Inside gulags where beatings, torture, rape and death are daily realities
EVEN within Russia’s notorious penal colony system, prison FGU IK-3, or more commonly Polar Wolf, has a reputation for cruelty.
In winter temperatures of -30C, prisoners are ordered to gather outside for roll call wearing only light clothing. In spring, swarms of mosquitoes bite through their drab uniforms. If any of the prisoners flinch, they are hosed down with water.
Beatings and naked stints in isolation are common.
The prison where Alexei Navalny, Russia’s top opposition leader, died last week in mysterious circumstances, is part of a network of about 700 penal colonies scattered across the country.
Among the more than 460,000 inmates locked up inside are those who fell foul of Vladimir Putin’s regime: Russian opposition leaders, Western journalists, civil society leaders and activists.
According to Memorial, once Russia’s foremost human rights group before it was banned, the number of people designated as political prisoners in Russia has more than tripled since 2018, reaching 676.
Since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the ranks of political prisoners have only grown, with dozens of people sentenced under tough new laws punishing dissent over the war.
The conditions they are subjected to are often tantamount to a death sentence. In the words of one Russian lawyer, the Polar Wolf colony, high in the Russian Arctic, is “essentially legalised torture”, designed to break prisoners physically and mentally.
“It’s a disgusting colony,” he told the Russian news website Meduza.
When he flew back to Russia from Germany three years ago, having survived poisoning with the Novichok nerve agent, Navalny knew that the Kremlin wanted him dead. There is nowhere that is more efficient than Polar Wolf at carrying out such a task.
These remote outposts freeze in winter and boil in summer. Guards prod, bully and torture. The daily regime grinds, bores and humiliates.
Riots are common and thousands of inmates die each year, mainly from suicides or heart attacks. Even the option of being cannon fodder in Ukraine, where thousands are being killed, is more appealing to many.
Many see Polar Wolf as the worst of the worst.
It lies at the end of the road and was built as a Soviet prison labour camp to quarry stone in the 1960s in one of the country’s most inaccessible and isolated Arctic regions. It houses 1,000 prisoners, mainly rapists and murderers. Rare photographs from the prison show rows of inmates with shaved heads sitting in a classroom listening to women giving lectures from behind a grill. Oleh Sentsov, a Ukrainian filmmaker, spent five years at the nearby prison colony Polar Bear, which supposedly has a lighter regime than Polar Wolf.
He said that prisoners are at the mercy of guards, who dish out beatings, electric shocks and threats of rape with impunity. Prisoners who are considered troublemakers are locked in a box in the foetal position and forced to urinate on themselves.
“You are in purgatory, where you have no rights, and there is no use and no one to complain to,” he said in 2019 after being released in a prisoner exchange. Tatiana Stanovaya, a Russia-focused analyst, said that if a Russian prison colony didn’t kill inmates, it would crush their spirits.
Samuel Greene, a professor of Russian politics at King’s College in London, warned other political prisoners; Russian opposition leaders Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza; and US journalist Evan Gershkovich; were increasingly vulnerable.
They have always had good reason to fear, but with Navalny gone that will only magnify. Opponents of Putin meet varying fates: like Boris Nemtsov, a politician, or Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist, who were shot dead. Some are poisoned like Alexander Litvinenko. Others fall from windows, die in car accidents. Drown. The majority, though, get locked up in Putin’s purgatory and left to die.
Putin use of such hell holes is nothing new in the history of Russia. In The House of the Dead, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel based on his own experience of four years inside one, he describes his Siberian camp as “one of the ulcers of society” and “one of the most powerful destructive agents”.
Navalny knew this: it allowed him to prepare those left behind after he was gone: “My message if I am killed is very simple,” he said in a video recorded before his fateful exodus from Germany in 2021. “Don’t give up.”