when you mentioned that Africa will grow quite quickly and Europe will not grow at all. But I wonder if you could break down a bit by region what those global trends mean and will look like.

Well, the big drivers of population growth over the coming decades are going to continue to be South Asia, so we're talking about India and the countries around it. And then gradually, Africa will play more and more of an important role because even though women are having fewer children in Africa, Africa has a very young population. So that means you have a lot more women coming over the horizon who are going to be having babies. So their population is going to continue to increase for some time. And Africa's share of the world population is going to increase very dramatically. I mean, Africans make up about a seventh of the world's population now. By 2050, it's going to be about a fifth, and by 2100, it's going to be about a quarter. So there's going to be a huge kind of demographic surge from Africa, whereas, you know, East Asia, China, Europe are going to make up much smaller proportions of the world's population.

And so what then are the divergent challenges facing somewhere like Africa with steady population growth and somewhere like Europe facing more or less the opposite?

Well, I mean, in Europe, the challenges come with, you know, what happens with an aging population. And, you know, those countries have a particular set of problems that they do have to worry about. They worry about the number of workers to support each pensioner. They worry about what's going to happen with their health budgets and spending on old age care. They worry about economic growth in general. So that poses one set of challenges. If you are in Africa, you face very different challenges. Very large increase in the number of young people, number of working age people, which can be a good thing. You can get from that a demographic dividend. But you need your economies to be strong enough to create jobs for these people. You need your schools to be good enough to create good jobs for these people. And there's evidence that, you know, in some countries that's not happening. I mean, for example, in Angola, where the population has been growing at a rate of something like 3% a year since the 1970s, poverty has increased quite dramatically. You know, it's doubled over 10 years. And another problem is that, you know, if you have two and a half billion more people on the planet by 2080, that means that there are going to be two and a half billion more people emitting greenhouse gases. And all things being equal, that means that it'll make it harder to fight the effects of climate change.

All right, Brooke, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thanks very much, John.

There are lots of factors to consider when choosing a bottle of wine. The grape, the year, the country of origin. But now add to that list the color of the glass it's in.

You may have seen on supermarket shelves the white wines, roses, sparkling wines, all in clear glass bottles.

Abby Bertix writes about science for the Economist.

Wines traditionally were sold in green or amber glass bottles, like reds still are. But the whites and the rose are increasingly being shown in clear glass. It helps to show off their dazzling colors and really draws in the consumer. But while that might be really enticing to the eye, it might give the nose some reason to despair.

Why isn't it what's inside the bottle that matters?

When wine is exposed to light, it can change the taste and the smell of the wine. It can also lead to a fault called light strike, or gou de lumiere in French. So what happens is the Light photons trigger a reaction that can make your wine smell of what has been unfortunately described as boiled cabbage, wet dog, or even Marmite.

If that's true, then why was the industry switching to clear glass? Was this not a known problem?

So light strike is a fault that is well attested, but not as well known as corking or oxidation or some other wine issues. And what has not been known is the mechanism of light strike. So a team of scientists from northern Italy decided to conduct two experiments to help them figure out what exactly light is doing to ruin the wine. So in the first experiment, they had 20 different types of four white wines. And they put a third of them in clear glass bottles, a third of them in green bottles, and then a third of them in clear glass bottles, but in a dark cardboard box so no light could get to it. They put all these bottles on supermarket, like shelves for 60 days, and then they measured the smell of each of these wines. They used a gas chromatography method. So it wasn't just the subjective smellings of these wine scientists. And then what they did is they compared the different smell prints of each of the wines, and they were very clearly able to distinguish the wines in the clear bottles from the wines in the green glass bottles, from the wines in the dark cardboard boxes.

And what was the second experiment then?

So for the second experiment, they looked in particular at Pinot Gris and Chardonnay, because those two showed the biggest difference between the green glass and the clear glass. And what they did was the same exact thing. But instead of just checking the small print after 60 days, they checked it periodically throughout a 50 day period. So they checked it after a day, two days, seven days, two weeks, et cetera. And what they found is that they were able to hone in on a few different chemicals that were damaged or that increased due to the light.

But both of these experiments just done with white wines, is it not a concern?

With others, it is less of a concern. For example, red wines are protected by their tannins and anthocyanins, which are the color pigment compounds. Those act as kind of a sunscreen protecting the wines. Also, dessert wines are very sweet and have a heavy aromatic profile. So they're less affected by these smaller reactions that are going on in light strike. The really delicate, non aromatic wines are the ones that you have to worry about. In fact, for those wines, it takes just a week on supermarket shelves in clear glass bottles to ruin the aromatic bouquet of the wine.

And you say ruin, that is to say that this would be noticed even by a supermarket wine buyer such as myself, and not just wine experts.

Computers could tell the difference between clear bottled wine and green glass bottled wine after two weeks, human tasters and smellers after three. And a novice could definitely tell the difference between light stricken wine and normal wine. What this experiment is showing is that even if light strike doesn't occur, the quality of the wine is deteriorating with more exposure to light. With light strike and with light in general, nice smelling compounds decrease and bad smelling ones increase. There's this compound that smells of baked apple, quince or flowers and that was shown to decrease by up to 65% in just one week in clear glass bottles. In green bottles, by contrast, it took 50 days for it to decrease by only 40%. There's a huge difference there. The green bottle is really protecting the wine from the light. And a bad smelling compound that smells of fish or rancid oil was able to double in clear glass bottles over 50 days and it tripled in one type of the Pinot Gris. So it's clear that the clear glass is letting in light and allowing it to do bad things to the smell of the wine.

Abby, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

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