Kerry Kennedy, a human rights activist and the daughter of Democratic politician Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968, exchanged letters with Alexei Navalny. He told her that he had cried “two or three times” while reading a book about her father recommended by a friend, according to a copy of a letter, handwritten in English, that Kennedy posted on Instagram after Navalny died. Navalny thanked Kennedy for sending him a poster with a quote from her father’s speech about how a “ripple of hope,” multiplied a million times, “can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” “I hope one day I’ll be able to hang it on the wall of my office,” Navalny wrote.

The friend who recommended the Kennedy book was Evgeny Feldman, now in exile in Latvia, said he sent at least 37 letters to Navalny since his 2021 arrest and received replies to almost all of them. In his letters to Feldman, Navalny also touched on the Israel-Hamas War and described his newfound appreciation for actor Matthew Perry before warning of another Trump presidency. Three days after Navalny sent that letter, he disappeared. During a frantic, 20-day search, Navalny’s exiled allies said they sent more than 600 requests to prisons and other government agencies. On Dec. 25, Navalny’s spokesperson declared he had been found in a remote Arctic prison known as Polar Wolf.

In prison he wrote to and from Ilia Krasilshchik, Mikhail Fishman, Kerry Kennedy, Sergei Parkhomenko, Evgeny Feldman and Yulia Navalnaya. He also read a 1,012-page, three-volume set by Soviet dissident Anatoly Marchenko, reread “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "Successor" by Mikhail Fishman, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov.

In his letter to Fishman he criticized his books favorability to Boris Yeltsin, former president of Russia. Navalny was outraged by Fishman's claim Yeltsin hated the KGB. “Prison, investigation and trial are the same now as in the books” of Soviet dissidents, Navalny wrote, insisting that Putin’s predecessor had failed to change the Soviet system. “This is what I cannot forgive Yeltsin for.”

https://archive.is/NQZh2

>>20444685

Evgeny Feldman (Евгений Фельдман) is a Russian photojournalist and photo editor based in Riga, Latvia. He used to freelance for different independent outlets in Russia as well as major media from abroad and work on personal projects. Now Feldman works at Meduza, a major Russian independent outlet, as a photographer and photo editor.

Born on February 24th, 1991, Feldman graduated from psychology department of Moscow State University. In 2010 he started his job as a photographer at Novaya Gazeta newspaper and went on to work there until 2016. In 2014-2016 he was also a permanent photography contributor to Mashable.

Feldman covered protests in Moscow and country's regions, trials of the opposition leaders and activists, aftermaths of a flood in a city of Krymsk and of Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack in Paris as well as Pulse gay club shooting in Orlando and 2020 revolution attempt in Belarus. He extensively covered Alexey Navalny’s campaigns and trials.

In 2014 he released a photo book Apart on Ukrainian revolution & war that established a record in the history of Russian crowdfunding. All 1,500 copies were sold out in a few months. In 2015 renewed edition of Apart was published in Kiev, Ukraine. In 2015 he published two long-term photo projects, Moscow Military Glamour and The Village That Banned Wikipedia.

In 2017, he published his second album, Super Tuesday and The Other Days Of The Week that was photographed throughout the previous year in the US and intertwines America's daily life and the 2016 presidential elections. He also published an album Spartak, the Champions that tells a story of Moscow football team winning its first league title in 16 years.

Throughout 2017 and 2018 he covered Alexey Navalny's insurgent presidential campaign challenging Vladimir Putin. It was being published at navalny.feldman.photo and has been seen by more than 1,5 million viewers.

The project turned out to be featured in the first issue of Feldman's own 'glossy self-published' magazine SVOY. Each issue is crowdfunded with the first receiving more that $12.000 and the third getting over $13,000. Second issue, which Feldman edited, featured a story by Sergey Ponomarev, a World Press Photo and Pulitzer Prize winner. Fourth issue was also edited by Evgeny and was dedicated to Igor Mukhin’s The Nineties project. Seventh issue featured Evgeny’s own global project on Russians leaving the country for good.

In 2021, Feldman started to work full-time at Meduza.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220326130108/https://www.feldmanphotography.com/bio

>>20444720

Evgeny Feldman Goes to a Trump Rally — And Feels at Home

https://web.archive.org/web/20160203090934/https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/02/02/a-russian-reporter-goes-to-a-trump-rally-and-feels-at-home/