Russia's Navalny says he has become a 'seamstress' in prison

[December 07, 2021]  MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny said on Tuesday he had joined a sewing workshop in prison and become a "seamstress", joking that the experience had changed his attitude towards feminists.

Navalny, 45, said on Instagram that the authorities in his prison camp required inmates to work and gave them a choice between various roles including cooking, baking and sewing.

He said he had chosen to become what the prison management called a seamstress ("shveya" in Russian), even though the word is grammatically feminine and normally only used for women.
 

In his post, he joked that the word ought to have a masculine form in Russian. The experience had made him more sympathetic towards people he had previously mocked for demanding new feminine nouns such as "blogerka" for a female blogger.

"Society, I am formally requesting a masculine form of the 'seamstress' profession," he said.

Navalny, President Vladimir Putin's most prominent domestic critic, began a two-and-a-half sentence at a prison camp east of Moscow in March for parole violations related to charges he says were trumped up to thwart his political ambitions.

Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny attends a court hearing in Moscow, Russia February 20, 2021. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov

His latest Instagram post appeared on the day when Putin is due to hold a video call with U.S. President Joe Biden. The United States imposed sanctions on Russia in March over the poisoning of Navalny with a nerve agent last year, which Moscow denied carrying out.

(Writing by Mark Trevelyan, editing by Ed Osmond)

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