[TIME] On a cold morning in November, the family of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, made the trip out to visit him at Penal Colony No. 2. The drive from Moscow took about two hours, though parts of it felt like ​traveling back in time. Coming off the highway from Russia’s high-tech capital, the roads became rutted. Apartment blocks gave way to wooden huts, and old ladies appeared near the roadside in heavy coats, selling vegetables from their gardens.At the prison gates, Navalny’s wife and parents carried a few bags of groceries into a waiting room, where an ancient telephone allowed them to announce their visit to the guards. Before long, the inmate was led out to meet them. He looked skinny, his head shorn, a broad smile framed by a prison-issue hat. Ten months had passed since Navalny’s incarceration, and more than a year since he was nearly poisoned to death with a chemical weapon. Its effects on his nervous system no longer showed; his hands had stopped trembling. "He looked good," his wife Yulia Navalnaya later told me. "Unchanged."
It had been Navalny’s decision to be there. Not in this specific prison, with its silent guards and its windows papered over to create the feeling, Navalny says, of living inside a shoebox. But he did make a choice to return to Russia, fully aware of what the state would likely do to him. From his temporary exile, he decided almost exactly a year ago to submit to the custody of the regime that stood accused of trying to murder him. The poison had failed to kill Navalny. It hadn’t even really changed him.