The more political prisoners there are in Russia, the more attention is paid to everyday life in prisons and camps. The insights also reveal striking continuities with the Tsarist Empire and the Stalin era.
Alexei Navalny is connected via video from the penal colony to a courtroom in the small town of Kovrov in the Vladimir region, where his lawsuit against the penal camp management will be discussed on September 2.
Alexei Navalny, Russia’s best-known opposition politician, is in a “prison in prison” for the third time in two weeks. “Penal isolator” (Schiso) is the name of the place within the penal camp, which is notorious for its particularly adverse conditions. Damp and cold in winter, stiflingly hot in summer, cramped, dirty and without the slightest comfort at any time of the year, it makes life in the penal colony all the more hell.
An open button on the prison uniform, an order three seconds late in following an order, an incorrect greeting to the authorities: for the rebellious prisoner Navalny, as he himself knows, there is always a new reason to try to wear him down. He was “politically too active”. He was threatened with spending his time in the “Schiso” if he did not stop his provocative attempt to set up a prisoner union. This, in turn, alarms Navalny’s lawyers: his back pain is being fueled anew by the lack of mobility in the punishment cell. They want to make him a cripple for his insistence not to remain silent even in the harshest of prisons.
A glimpse into another yet close world
It is indeed amazing how Navalny is still present on social networks a year and a half after he was sent to the prison camp in Pokrov and then to Melekhovo east of Moscow. He regularly expresses himself on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook – with comments on daily politics or a report from his everyday life as a prisoner. Apparently he gives his lawyers the notes of the texts, which are always written in his typical, sarcastic and ironic style.
Alexey Navalny spent the first year of his imprisonment in the Pokrov penal colony in the Vladimir region.
The prison memoir genre is classic for Russia; There are large numbers of shorter and longer texts, in the form of letters or as memoirs, from the pre-revolutionary period, from Stalinism and the later Soviet Union. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the fallen commodity magnate, and people around him also published autobiographical camp literature.
What is new is how today’s possibilities allow prison and camp memoirs to be disseminated in real time. Attention to this has not only increased because of Navalny. The more repressive the regime is against those who think differently, the more politicians, journalists, lawyers and civil rights activists are behind bars for clearly political motives. They have a social media audience that an ordinary citizen lacks.
These reports give an insight into “another world”, the one behind the prison walls and camp fences. It could affect every inhabitant of Russia and is part of social normality in a way that Western observers find difficult to imagine. Almost every family faces it in some way, even if it’s a generation or two back. The world of prison and camp is also present in everyday life outside – in customs, in language, in thinking. Some even say that all of Russia is basically a “zone,” as the camp is called in prisoner parlance.
Oppressive continuity in prisons
The liberal Moscow opposition politician Ilya Yashin has been in custody since July; According to Article 207.3 of the Criminal Code, introduced in March, he is accused of discrediting the army – i.e. opposition to the war in Ukraine. Yashin, a shrewd communicator, regularly lets his followers participate in everyday life in the prison via his social media channels. Together with him, they make the experiences of the naive newcomer in Moscow’s Butyrka remand prison, a building from the 18th century.
Revolutionaries of the Tsarist era and political prisoners of Stalinism on their way to the Gulag wrote about their experiences in Butyrka. Apparently, the regime there has always been somewhat looser than in other detention centers. In a post on Telegram that has since been deleted, Yashin describes the fascinating self-organization of the prisoner society, which exchanges information between the cells at night via a complex system of threads stretched along the facade and across the inner courtyards.
Butyrka is one of the oldest prisons in Moscow.
This is only possible because Butyrka is a “black” prison, one in which prisoner rules take precedence, and not a “red” one in which the prison management has everything under control. Here as there it is important to be on the lookout for informers and informers. Like Navalny, Yashin describes fellow prisoners and their fates. The coexistence of criminal and political prisoners was always a major issue – even before the October Revolution of 1917 and in the Soviet Union. In contrast to earlier times, the administration is apparently careful never to put two “political” in one cell. Of the Russian revolutionaries’ thirst for agitation remember the young left-wing anti-war activists Ruslan Abasov and Lev Skoryakin, who attempted political education in their cells.
The two and Yashin also experienced the overcrowding of the prisons, which was also discussed in the Russian media. Up to 35 are crammed into cells designed for around 20 prisoners. You sleep in shifts. But in contrast to the sparseness and the 24-hour lighting that the prisoner Yevgenia Ginsburg, who became famous for her memoirs, and the German exiles Susanne Leonhard and Margarete Buber-Neumann experienced in the Butyrka of the Stalin era, today the television, shower and refrigerator are part of it in the cell for that. Today’s prisoners no longer live on “balanda”, the thin prison soup. They let relatives provide them with money and food parcels.
Solzhenitsyn also describes the “Schiso”
However, no prisoner sitting in the “penal isolator” like Navalny can receive such. That too is part of the ordeal. And of course the “Schiso” is also a remnant of the past. “Because it goes without saying: How else could prisoners learn to shudder if there were no further punishment options at all to maintain the camp order?” writes Alexander Solzhenitsyn sarcastically in the “Gulag Archipelago”, the most comprehensive compilation of his own and other people’s memories and analysis of the terrible Soviet human mill.
The solitary confinement in the “Schiso” is the quintessence of the Soviet-Russian penal system. No wonder, since the walls of these places of torture are the only thing left from the abandoned Stalinist camps in Siberia and northern Russia, as the American historian and publicist Anne Applebaum aptly stated in her great history of the Gulag.