As you can see, I was never tried… There were no concrete accusations, no witnesses, no confrontations. Finally, there was no investigation and no trial. If I’m a spy, I should have been tried by a tribunal. If I’m an agitator engaged in counterrevolutionary activities, I should have been tried by a special collegium of the Supreme Court… I treated everything that took place with suspicion and disbelief, like many here… But because everyone is sentenced for exactly the same thing and to the same term, you don’t feel lonely and lost amid all these people of your level—engineers, pilots, chairmen, managers, directors…
Apologizing for not having replied earlier to Serafima’s four letters, he explained that he’d spent three months away from Ivdellag in a brigade that floated lumber down rivers. “It’s not the imprisonment and labor that’s frightening,” he wrote, “but the terror of stupefaction from a slow death of exhaustion.”
The graveyard has been growing from the first day of our arrival, along with the cases of periodontitis and broken-off, frostbitten extremities. Oh well, you can never foresee where your fate will take you. My dear one, my joy, let’s hope for the best. Everything will find its right course… When I was out with the brigade, I would often sit at night on the plunging bank of the gloomy taiga [forest] river and remember and kiss you, my dear wife. I wanted so much to caress you and to be caressed.
I don’t need anything for the time being, especially please don’t think of sending underwear. If you do, however, please include a towel, but not our towel from home, that would be very difficult for me to bear. Better a new one, and a piece of soap, cheap, of course, because expensive soap is useless here.
My dear one, we’ll be together again someday. I’m no criminal, after all, and have done nothing wrong. All this is temporary; we just need fortitude and time. Often while walking along taiga paths—how wild the taiga is!—I would while away my time remembering moments from our life, especially the winter of ’36 and ’37… the table, the lamp with the blue shade, the warm stove. Something warm and soft would begin flowing inside me out on the freezing taiga and my soul would glow. Only the death of another of my slow-plodding comrades would distract me from my dreams. Because he was remembering his own table, his own stove. Otherwise we didn’t say a word to each other, didn’t dare intrude on those memories.
The degree of civilization in a society,” Dostoevsky wrote in The House of the Dead, “can be judged on entering its prisons.” Far as Russia’s current penal system is from the KGB-run Gulag, the legacy of its sadism and neglect very much endures. Prisoners in pretrial detention are still tortured into giving confessions, as the notorious case of Sergei Magnitsky showed the world in 2009. Arrested by the same police investigators he had exposed, those who had committed tax fraud worth hundreds of millions of dollars, Magnitsky was beaten, became ill, was denied medical care and left to die on a cell floor after refusing to retract his accusations. Some of the officials involved later received awards and promotions, and the less prominent killings that regularly surface continue to illustrate the same sad points, even after Medvedev signed highly publicized legislation aimed at fighting the widespread lawlessness among police.
The majority of the country’s six hundred thousand prisoners are incarcerated in penal colonies, where they live in barracks that differ little from the Gulag’s. Russia has only seven large prisons, including Vladimir Central, a collection of solid brick structures in the medieval city of Vladimir, east of Moscow. Conditions there—one of the few prisons foreign journalists can visit without having to file more than the usual reams of paperwork—are relatively good. Nevertheless, very little inside the thick walls seems to have changed in the two centuries since they were built.
In one cramped, wood-floored cell, four prisoners with shaved heads and downcast eyes said they had no complaints about their treatment. That wasn’t surprising because they spoke under a guard’s watchful eye. Elsewhere, it was hard to miss signs that the prison authorities were hiding the real conditions. Across a courtyard, in a building they declined to show, faces peered from the windows of what appeared to be cells jammed with many more inmates. Although Russia’s prison population, second in size only to that of the United States, has significantly diminished in recent years thanks to new sentencing rules, conditions inside remain little changed, and former prisoners speak of raging disease together with the overcrowding.
Women’s prisons are little better. Reports describe an almost complete lack of privacy—including no partitions between the holes in the ground that pass for toilets—humiliation and punishment for soiling sheets, even accidentally, with menstrual blood.5 Much more than men, women convicts tend to be treated as outcasts in society, even after their release.
Some describe far more disturbing conditions. Among them is a youthful-looking, soft-spoken former inmate named Vladimir Gladkov, who spent a total of fifteen years in Vladimir Central and other penal institutions, including a so-called torture prison: Kopeisk, a transit prison—for the temporary incarceration of inmates bound elsewhere—in the Ural Mountains region of Chelyabinsk, where Gladkov said guards systematically abused prisoners.
Gladkov, a former driver who said police framed him for murder, described regular mass beatings that began with his arrival: “They’d force us from our cells, order us to spread our legs and put our hands against the wall, then whack us with batons until we had to help drag each other back to our cells.” Guards exerted psychological pressure through a steady stream of insults directed especially at dark-skinned minorities from the Caucasus and Central Asia. Gladkov met an ethnic Tajik whose skull was fractured when he was thrown against a wall. Apologizing and begging him not to complain, the guards delayed his transfer until his skin had healed. “The most frightening is hearing others scream while you’re waiting your turn,” Gladkov said. “The fear turns you into an animal.” Doctors routinely refused to record injuries. Prosecutors accepted complaints before dropping investigations for a supposed lack of evidence.
The journeys between prisons and penal colonies, still called etapy, are also still made in the same kind of train cars that took inmates to Gulag camps. Traveling in winter, Gladkov froze in his light tracksuit and slippers. Later devoting himself to studying the judicial code, he appealed and complained at every step of his incarceration—risky behavior because most who make trouble that way are singled out for especially harsh treatment. “We’ll rape you if we want and we’ll kill you if we want,” Gladkov said a prison warden in another prison had told him. “Nothing will happen to us because prisoners are meant to be punished.”
Another former Kopeisk inmate named Yuri Skogarev corroborated Gladkov’s account. During his four years in solitary confinement, he told me, “guards would take me out, handcuff me to a shower, then beat and kick me until I fainted and woke up back in my cell.” Skogarev told me prisoners were regularly stripped and made to clean filthy toilets with a single rag. Much of the abuse was doled out by prisoners who were enticed to beat their fellow inmates by perks, including drugs as well as extra food and cigarettes. Use of such enforcers and informants, called activists, is an integral part of the discipline system, meant to generate constant fear.
Skogarev said prisoners regularly die. Four inmates were killed at the Kopeisk prison in 2008 when the authorities accused them of attacking guards. But human rights groups said their black-and-blue corpses indicated they were probably beaten to death for having protested their treatment. Nevertheless, hundreds of other Kopeisk inmates made headlines in late 2011, when they revolted against cruel treatment and extortion. Failing to provide the prison authorities with regular payments, usually made by relatives, was said to result in more beatings and torture.
Such conditions are no secret. Rights groups have posted smuggled videos of prison torture on the Internet. In one clip, what appear to be guards dressed in riot helmets and face masks force cowering inmates to strip outside, then beat them with rubber truncheons. Inmates often attempt to
escape such beatings by mutilating themselves with cuts or by swallowing pieces of wire. Hundreds of them sometimes slash their arms and wrists in mass protest. Others commit suicide. News of such events barely registers in a country where there’s virtually no sympathy for prisoners, who are seen as deserving of their fates.
The human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov described dozens of torture colonies like Kopeisk throughout Russia. “The system of incarceration is meant to destroy people psychologically,” he told me. “They’re told they’re not human. They’re punished for trying to defend their dignity.” The Soviets, he added, used to say the system turns people into “Gulag camp dust.”
Sitting at his desk in his cramped office on an old Moscow side street, Ponomaryov showed me a page-long letter carefully handwritten in what looked like brown ink but was actually the blood of an inmate who had no pen. Pleading for help in his smuggled appeal, he said he feared for his life.
Denying the existence of torture prisons, the authorities claim that all penal institutions are regularly inspected by government officials and all complaints investigated. But Ponomaryov said there was a clear rationale: spreading fear and compliance among the general prison population, a style of enforcement that is integral to Putin’s authoritarianism. “Torture prisons are places in which totalitarianism rules,” he said. “That’s why it’s so important to stop it: that kind of system spreads to other parts of society.”
Some former prisoners estimate that 70 percent of the people incarcerated in Russia’s prison system are abused. “God help you,” an ex-inmate told me, “if you end up in a Russian jail.”
The difficulty of governing the mostly inhospitable land of the world’s largest country in area may partly explain the brutal nature of Russian punishment as well as its penchant for authoritarianism. According to Slavic legend, based largely on the Primary Chronicle of Kievan Rus’—a highly untrustworthy source primarily written by monks in the twelfth century—quarreling Slavs asked Scandinavian Viking warriors known as Varangians to rule them in order to establish some form of order and prosperity. In fact, trade was responsible for the initial expansion of nonindigenous settlers into the states that preceded Russia. Archaeological evidence shows that Scandinavians sailed down Russian rivers to trade with the Byzantine Empire in the ninth century and established control over the various settlements along the way. Historians have argued that the Varangians, who probably called themselves Rus’, gave rise to the state of Kievan Rus’ and established the Riurik dynasty, which ruled Moscow until the death of Fyodor I, son of Ivan IV (the Terrible) in 1598. Real events notwithstanding, the appeal to a strong ruler to rescue the people from enemies and chaos is rooted in Russia’s cultural tradition. Citing the Varangian legend in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’s semiautobiographical character Levin praises the merits of political submissiveness by calling their rule a “privilege [the people] had bought at such a high price.”
When Slavs first began crossing the Ural Mountains into the Turkic Siberian Khanate in the middle of the sixteenth century, very few indigenous people lived there to slow their expansion.6 As usual, trade, especially in furs—chiefly sable, fox and ermine, which were central to Muscovite finance and foreign transactions—drove the explorers into virgin lands. The Stroganov merchant family would soon dominate the business. Granted estates by Ivan IV, it sponsored Cossack-led expeditions into Siberia in the seventeenth century before enlisting a Cossack leader named Ermak to defeat the Siberian khan. Scoring important victories before their leader was killed and his men forced to withdraw, Ermak’s soldiers opened the way for others who followed. Then expansion began in earnest and took only decades to reach the Pacific Ocean.
Once territory was “settled,” provincial governors charged with enforcing Muscovite law had too few resources to do so in any comprehensive way. The Kremlin relied on a harsh code of punishment, mostly for “political” crimes, to keep the lid on chaos by reinforcing fear. Slovo i delo, the sovereign’s “word and deed” legislation, called for a series of punishments, usually against peasants and other low-ranking subjects, who had been accused of maligning officials. Singing a song impugning the tsar’s reputation was enough to prompt flogging, breaking on the wheel or subjection to other heinous torture. Denunciation by others often served as evidence.
Rather than the terrible wrath of an almighty tsar, slovo i delo reflected something closer to desperation. Unable to punish most lawbreakers, the governors protected the myth of his power by making examples of a few.7 Tellingly, the punishment system was most used under relatively weak tsars, such as the first Romanov, Mikhail I, whose coronation at the age of seventeen in 1613 ended the Time of Troubles, which followed the end of the Riurik dynasty. Although Catherine the Great formally ended the system in 1762, the practice of making examples of a few in a country where lawbreaking is frequent lived on.
Randomness was a hallmark of Stalin’s Great Terror, too. Unlike Hitler’s Holocaust, which killed clearly defined groups of people, Soviet repression swept up victims who didn’t understand why they were punished. That also applied to society at large: many people didn’t know why their relatives had been taken or whether they’d be next. Although its proportions are vastly smaller today, fear still functions as the glue in Putin’s system of top-down administration, partly by helping to ensure that widespread lawbreaking doesn’t extend beyond prescribed boundaries.
Foreigners jostling in line at the so-called passport control booths in the arrivals sections of the country’s international airports aren’t exempt from that system. I’d believed that the long, hard stares the sour-faced border-guard officials train on each discomfited passenger were meant mainly for show until one encounter after a trip from Washington. The young woman behind the glass was clearly trying to identify me before she silently reached across her desk to push a button. I was traveling with my wife, Elizabeth, and our one-year-old son, Sebastian, whom the guards allowed to pass through before two of their thick-necked colleagues materialized to escort me away.
“You’re leaving on the next flight back!” they barked. Their response to my demand for an explanation was, “We don’t have to tell you anything!” After they’d left me next to a group of dejected-looking Pakistanis at a wall in the rear of the arrivals hall, frantic calls to the US embassy and the Russian Foreign Ministry confirmed that the officials were legally obligated to explain. That was a tense time in late 2007, shortly before parliamentary elections that a number of foreign election observers were barred from monitoring. My cell-phone battery died. I was left to wonder which of my broadcast reports the authorities may not have liked or whether I’d been targeted by an official who had overstepped his powers in an attempt to show his zeal.
After four hours of arguing and waiting, during which the American ambassador told me the Kremlin had been informed that expelling an NPR reporter would be a serious mistake, I was allowed into Russia minutes before the scheduled departure of the Washington-bound plane I’d nearly been forced to board. I never learned the reason for my treatment.
Lack of uniformity in the enormous bureaucratic machine that runs the Russian state has much to do with the selective punishment and enforcement that is often left to the whims of local leaders charged with maintaining order. The same was true under communism, when terrible inefficiency in the Gulag often left its prisoners unable to “fulfill the norms” of work calculated by the system’s directors. That put well-qualified engineers like Zhora Leimer in great demand for their skills, which they used to help build roads, railroads and other infrastructure. My grandmother’s husband was even able to obtain a temporary permit to leave the “zone”—the camp territory where prisoners lived—unescorted, a coveted privilege he described in letters written over periods of weeks and months.
Ivdel, December 8, 1938
My golden Simulinka,
Happy New Year’s once again, my dear one! Tell me, how did you greet it? How I met it is clear—I was utterly with you. I decided t
o lose myself in dreams and went to bed at ten, drifting into a nervous sleep. As I was falling asleep I thought about life and of you… I woke before dawn and went outside into the frosty night. I looked at the stars and absently thought that they are also shining where you are. I remembered how they shined for me in childhood… Then it began to snow and I lay down in the predawn silence while others were sleeping…
Simulinka, how beautiful life really is; it’s only that people seriously dirty it with all kinds of “isms” and complications. Apparently it’s a result of their becoming ultracultured: they forget life is the most important thing we have. Of course, everyone must contribute to culture and live for the betterment of society, but without forgetting about one’s own life… No one has the right to build godliness by feeding on people’s lives, on fresh human blood. I tell that to myself when a cloud of gloom passes over me.
Why are my brows so sullen,
To what end is my heart burning?
My end is an Asian truth,
A little muffled shot point-blank
And September will cry rain
Over my hillside grave.8
Apologizing for being too gloomy—the result of “depression and a temporary loss of perspective”—Zhora said the camp’s atmosphere had taken a turn for the worse. “Pressures have unexpectedly begun, repressions and all kinds of harassment,” he wrote. “Wild, senseless, and unnecessary.”
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