In Putin's Gulag
Оригинал взят у basir71 в In Putin's Gulag
600.000 Russians work like slaves in prison camps - former oligarch Michael Khodorkovsky and “Pussy Riot” activist Nadeshda Tolokonnikova among them. profil collected witness accounts of prisoners to document the conditions in penal colonies which are reminiscent of Stalin.
Ten years ago, on October 25th 2003, special commandos stormed the private jet of Russia’s then-richest man Mikhail Khodorkovsky and arrested him at gunpoint. A few months ago, the former oligarch celebrated his 50th birthday in his cell in prison colony Number 7 in Karelia on the Finnish border. One of Russia’s most capable managers has been turned into a slave labourer who produces plastic binders.
The conditions in Russia’s prisons are devastating - the West’s attention was only recently drawn to it, when Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, a member of the feminist punk group “Pussy Riot”, published an open letter about her daily life in prison on the popular Russian news website “Lenta.ru”.
“They feed us rotten bread”, the 23-year-old political activist wrote. She was sentenced to two years in the prison camp in August 2012 for singing an anti-Putin punk prayer in Moscow’s main cathedral.
Around 700,000 people sit in Putin’s prisons. Almost 600,000 of them in penal colonies, some of which date from Stalin’s times. The paranoid Soviet dictator had built a network of prison camps, where inmates were supposed to contribute to building the Soviet Union with their labour. Dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn made these camps notorious across the world through his book “The Gulag Archipelago” in 1973. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature for it. It is dedicated to “all who did not have enough life to tell their story”.
The distance from Stalin’s gulag to Putin’s prison camps is shorter than one might think. The current president is not the first Russian leader who cracks down hard on peaceful resistance. The country has a long tradition of the gulag. Those who fought with their minds against the regime were considered particularly dangerous criminals. The Tsars sent these intellectuals to Siberia. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, today one of Russia’s most admired authors, spent four years there, his wrists and ankles in chains.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the prisons did not stay empty. Putin filled them quickly again - one reason being that he tried to crack down on economic crime, much of which was the result of capitalist excesses in the Nineties. Real criminals but also victims of corrupt competitors spent years behind bars. Finally in July 2013 the Russian Duma (parliament) passed an amnesty law. Economic criminals will be released if they repay the damage caused and apologise. On a small scale the regime shows interest in reforms. But there is not enough energy to tackle the corrupt and huge bureaucracy and reform the entire prison system.
Not only the Gulag but also the resistance against it has a long tradition in Russia. Former prisoners and human rights campaigners have created groups all over Russia to fight against injustice in prison. Not completely without success. Alexei Sokolov for example founded “Defender of the Urals” to protest against the deplorable conditions behind the barbed wire.
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova also plans to create a NGO for prisoner rights called “Mordovlag” - an abbreviation of “Mordovia Camps” in Russian. Many have warned her not to provoke her guards by rebelling against them. She and her colleague Maria Alyokhina are supposed to be released on March 2nd. But Tolokonnikova, the mother of a small daughter, went on hunger strike for nine days at the end of September to draw attention to the injustice in her camp. At the end President Putin sent a delegation from his human rights commission to camp 14 in Mordovia to check her allegations. The government also announced that inmates would receive a slightly higher salary.
These are small victories. It is not easy to change the unwritten laws. Most prisoners refused to speak to Putin’s human rights delegation. Some motioned silently with their eyes towards the walls: no conversation stays secret in prison and one critical word can provoke the fury of the guards.
“Profil” researched the conditions in penal camps in Siberia, Karelia and the Urals and put together these witness accounts from the prisoners of Putin’s gulag:
Witness 1:
“Licence to kill”
Alexei Sokolov, 40, is a founder of the NGO “Legal Basis”. He also sits on the “Public Monitoring Committee” in Sverdlovsk and fights there for the rights of prisoners. After he refused to stop his work, he was arrested and brought to prison on fabricated charges. After being released, he created “Defenders of the Urals”:
The first time I was arrested was in 1993 for stealing sports uniforms. The accusation was false, I was not stealing clothes, I produced them. They beat me for ten days to make me sign a confession. I refused. The judge did not mind, he still sentenced me to seven years penal colony in Khabarovsk. There I quickly realized that the guards could do what they wanted with us. The prisoners could be beaten, tortured, starved, even killed - no one had to fear the consequences. I started to help prisoners to fight for their rights. I went to the higher level, to the superiors. The only result was that I was put in solitary confinement.
In 2000 I was released. I got a job, started a family and continued to fight for the rights of prisoners. I became a member of the “Public Monitoring Committee”, which was based on a law from 2008, which allows civil rights activists to visit prisons. After every visit, I wrote a report about the appalling conditions. The officials from GUFSIN, the prison authority, were not amused. They “invited” me to a conversation. They threatened to arrest me if I did not cooperate. I refused. So they arrested me.
The accusations were absurd: prisoners suddenly remembered, that I had committed crimes with them eight years earlier. Russian and international human rights organisations protested against my trial. My guards said they could not finish me off because of the high profile of my case, but they would “break me mentally”: They put me away for three years in a closed institution for alcoholics and drug addicts in Krasnoyarsk.
The work there was hard. We had two greenhouses for cucumbers and tomatoes, as well as pigs and cattle. Three of us got 500 roubles per month, the others worked for free. There were no export lists. In our dining room we never saw vegetables.
I became sick and was diagnosed with tubercolosis. They released me. Nothing will change as long as the prisoners know that it makes no sense to complain to the authorities, because the top officials conspire with the guards. Prisoners will be abused like slaves. We need to fight for change.
Witness 2:
“Camp chiefs live off the drug trade or extortion”
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, 50, was arrested in 2003 and got eight years penal camp for embezzlement at his first trial. At a second trial in 2010 he was convicted of stealing his own oil and sentenced to a six further years. In 2012, his sentence was shortened by two years, so theoretically he could be released in August 2014. But there are rumours of a third trial being prepared with an accusation of murder, which would keep him in prison. For the moment, he is in Penal Colony Number 7 in Karelia on the Finnish border.
“Lawlessness in the Russian regions can be separated into “red” and “black” prisons. The leadership of “black” colonies usually lived off drug dealing. The “red” camp chiefs profited simply from extortion. In both, the prison administration and the gangsters followed their own self-interest.
Lately, the “red” and “black” penal colonies are not so easy to distinguish. The “black” colonies were run by criminals, the “red” by the prison administration. Nowadays they have mixed. There is less physical violence, but more paper war and selective implementation of regulations.
(Excerpt from the latest episode of Khodorkovsky’s series “Prison people” in the Moscow opposition magazine “The New Times”)
http://www.tessaszy.com/en/1061/in-putins-gulag-2
600.000 Russians work like slaves in prison camps - former oligarch Michael Khodorkovsky and “Pussy Riot” activist Nadeshda Tolokonnikova among them. profil collected witness accounts of prisoners to document the conditions in penal colonies which are reminiscent of Stalin.
Ten years ago, on October 25th 2003, special commandos stormed the private jet of Russia’s then-richest man Mikhail Khodorkovsky and arrested him at gunpoint. A few months ago, the former oligarch celebrated his 50th birthday in his cell in prison colony Number 7 in Karelia on the Finnish border. One of Russia’s most capable managers has been turned into a slave labourer who produces plastic binders.
The conditions in Russia’s prisons are devastating - the West’s attention was only recently drawn to it, when Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, a member of the feminist punk group “Pussy Riot”, published an open letter about her daily life in prison on the popular Russian news website “Lenta.ru”.
“They feed us rotten bread”, the 23-year-old political activist wrote. She was sentenced to two years in the prison camp in August 2012 for singing an anti-Putin punk prayer in Moscow’s main cathedral.
Around 700,000 people sit in Putin’s prisons. Almost 600,000 of them in penal colonies, some of which date from Stalin’s times. The paranoid Soviet dictator had built a network of prison camps, where inmates were supposed to contribute to building the Soviet Union with their labour. Dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn made these camps notorious across the world through his book “The Gulag Archipelago” in 1973. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature for it. It is dedicated to “all who did not have enough life to tell their story”.
The distance from Stalin’s gulag to Putin’s prison camps is shorter than one might think. The current president is not the first Russian leader who cracks down hard on peaceful resistance. The country has a long tradition of the gulag. Those who fought with their minds against the regime were considered particularly dangerous criminals. The Tsars sent these intellectuals to Siberia. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, today one of Russia’s most admired authors, spent four years there, his wrists and ankles in chains.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the prisons did not stay empty. Putin filled them quickly again - one reason being that he tried to crack down on economic crime, much of which was the result of capitalist excesses in the Nineties. Real criminals but also victims of corrupt competitors spent years behind bars. Finally in July 2013 the Russian Duma (parliament) passed an amnesty law. Economic criminals will be released if they repay the damage caused and apologise. On a small scale the regime shows interest in reforms. But there is not enough energy to tackle the corrupt and huge bureaucracy and reform the entire prison system.
Not only the Gulag but also the resistance against it has a long tradition in Russia. Former prisoners and human rights campaigners have created groups all over Russia to fight against injustice in prison. Not completely without success. Alexei Sokolov for example founded “Defender of the Urals” to protest against the deplorable conditions behind the barbed wire.
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova also plans to create a NGO for prisoner rights called “Mordovlag” - an abbreviation of “Mordovia Camps” in Russian. Many have warned her not to provoke her guards by rebelling against them. She and her colleague Maria Alyokhina are supposed to be released on March 2nd. But Tolokonnikova, the mother of a small daughter, went on hunger strike for nine days at the end of September to draw attention to the injustice in her camp. At the end President Putin sent a delegation from his human rights commission to camp 14 in Mordovia to check her allegations. The government also announced that inmates would receive a slightly higher salary.
These are small victories. It is not easy to change the unwritten laws. Most prisoners refused to speak to Putin’s human rights delegation. Some motioned silently with their eyes towards the walls: no conversation stays secret in prison and one critical word can provoke the fury of the guards.
“Profil” researched the conditions in penal camps in Siberia, Karelia and the Urals and put together these witness accounts from the prisoners of Putin’s gulag:
Witness 1:
“Licence to kill”
Alexei Sokolov, 40, is a founder of the NGO “Legal Basis”. He also sits on the “Public Monitoring Committee” in Sverdlovsk and fights there for the rights of prisoners. After he refused to stop his work, he was arrested and brought to prison on fabricated charges. After being released, he created “Defenders of the Urals”:
The first time I was arrested was in 1993 for stealing sports uniforms. The accusation was false, I was not stealing clothes, I produced them. They beat me for ten days to make me sign a confession. I refused. The judge did not mind, he still sentenced me to seven years penal colony in Khabarovsk. There I quickly realized that the guards could do what they wanted with us. The prisoners could be beaten, tortured, starved, even killed - no one had to fear the consequences. I started to help prisoners to fight for their rights. I went to the higher level, to the superiors. The only result was that I was put in solitary confinement.
In 2000 I was released. I got a job, started a family and continued to fight for the rights of prisoners. I became a member of the “Public Monitoring Committee”, which was based on a law from 2008, which allows civil rights activists to visit prisons. After every visit, I wrote a report about the appalling conditions. The officials from GUFSIN, the prison authority, were not amused. They “invited” me to a conversation. They threatened to arrest me if I did not cooperate. I refused. So they arrested me.
The accusations were absurd: prisoners suddenly remembered, that I had committed crimes with them eight years earlier. Russian and international human rights organisations protested against my trial. My guards said they could not finish me off because of the high profile of my case, but they would “break me mentally”: They put me away for three years in a closed institution for alcoholics and drug addicts in Krasnoyarsk.
The work there was hard. We had two greenhouses for cucumbers and tomatoes, as well as pigs and cattle. Three of us got 500 roubles per month, the others worked for free. There were no export lists. In our dining room we never saw vegetables.
I became sick and was diagnosed with tubercolosis. They released me. Nothing will change as long as the prisoners know that it makes no sense to complain to the authorities, because the top officials conspire with the guards. Prisoners will be abused like slaves. We need to fight for change.
Witness 2:
“Camp chiefs live off the drug trade or extortion”
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, 50, was arrested in 2003 and got eight years penal camp for embezzlement at his first trial. At a second trial in 2010 he was convicted of stealing his own oil and sentenced to a six further years. In 2012, his sentence was shortened by two years, so theoretically he could be released in August 2014. But there are rumours of a third trial being prepared with an accusation of murder, which would keep him in prison. For the moment, he is in Penal Colony Number 7 in Karelia on the Finnish border.
“Lawlessness in the Russian regions can be separated into “red” and “black” prisons. The leadership of “black” colonies usually lived off drug dealing. The “red” camp chiefs profited simply from extortion. In both, the prison administration and the gangsters followed their own self-interest.
Lately, the “red” and “black” penal colonies are not so easy to distinguish. The “black” colonies were run by criminals, the “red” by the prison administration. Nowadays they have mixed. There is less physical violence, but more paper war and selective implementation of regulations.
(Excerpt from the latest episode of Khodorkovsky’s series “Prison people” in the Moscow opposition magazine “The New Times”)
http://www.tessaszy.com/en/1061/in-putins-gulag-2