Elvira Dmitriyeva, 38, packed her bags for prison days before she was due to lead an anti-Putin rally.
Having already been behind bars twice she knew what she needed: slabs of chocolate, warm socks and night clothes to hide from the probing gaze of a surveillance camera in the cell.
If she was taken before a judge, her husband would bring the bag to court, in case she was sent to a detention centre again. “It could easily happen,” she said last week. “That’s the way they work.”
Ms Dmitreyeva is a target because she is the co-ordinator of Alexei Navalny’s headquarters in the city of Kazan, about 450 miles east of Moscow. Last year she was jailed for two days, and then again for eight days, for allegedly urging people online to attend an unauthorised protest. She has been fined twice and sentenced to community service. Police filmed her clearing nettles from city verges and passed the footage to government-friendly websites.
On one occasion masked men pulled over the car she was driving after a rally and bundled her off to a police station. “Corrupt bureaucrats are plundering the country, wars are launched, we have fallen out with Ukraine — our closest brother nation — and Putin’s friends get richer and richer,” she said. “And they call us extremists!”