November 4, 2016
Shocking
revelations of the conditions faced by a political prisoner should remind us of
the dominant principle inside Russia’s prison system — violence in all possible
forms. Русский
About the author
Bulat
Mukhamedzhanov is coordinator for Zona
prava, which provides legal and informational support to
prisoners and criminal defendants in Russia.
This week, a
letter from civic activist Ildar Dadin, who is currently serving a three-year sentence for
violating legislation on public demonstrations, has forced Russian
society to look again at the practices that dominate Russia’s penitentiary
system. The letter describes the humiliation and torture Dadin has faced as a
new arrival at Penal Colony 7 in Segezha, Karelia, including group beatings,
being hung up by the handcuffs and having his head thrust down the prison
toilet.
There’s nothing
particularly new in Dadin’s letter. What, we didn’t know that people are
tortured in Russia’s prison system? That people are illegally placed in
punishment cells, and have to face unbearable living conditions every day?
Since the era of the Gulag, the use of physical force against a prisoner has
been a means of making him or her obedient and dependent on the prison
administration.
Alexander
Solzhenitsyn, Nobel laureate and a former prisoner himself, remembers in The
Gulag Archipelago how Soviet prison guards had 52 forms of torture in their
arsenal. “Their branch of service does not require them to be educated people
of broad culture and broad views — and they are not. Their branch of service
does not require them to think logically — and they do not. Their branch of
service requires only that they carry out orders exactly and be impervious to
suffering — and that is what they do and who they are.”
Today, the range
of tortures in Russia has expanded. We all remember Vladimir Putin’s famous use
of criminal jargon (“We’ll waste them in the outhouse”), which Russia’s
future president used to describe the swift vengeance of the Russian state in
1999. It soon became Putin’s main slogan, and helped him win the presidential
election a year later.
In Russia’s
prisons, the successor to the Gulag, prisoners aren’t afraid of beatings, but
the humiliation that accompanies them
Indeed, after
that now-infamous press conference, this idiom acquired the meaning: “To catch
someone off guard and then deal with them mercilessly, wherever it might be.”
Vladimir Bukovsky, another Soviet dissident, noted that this phrase has its
roots in the violent Gulag uprisings of the late 1940s, and referred to
“killing an informer and throwing his body into the latrines”.
This form of
“settling accounts” has come to feature all too prominently in Russia’s prison
system also. In recent years, there have been several scandalous cases where
prisoners have revealed that they haven’t only been beaten, but prison officers
have put their head down prison toilets as punishment.
In 2011, in
Chelyabinsk region, prisoners in Colony No 1 in Kopeisk were forced to crawl naked on their
hands and knees upstairs to the toilet block, where prison
employees thrust their heads into the latrines. They were then brutally beaten.
Four prisoners died as a result, and the coroner’s office found up to 140
bruises from prison officers’ batons on their bodies. Eighteen prison officers,
including the head of the regional penitentiary service, were put on trial, and
eight received prison sentences of between nine and 12 years.
In 2015, in
Sverdlovsk region, according to the journalists at 66.ru, prisoners who refused
to pay a monthly sum to the prison administration of Ekaterinburg Colony No 2 were tortured by having their heads
put down all the latrines. After this, prisoners were forced to
write a petition to the prison administration claiming that they would never
discuss illegal practices at the colony. If this information was revealed, the
prisoner could be raped and forced into a prison “harem”.
As we can see,
the power vertical in Russia’s penitentiary system works better than on the
outside. If a prison administration gives the order, then it is carried out
without question — even zealously. The most important consideration is not to
leave any bodies, as they can’t be covered up.
This kind of
humiliation is fixed on CCTV — if a prisoner doesn’t wish to “negotiate”, then
the video can be distributed on the internet, shown to other prisoners or sent
to his family
In May 2016, in
the southern region of Krasnodar, 10 employees at the Belorechensk Prison
Colony stood trial in connection with
humiliation faced by young prisoners. According to the
investigation, prison officers brutally beat new arrivals at the colony on the
orders of the prison administration while wearing balaclavas (to ensure both
anonymity and the desired effect). The officers then stripped the new prisoners
naked, forced them to urinate on one another and then put their heads down the
prison latrines.
All this was done
while shouting abuse at the prisoners, who were forced to do physical exercises
constantly during the episode. Vitaly Pop, a 17-year-old Ukrainian prisoner,
did not withstand the torture. He died from the 17 punches and kicks against
his vital organs.
Anastasiya
Kopteeva, head of the Zabaikalsky Human Rights Center, notes that former
prisoners often turn to her for help. In their letters, they describe how this
toilet block humiliation is used to force them to cooperate with the prison
administration. “We expected that after the episode of mass beating of
prisoners in Colony No 10 [in October 2016, eight prison officers from
Krasnokamensk were convicted in relation to this case], the situation would
change, but everything has stayed the same.”
Ildar Dadin’s
letter is testimony to the continuing use of this practice: “After the third
beating, they lowered my head into a toilet right there in the holding cell.”
As a rule, this
kind of humiliation is fixed on CCTV — if a prisoner doesn’t wish to
“negotiate”, then the video can be distributed on the internet, shown to other
prisoners or sent to his family.
There are places
where the Gulag has remained practically unchanged, where violence remains the
defining principle of “order”
Thus, this
technology of “flushing” places a prisoner at the very bottom of Russia’s
prison hierarchy. He becomes “lowered down” (opushchennyi, a specific
term in criminal slang) and has to do dirty and unpleasant work, including
cleaning out the latrines. The path back “up” the hierarchy, towards the
middle-ranking and top prisoners is closed forever — you can only move further
down. Thus, in Russia’s prisons, the successor to the Gulag, prisoners aren’t
afraid of beatings, but the humiliation that accompanies them. It’s a cross you
have to bear for the rest of your life in prison.
For the first
time ever, the European Court of Human Rights is now examining a complaint by nine
former prisoners from Kostroma who wound up among “lowered” prisoners
for different reasons. One of the prisoners, for instance, accidentally fell
into a wooden toilet. These prisoners are now requesting that the informal
hierarchy that dominates Russia’s prison system be recognised as inhumane and
degrading to human dignity.
Vladimir
Rubashny, former director of Tatarstan’s penitentiary psychological service,
believes that, in certain situations, a prisoner’s “fall” down the hierarchy
can be beneficial for a prison administration. “In my experience, these kind of
situations [where it was beneficial] came about,” said Rubashny in a recent interview for MediaZona. “Prisoners (both
young and adult) admitted that it was the prison administration that provoked
such situations, including with the help of ‘activists’ [prisoners who
cooperate with the prison administration]. This practice is alive and well
today.”
Of course, there
are regions in Russia where beatings and psychological pressure are a thing of
the past. But at the same time, there are places — in my opinion, Karelia,
Mordovia, Chelyabinsk and Sverdlovsk regions — where the Gulag has remained
practically unchanged, where violence remains the defining principle of
“order”.
An episode of
Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, where an officer in Stalin’s secret
police addresses someone under investigation, comes to mind: “‘You think we get
any satisfaction from using persuasion? We have to do what the Party
demands of us.’”
