The rest fall into a broad category called simply the ‘men’, and they undertake to undertake the gang leaders, refraining from cooperating with the guards and avoiding the abuse of those at the bottom of the pick order. A system of rituals keeps the hierarchy intact. Men, for example, never share silverware with the destructive.
Some former political prisoners manage to find a place in the system. Mr. Margolin, who was arrested in 2014 for his role in protests against the government, said he had successfully sought help from criminal “authorities” to defend himself against an aggressive fellow prisoner. The help was on hand, he said, in part because he was convicted of attacking a police officer during a protest.
“It is highly valued,” he said.
Oleg G. Sentsov, a Ukrainian filmmaker who served five years in Russian prisons and a Siberian penal colony before being released in a prisoner exchange with Ukraine, said in a telephone interview that inmates in his high-security prison camp, mostly murderers, respected him.
“They were not psychologists,” he said. Sentsov said about the killers under whom he slept. Most were domestic violence. ‘They may have gotten drunk and killed their wives with axes. But in prison it is different. It is seen differently. ”
Mr. Navalny said he would do well because “he is brave”, he added. “I also did not have any problems with the prisoners, nor do I think he would do it.”
Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, a former oil tycoon and once the richest man in Russia, who served a decade in prison after funding political opposition, was stabbed in the face by a fellow inmate with a homemade knife . He only sustained a light wound. The attacker said he tried to stick an eye out.
Nevertheless, Mr. Khodorkovsky said in a telephone interview that prisoners were generally not hostile to him as a political prisoner, and some said, “You are in the truth.”