Putin’s gulag
In its far-flung prison camps, Russia has revived and refined the most terrifying elements of Stalin’s repression, said Arkady Ostrovsky in The Economist’s 1843 magazine.
THE WAKE-UP CALL in cell number nine of the IK-6 prison colony in the Siberian town of Omsk comes at 5 a.m. in the form of the Russian national anthem blasting from a loudspeaker. Vladimir KaraMurza, a journalist and politician, knew as soon as he heard the opening chord that he had only five minutes to get up before prison guards would take away his pillow and mattress. By 5:20 a.m. his metal bed frame, attached to the wall, would be locked up so that he could not use it for the rest of the day. Kara-Murza’s cell, painted in bright blue, was 5 meters long and 2 meters wide. In the middle, a table and a bench were screwed to the floor. The only objects he was allowed to keep were a mug, a toothbrush, a towel, and a pair of slippers. The light was never turned off.
Later in the morning a mug of tea and a bowl of gluey porridge made from an unidentifiable grain would be pushed through a small hatch in the cell door. At some point Kara-Murza would be permitted a 90-minute “walk”—a stroll around a concrete courtyard the same size as his cell with a metal grill in place of a roof. He was obliged to keep his hands behind his back. Often the subzero temperatures made it impossible to keep going for the allotted time. The loudspeaker in his cell blared throughout the day, sometimes playing the local radio station, sometimes a monotonous recital of the penal-colony rules.
CCTV cameras were trained on KaraMurza around the clock. Even so, the guards would take him to an inspection room at 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. each day. He had to strip naked while they ran a metal detector over his clothes and underwear. Every time he was addressed he had to identify himself in the official formula: “Kara-Murza, Vladimir Vladimirovich, date of birth Sept. 7, 1981, convicted under criminal code articles 284.1 part one, 207.3 part two, 275. Start date of sentence, April 22, 2022. End date of sentence, April 21, 2047.”
Since the February death of Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, in a similar penal colony in the Arctic, Kara-Murza has become one of the country’s highest-profile political prisoners. Like Navalny, Kara-Murza was the victim of suspected Novichok poisoning. He twice fell into a coma in 2015, and again in 2017.
Like Navalny he could have stayed in exile abroad—he had lived in America for years and is also a British citizen.
And like Navalny he also chose to return to Russia, drawn by his calling as a Russian intellectual and a refusal to let his country be defined by Vladimir Putin. On April 5, 2022—just over a month after Russia invaded Ukraine—he flew back to Moscow.
A week after his return, he was arrested outside his home in Moscow and charged with spreading “fake news” about the war. Kara-Murza was given 25 years in prison— a far graver penalty than awarded, on average, for murder.
On Jan. 26 of this year, Kara-Murza was transferred to an even harsher penal colony a short drive away, differentiated from the previous one by a single digit (IK-7). This measure had been taken, officials said, because of a “severe administrative breach” by Kara-Murza: missing a wake-up call that he says never came.
Kara-Murza is permitted to write and receive letters, though he is only allowed a pen for 90 minutes each day. I wrote to him after his abrupt disappearance from IK-6. “You ask me about the meaning of my transfer,” Kara-Murza replied. “The meaning of a transfer is the transfer itself. One of the main features of prison life is a constant unpredictability, insecurity, and uncertainty not only about tomorrow but even this evening.”
Since he arrived in prison, KaraMurza has been granted only one 15-minute phone call with his children (five minutes per child). Apart from the drone of the loudspeakers, Kara-Murza’s only external sources of mental stimulation are letters and books from the prison library. But he finds it hard to read. “You lose concentration very fast, thoughts run away. You read one page and don’t understand what it is that you’ve read,” he wrote to me. “Memory also works in a strange way. You remember in detail what happened 30 years ago, but anything you hear and read this morning is erased completely.”
At 8:30 p.m. he is handed his mattress and pillow. His bunk bed is lowered. Then at 5 a.m. the next morning he once again wakes up to the sound of the national anthem.
OMSK, THE CITY where Kara-Murza is being held, was one of hundreds of sites for the Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps, established by Stalin in 1929 and better known by its acronym in Russian: gulag. This was a centralized system of slave labor on an industrial scale, in which up to 20 million people from across the Soviet Union found themselves trapped. Roughly 2 million of those prisoners died.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave the definitive literary treatment of these labor camps, prisons, and transit centers in The Gulag Archipelago. He spent 11 years within the gulag and wrote a three-volume “literary investigation” in which he mapped it as though it were “an almost invisible, almost imperceptible country...though scattered in an archipelago geographically.” He described the prisoners, starving and exhausted by work, “eyes oozing with tears, red eyelids. White cracked lips covered with sores. Skewbald, unshaven bristles on the faces.”
After Stalin’s death in 1953 the extermination stopped, the system became more humane and the number of prisoners decreased, but its essence remained. Navalny saw many of the features of the
gulag perpetuated in the Russian prison system. “It is not concerned in the slightest with the re-education of prisoners but is aimed only at dehumanizing the prisoner, bullying him and serving the illegal orders of the country’s political leadership,” he wrote. “This system cannot be reformed.” As Solzhenitsyn observed: “Archipelago was, Archipelago is, Archipelago will be.”
Few institutions in Russia have experienced the continuity that prisons have. Both prisoners of the Soviet gulag and those who guarded them have passed on their experiences to their descendants. Russia’s camps—particularly in more remote parts of the country where the prison is the main employer—are often staffed by children and grandchildren of those who guarded the Soviet gulag. These dynasties see their past as a point of pride.
New arrivals to prison are placed in “quarantine,” where they are given medical checks and a psychological assessment, before they are moved to a shared cell or solitary confinement. Scared and often barred from seeing a lawyer, they feel completely powerless. To demand a meeting with a lawyer, detainees need a pen and paper, which they are often denied. They can complain, of course, but for that they still need a pen and paper.
They soon learn that real power lies in the hands of prison officials known as operativniki—investigators. In countries governed by the rule of law, punishment comes after a trial. In Russia, investigations start after an arrest and continue inside prisons and penal colonies. Pretrial detentions can last for years, and the acquittal rate in Russia is less than 0.5 percent. Operativniki, who are rewarded on the basis of how many crimes they solve, use their unlimited power to coerce confessions and pin new crimes on prisoners. They work in close coordination with the security services and the police, deciding who gets urgent medical care and who gets punished with solitary confinement or beaten in special “pressure cells.”
Prisoners are divided into four castes. The top caste is “criminal elite” or “made men,” who perform no duties themselves and adjudicate conflicts. They are followed by “collaborators,” “bitches” or “reds” who enforce order alongside prison officers. “Lads,” “men” or “wool,” who are not professional criminals, make up the vast majority of prisoners. And then there are the outcasts or untouchables who are referred to as “cocks” or “the degraded” because they sleep under the bunk beds.
This informal hierarchy has been endorsed by prison authorities. The state and the underworld have fused together, according to Nikolay Shchur, a former prison ombudsman. Brigades of inmates now carry out torture on behalf of the authorities. “The community of criminal bosses today is simply a branch of the FSB, Russia’s security service, or the police, who appoint informants over a particular territory,” Shchur has written.
Though the prison economy drives many of the abuses within Russia’s penal system, its horrors are politically vital to the Putin regime. “Everyone must be afraid of Russian prison. That is its purpose,” says one former prison official. “The goal of the penitentiary system...is to break people, to destroy their personality and to vaccinate the population against freedom.”
One person who has seen this process up close is Maria Eismont, a defense lawyer. In 2019, Konstantin Kotov, one of her clients, was transferred to IK-2, a notorious prison where Navalny was first sent, for taking part in a political protest. After visiting Kotov there, Eismont was struck by how poorly defended it seemed from the outside: There were no towers or barbed wire.
“It was guarded by fear,” she wrote. “You feel that fear in the looks of those convicts who walk around the camp without a convoy, but answer monosyllabically to your questions and avoid eye contact,” she has written. “You feel it in the visitors’ waiting room filled with relatives of the convicts, who try their best not to talk to you. ‘They don’t like lawyers here,’ one explained.”
In prison, brutality is elevated to a virtue and acts of kindness are rooted out. Kotov didn’t have any gloves, so one of his fellow prisoners took pity on him and offered him a spare pair. In response, the prisoner’s parole was canceled and Kotov was blamed. Earlier this year, Alexander Kravchenko, a prison doctor who signed off on the release of four gravely ill prisoners, was sentenced to seven years in jail for “overstepping his authority.”
PRISON IS INGRAINED in Russian song, language, and folklore. “You can never be safe from prison or the begging bowl,” runs a popular proverb. “If you have not been to prison, you don’t know life,” goes another common saying. Despite the barbed-wire fences, the separation between the world inside and outside prison has always been notional. Prisoners are not an aberration but an essential part of Russian life.
“The only place befitting an honest man in Russia at the present time is a prison,” a character reflects in Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection. For those who aspire to be national politicians in Russia, prison is not just a punishment or hindrance but the ultimate test of someone’s convictions. It asserts their dignity and earns them moral authority.
Navalny, the ultimate national politician, understood this fully. He walked into prison to strike at the fear that prison instills and, in so doing, liberate his people from paralysis. When Putin tortured Navalny, he didn’t want a confession but a plea for mercy, an admission that fear works. He could not
obtain it.
In his last significant appeal to Russia’s supreme court made from his penal colony, Navalny pleaded not for justice for his country or for his own release, but for the right of prisoners to have two items of printed material in a punishment cell.
The rules permitted just one. For himself he requested two books—the Bible and The Law of God, a volume of Orthodox teachings.
But he wasn’t just concerned with his own situation. A Muslim prisoner, he argued, is faced with a choice of having the Quran or a newspaper. Such a prisoner would always choose the former, but anyone put in a punishment cell also needs a newspaper because “it is a very cold place.” he said: “Do you know what they take newspapers into the cell for? To cover themselves at night.” In Russia, the separation between prison and freedom, life and death, is newspaper thin.
Adapted from an article originally published in The Economist’s 1843 magazine. Used with permission.