Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny has been sent to a prison that is considered extraordinarily harsh and feared as a place where prisoners are under tremendous psychological pressure, according to former prisoners and prison rights fighters.
Last month, Navalny was sentenced to serve more than two and a half years in a penal colony for allegedly violating his parole due to a 2014 conviction for internationally motivated fraud as a politician. He was arrested after returning to Russia after his almost fatal poisoning with a nerve agent.
Navalny was moved from a Moscow detention center to a prison colony last week, and authorities have not yet officially said where he is. However, Russian state media reported on Monday that Navalny is now in a prison in the Vladimirskaya region, about 60 km east of Moscow.
The United States and the European Union on Tuesday imposed new sanctions on several senior Russian officials, including the head of the Russian prison service and his prosecutor general, for Navalny’s poisoning and imprisonment. The Biden administration also said it was restricting some forms of cooperation with the Russian space industry.
The prison to which Navalny was sent, the penal colony no. 2 in the town of Pokrov, is’ a raging camp ‘, Pyotr Kuryanov, a lawyer for the NGO Fund for the Defense of Prisoners’ Rights, told ABC News
Former prison inmates have said that while they do not expect Navalny to be beaten or physically tortured in prison because he is a high-ranking prisoner, they believe he will be subjected to pressure and isolation, which amounts to psychological torture. ‘. “
“No one will beat or torture him,” said Vladimir Pereverzin, who spent ten years in prison. “But they will break him psychologically.”
Pereverzin was a former manager at the oil company Yukos, which was owned by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oligarch who was sentenced to more than a decade in prison on charges of fraud that most observers retaliated for wanting to politically challenge President Vladimir Putin. Pereverzin was sentenced to seven years on charges of embezzlement as part of the case against Yukos and Khodorkovsky.
Although the Russian penal colonies have improved, they are still being erected in the line of Gulag camps that originated in the 1930s. The prison consists of barracks that house several dozen prisoners sleeping in rows of stacks together, and it is surrounded by high walls with razor wire.
Prisoners work long shifts, often work on clothes, and conditions are apparently bad. Penal colony no. 2, said former prisoners and campers, is characterized by the exhausting level of control and discipline to which the prisoners are allegedly subjected.
From the outside, it looks like the rest of the camps, ”said Kuryanov. “But inside this camp, there is an unbearable atmosphere that is artificially created by the administration staff, so that it has to be lived day after day, month after month, year after year.”
In practice, former prisoners claim, this means that prisoners are almost constantly monitored and forced to constantly follow trivial rules invented by the government, which they constantly fear from punishment. Violations may include a missing button or not greeting.
Ordinary new inmates are reportedly going through a grim introduction, beaten by guards and inmates working for the administration, according to several reports from former inmates published online. Almost every moment of a prisoner’s time is taken into account, and guards apparently often involve them in repetitive senseless exercises intended to break them down, such as repeating their names and crimes over and over or being forced for hours. With their heads down, Dmitry Dyomushkin, a nationalist activist who spent time in the camp, told Russian media.
“Even flies do not fly without asking,” Dyomushkin told Moscow radio station Echo.
In the penal colonies, discipline is usually maintained by prisoners themselves, either by prisoners working with the guards, or by criminal gang leaders. Colonies run by prisoners working with the authorities are known as “Red Zones” in Russian criminal slang.
By Penal Colony. Nr. 2, there is a strong configuration between the administration and cooperating prisoners, those with alleged experience, which allows the custodian to completely dominate a prisoner.
“This is the reddest of the red,” Maria Eismont, a lawyer for an activist sentenced there in 2019, told Open Media. “Every effort is being made to isolate political prisoners,” she said, claiming that other prisoners were forbidden to speak to her client.
Dyomoshkin said he faced similar tactics, and for months without talking to anyone, despite being kept in the crowded barracks.
Guardians would apparently also make life unbearable for prisoners by turning other prisoners against them. Guards told some inmates that other inmates were responsible for taking away collective privileges, former inmates said.
Pereverzin said that while he was in prison, the pressure became so severe that he used a razor to cut the peritoneum to force the guards to move him to another barracks.
“There’s nothing good,” Pereverzin said. “You feel completely helpless.”