• Perm Region  Prisoners  Political Prisoners  Persecution of Activists

Maria Alekhina (Pussy Riot): "We walked into a building surrounded by a stone wall - the solitary punishment cells. Here they removed all our clothing and we were sent to the quarantine block in identical checked overalls..." My story does not have a beginning. Neither is there a story. There is the impossibility of what is happening, retold with the help of words. 

It is unlikely that anybody will verify my words. Many will be found who will deny them, half-heartedly at first and then more and more enthusiastically until, finally, you will be told quite chirpily: "Everything is fine here". Or even "good". The prisoners, the administration and the "human rights defenders" all say, "Everything is good at IK-28".

IK-28 - a female penal colony in the Perm region surrounded by factories and taiga forest. There is some irony in the fact that I was once part of the environmental movement and have ended up in a zone where we are all breathing in the emissions from hazardous industry. Everything around me is grey, even if it is another colour. It still contains shades of grey. Everything: the buildings, the food, the sky, the words. It is anti-life in an autonomous area of space.

People are brought here in groups, in my case from Moscow via three transit prisons (pre-trial detention centres in Kirov, Perm and Solikamsk) in three Stolypin trucks and dozens of police wagons. When the last one reached the high iron gates, it contained 19 people. 19 new prisoners: future seamstresses, cutters and maintenance workers.

We walked from the gates to where we were searched, bent under the weight of our bags. I carried three and their total weight was almost the same as my own.

We walked into a building surrounded by a stone wall - the solitary punishment cells. Here they removed all our clothing and we were sent to the quarantine block in identical checked overalls.

Prisoners adapt to life in quarantine, or rather they learn to get used to it. They get used to jumping up at 5.30am and hurrying quickly to the bathroom (except for me, nobody calls this room the "bathroom"): sinks - three, toilets - two, prisoners - forty. We are hurrying again at 6am, already in groups of ten, and hurry to the kitchen for breakfast. We also need enough time to get to the storeroom where everything is kept, including the food - if we want a cup of tea, of course. However, we need to go there anyway since we cannot keep our pyjamas under our pillows. After two weeks of washing in icy water, my hands no longer resemble hands. I could wash them in warm water, but there is a queue for that and you also need to hurry. The constant hurrying is going to be required for another year and a half yet. I am getting used to it. We are all getting used to it together in the so-called RR room.

RR stands for rules and regulations, meaning that in quarantine we have to learn them off by heart and it is no laughing matter. It is not so much that we have to learn them, as every day we sit down and listen to them (someone reads them out aloud). So this room is known as the RR room, there is even a sign with this written on it hanging above the door to the entrance. We go to the RR room to read the RR. There is nothing absurd about it. So as not to fall asleep in the RR room (there is a video camera in the corner), I go into the courtyard and clear up snow with a shovel. There is a courtyard (it is not really a courtyard, but a small square of earth surrounded by wire) attached to each barracks.

So as not to fall asleep you need to come up with things to do: tying cigarettes together with thread (cigarette packets are prohibited and get thrown away during the search, the cigarettes are dumped into one big bag), put matches back into boxes, sew name tags into your clothing, make a list of your belongings. So as not to fall asleep. Falling asleep sitting in the RR room is a violation, sewing tags on badly is a violation, an unfastened button on your coat during roll call is a violation.

The triad of "crime-punishment-correction", any strategy regarding these terms is negligible. In practice, they just look for violations here. The main manipulation trick is release on parole. You are asked: “Do you want to be released on parole? Then kindly conform”. Half of the conversations are about parole. "When are you going to be released on parole?", "Do you think you'll get to leave?", "What are you going to do outside once you're released on parole?", "I can't wait for the day when I'm released on parole".

Getting released on parole is not that difficult. This is the reason why they are sewing for 12 hours a day for a maximum of 1,000 roubles a month; this is the reason why they are not writing complaints; this is the reason why they are setting people up, snitching, trampling all over any principles they have left; this is the reason why they keep silent and tolerate it; this is the reason why they get used to it.

There is the "system of social lifts" concept - a series of criteria, compliance/non-compliance with which is used by the parole board to determine whether a prisoner is reformed or not. They are also read aloud.

Do not break the rules, work, attend events, visit the library, the psychologist, the prayer room (isn’t everybody tired of saying we have a secular state?). Have socially-external relationships, which means do not lose contact with your family.

In the end, everything the prisoner does is not as a result of personal development but in order to get a tick for parole. During my conversation with the psychologist, she compared it to career development, citing herself as an example. "It is the same for us soldiers as well", she said. And that is the bitter truth: half of the country is just like those convicted of a crime. It is not individuals that are needed, it is those who get used to it. "And nothing is going to change", I said at the same time as one of the other prisoners. Only the choices we make in a hopeless situation are different.

"You can get used to it, knowing that it is hopeless, or fight against it, knowing that it is hopeless. It seems to me," she continued, "that the terrorists seize aeroplanes and theatres, but nowhere have they ever seized a prison." Because nobody needs us. My conclusion comes out automatically, in a whisper. At that moment, late at night just as one shift at the factory was being replaced by another, I momentarily felt a chilling solidarity between myself and somebody who had been in prison for more than twenty years, solidarity in our irrelevance, in the way we have been discarded before everyone objective. Before "society", before the authorities - within a dead world which is paradoxically giving birth to people of the zone.

Source: The Newstimes