How penal system will try to crush Pussy Riot

By MAX SEDDON
Published on 15/10/2012 00:00

IT’S a far cry from Stalin’s Gulag, but the guiding principle of the Russian penal colony – the destination of two members of punk band Pussy Riot this month – remains the same: isolate inmates and wear them down through “corrective labour.”

Maria Alekhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova will have to quickly learn the inner laws of prison life, survive the dire food and medical care, and risk bullying from inmates either offended by their “punk prayer” against president Vladimir Putin or under orders to pressure them.

“Everyone knows the rule: Trust no one, never fear and never forgive,” said Svetlana Bakhmina, a lawyer who spent three years in a penal colony. “You are in no-man’s land. Nobody will help you. You have to think about everything you say and do to remain a person.”

Alekhina, 24, Tolokonnikova, 22, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30, were convicted of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred for an impromptu performance in Moscow’s main cathedral as Mr Putin headed into an election that handed him a third term as Russia’s president. The women insisted their protest was political.

An appeals court released Ms Samutsevich last Wednesday, but upheld the two-year prison terms of the others. The presiding judge said that “their correction is possible only in isolation from society.”

In Russian colonies for women, inmates live in barracks with 30 to 40 to a room. They begin the day with compulsory exercises in temperatures as low as minus 30C. After roll call and a breakfast of gruel, they spend seven to eight hours a day at work, usually hunched over sewing machines, working on uniforms and other clothing.

Since there is only one women’s penal colony near Moscow, female prisoners from the capital are commonly sent to Mordovia, a swampy, mosquito-infested province on the Volga River. Defence lawyers said Alekhina and Tolokonnikova would be transported to a penal colony within two weeks.

Russian inmates are kept in a system that Russia’s own justice minister has described as “monstrously archaic” and whose purpose has changed little for hundreds of years. Tsarist Russia sent prisoners to remote Siberian colonies where labour was in short supply. The system was inherited and expanded by the Soviet Union, which worked millions of prisoners to death in the Gulag. Russia incarcerates more people than any country in the world bar the US and China, according to the International Centre for Prison Studies.

Prisoners are typically paid the equivalent of about £6 a day, which they can use to buy food, cigarettes, and toiletries.

Spouses are allowed three-day conjugal visits four times a year. Prisoners who show especially good behaviour can even be given two weeks’ leave outside the camp. The two punk band members can be punished with up to 15 days in solitary for minor infractions such as failing to make their beds or to put their hands behind their backs at roll call.

Perhaps the greatest danger for the band members, however, will be posed by their fellow inmates, although physical violence, while a danger, is relatively rare in comparison to men’s colonies. But the psychological pressure can be greater, said Vitaly Borshchyov, head of the Public Monitoring Commission, a human rights group that works to improve prison conditions.