Words Will Break Cement

by Masha Gessen

  Sanitary conditions at the prison are calculated to make the prisoner feel like a disempowered, filthy animal. Although there are hygiene rooms in the dorm units, a “common hygiene room” has been set up for corrective and punitive purposes. This room can accommodate five people, but all eight hundred prisoners are sent there to wash up. We must not wash ourselves in the hygiene rooms in our barracks: that would be too easy. There is always a stampede in the “common hygiene room” as women with little tubs try to wash their “breadwinners” (as they are called in Mordovia) as fast as they can, clambering on top of each other. We are allowed to wash our hair once a week. However, even this bathing day gets cancelled. A pump will break or the plumbing will be stopped up. At times, my dorm unit has been unable to bathe for two or three weeks.

  When the pipes are clogged, urine gushes out of the hygiene rooms and clumps of feces go flying. We’ve learned to unclog the pipes ourselves, but it doesn’t last long: they soon get stopped up again. The prison does not have a plumber’s snake for cleaning out the pipes. We get to do laundry once a week. The laundry is a small room with three faucets from which a thin trickle of cold water flows.

  Convicts are always given stale bread, generously watered-down milk, exceptionally rancid millet, and only rotten potatoes for the same corrective ends, apparently. This summer, sacks of slimy black potato bulbs were brought to the prison in bulk. And they were fed to us.

  One could endlessly discuss workplace and living conditions violations at IK-14. However, my main grievance has to do with something else. It is that the prison administration prevents in the harshest possible way all complaints and petitions regarding conditions at IK-14 from leaving the prison. The wardens force people to remain silent, stooping to the lowest and cruelest methods to this end. All the other problems stem from this one: the increased work quotas, the sixteen-hour workday, and so on. The wardens feel they have impunity, and they boldly crack down on prisoners more and more. I couldn’t understand why everyone kept silent until I found myself facing the mountain of obstacles that crashes down on the convict who decides to speak out. Complaints simply do not leave the prison. The only chance is to complain through a lawyer or relatives. The administration, petty and vengeful, will meanwhile use all the means at its disposal for pressuring the convict so she will see that her complaints will not make anything better for anyone, but will only make things worse. Collective punishment is employed: you complain about the lack of hot water, and they turn it off altogether.

  In May 2013, my lawyer Dmitry Dinze filed a complaint about the conditions at IK-14 with the prosecutor’s office. The prison’s deputy warden, Lieutenant Colonel Kupriyanov, instantly made conditions at the camp unbearable. There was search after search, a flood of disciplinary reports on all my acquaintances, the seizure of warm clothes, and threats of seizure of warm footwear. At work, they get revenge with complicated sewing assignments, increased quotas, and fabricated defects. The forewoman of the neighboring unit, Lieutenant Colonel Kupriyanov’s right hand, openly incited prisoners to sabotage the items I was responsible for in the manufacturing zone so there would be an excuse to send me to solitary confinement for damaging “public property.” She also ordered the convicts in her unit to provoke a fight with me.

  It is possible to tolerate anything as long as it affects you alone. But the method of collective correction at the prison is something else. It means that your unit, or even the entire prison, has to endure your punishment along with you. The most vile thing of all is that this includes people you’ve come to care about. One of my friends was denied parole, which she had been working toward for seven years by diligently overfulfilling quotas in the manufacturing zone. She was reprimanded for drinking tea with me. Lieutenant Colonel Kupriyanov transferred her to another unit the same day. Another close acquaintance of mine, a very cultured woman, was thrown into the pressure-cooker unit for daily beatings because she had read and discussed with me a Justice Ministry document entitled “Internal Regulations at Correctional Facilities.” Disciplinary reports were filed on everyone who talked to me. It hurt me that people I cared about were forced to suffer. Laughing, Lieutenant Colonel Kupriyanov said to me then, “You probably don’t have any friends left!” He explained it was all happening because of Dinze’s complaints.

  Now I see I should have gone on a hunger strike back in May, when I first found myself in this situation. However, seeing the tremendous pressure put on other convicts, I stopped the process of filing complaints against the prison.

  Three weeks ago, on August 30, I asked Lieutenant Colonel Kupriyanov to grant the inmates in my work shift eight hours of sleep. The idea was to decrease the workday from sixteen to twelve hours. “Fine, starting Monday, the shift can even work eight hours,” he replied. I knew this was another trap because it is physically impossible to make our increased quota in eight hours. So the work shift would lag behind and face punishment. “If they find out you were the one behind this,” the lieutenant colonel continued, “you definitely will never have it bad again, because there is no such thing as bad in the afterlife.” Kupriyanov paused. “And finally, never make requests for everyone. Make requests only for yourself. I’ve been working in the prison camps for many years, and whenever someone has come to me to request something for other people, they have always gone straight from my office to solitary confinement. You’re the first person this won’t happen to.”

  Over the following weeks, life in my dorm unit and work shift was made intolerable. Convicts close to the wardens incited the unit to violence. “You’ve been punished by having tea and food, bathroom breaks, and smoking banned for a week. And now you’re always going to be punished unless you start treating the newcomers, especially Tolokonnikova, differently. Treat them like the old-timers used to treat you back in the day. Did they beat you up? Of course they did. Did they rip your mouths? They did. Fuck them up. You won’t be punished for it.”

  I was repeatedly provoked to get involved in conflicts and fights, but what is the point of fighting with people who have no will of their own, who are only acting at the behest of the wardens?

  The Mordovian convicts are afraid of their own shadows. They are completely intimidated. It was only the other day that they were well disposed toward me and begging me to do something about the sixteen-hour workday, and now they are afraid even to speak to me after the administration has come down hard on me.

  I made the wardens a proposal for resolving the conflict. I asked that they release me from the pressure artificially manufactured by them and enacted by the prisoners they control, and that they abolish slave labor at the prison by reducing the length of the workday and decreasing the quotas to bring them into compliance with the law. But in response the pressure has only intensified. Therefore, as of September 23, I declare a hunger strike and refuse to be involved in the slave labor at the prison until the administration complies with the law and treats women convicts not like cattle banished from the legal realm for the needs of the garment industry, but like human beings.[22]

  By the time she declared her hunger strike, Nadya had been depleted by a summer of abuse, sleep deprivation, and undereating. Once she stopped eating, she quickly became very ill. Then she disappeared. IK-14 officials would not let anyone call her, and even the defense lawyers, when they showed up, were turned away. Nadya, they were told, had been hospitalized in serious condition. After two weeks she resurfaced at a prison hospital. Her hunger strike was over and she was awaiting transfer to a different penal colony. On October 18, she was, instead, sent back to IK-14. She declared a hunger strike again. Then she disappeared again. Prison authorities said she had been sent to a penal colony in a different region but they would not say which or where until she had arrived there. Every two days or so, rumors placed her at a new colony somewhere in the Urals or in Siberia or in Chuvashia—but no one really knew where she was.

  I kept thinking of the first book I sent to Nadya in prison: My Testimony by Anatoly Marche
nko, which she had requested. Marchenko had been an odd bird among Soviet dissidents, a manual laborer whom self-education had turned into a “political.” He spent about fifteen of his forty-eight years in camps, including in Mordovia, and jails and political prisons. It was at a special prison for “politicals” in Tatarstan that Marchenko declared a hunger strike in August 1986, demanding that Mikhail Gorbachev make good on his talk of reform by releasing all political prisoners. Many dissidents thought then he was rash and irrational: it would take years for the Soviet Union to rid itself of political prisoners, they believed, if it ever happened at all. Marchenko was hospitalized, force-fed, started his hunger strike again, and finally stopped after more than three months. Less than two weeks later he fell ill. He died in prison in December 1986. A few days later, Gorbachev launched the process of releasing all Soviet political prisoners. I am sure that in perestroika-era USSR no one had really wanted Marchenko to die: he was an almost accidental victim, a side effect of a system created to exert maximum pressure on anyone who resisted it. The system had changed little since the 1980s, and now it was crushing a woman, not yet twenty-four years old, who had not even wanted to fight it.

  It had been two years since Pussy Riot started recording its first song, “Free the Cobblestones.”

  Moscow, October 2013

  Postscript, December 2013

  Twenty-six days passed before there was any news of Nadya. Petya and the support group roamed Russia, first camping out in Mordovia, then following one in a long series of leads to Siberia. It was in Siberia that Nadya finally surfaced, in a prison authority-run TB hospital in Krasnoyarsk. She had apparently been greatly weakened by the hunger strike and the nearly four-week transport, but she was alive. She was told she would be allowed to serve out the last three months of her sentence in the relatively comfortable conditions of the prison hospital and would be given a job there if she regained her physical strength.

  Less than a month later, Putin authorized an amnesty bill that would free all first-time female offenders who had small children. In a magnanimous gesture that garnered much positive press at home and abroad, Putin shaved two months off Maria and Nadya’s sentences. In the end, forty seconds of lip-syncing cost them around 660 days behind bars.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Writing about people whom I cannot, for one reason or another, interview has become something of a specialty for me. It has taught me to cast a wide reporting net. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich all knew I was working on the book from the moment this project began, and each helped me collect information. Yekaterina sat for many hours of recorded interviews, allowed me to trail along with her some days as she went about living the life of a convicted felon on parole, and also provided me with documentation of all her legal battles. Nadezhda and Maria corresponded with me, answering my questions to the extent that time, their physical condition, and prison censors allowed. I was also fortunate to be able to meet with Nadezhda in the penal colony for nearly four hours in June 2013. Maria and her friends and family gave me access to letters she had written to them; excerpts from these letters are reproduced in this book with her permission. I attended most of the court hearings described or mentioned in the book; where I could not be physically present, I used audio and video recordings prepared by journalists or lawyers. Defense attorneys Mark Feigin, Nikolai Polozov, and Violetta Volkova not only sat for interviews but also gave me access to case documents, correspondence, and audio recordings. Defense attorney Irina Khrunova made herself available for interviews and accessible for running commentary before, after, and even during many legal proceedings. Friends and family of the three Pussy Riot convicts talked to me at length: all of their quotes in this book come from original interviews. Tasya Krugovykh shared film footage documenting the group’s history. Finally, I interviewed seven Pussy Riot participants other than the three whose names are known to the public; some but not all of them are quoted in this book. The one unfortunate omission are the two participants in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior action who were not arrested. I was forced to forgo interviewing them because one of them asked that I pay for the interview; I do not know whether she was asking for herself or for both of them, because the other one never responded to me directly. In the many months of intensive reporting for this book, this was the only interaction that contradicted the spirit of openness, accessibility, and free flow of information that had always marked Pussy Riot. The rest of the time, I was not only grateful for but often awed by the ability of Pussy Riot and their family and friends to maintain this spirit under the most trying of circumstances.

  PRAISE FOR

  The Man Without a Face

  “In a country where journalists critical of the government have a way of meeting untimely deaths, Ms. Gessen has shown remarkable courage in researching and writing this unflinching indictment of the most powerful man in Russia…. Although written before the recent protests erupted, the book helps to explain the anger and outrage driving that movement.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “Powerful and gracefully written… Gessen’s book flows on multiple tracks, tracing Putin’s life back to boyhood, the story of his hometown of St. Petersburg, and finally the last quarter-century of Russian history…. For all of the ghoulish detail, Gessen’s account of Putin’s Russia is not overwrought…. [She] displays impressive control of her prose and her story, painting a portrait of a vile Putin without sounding polemical.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Written in English but with Russian heart, Gessen focuses on the places and institutions that bred the nation’s most resolute leader since Stalin… Some might say that Gessen’s interpretation is political. Of course it is… But more important, it is thorough. She has seen fellow journalists killed, has been harassed herself, and yet continues to write from Russia… Her urgency is felt on nearly every page.”

  —Bookforum

  “[Gessen] shines a piercing light into every dark corner of Putin’s story… Fascinating, hard-hitting reading.”

  —Foreign Affairs

  “Although Gessen is enough of an outsider to write beautifully clear and eloquent English, she is enough of an insider to convey, accurately, the wild swings of emotions, the atmosphere of mad speculation, the paranoia, and, yes, the hysteria that pervade all political discussion and debate in Moscow today.”

  —The New York Review of Books

  “What Gessen sees in Putin is a troubled childhood brawler who became a paper-pushing KGB man and, by improbable twists and turns, rose to the top in Russia…. [She] does not attempt to weigh up Putin’s record but rather examines his biography, mind-set, and methods… as a thug loyal to the KGB and the empire it served who never had a clue about the earth-shattering events that blew the Soviet Union apart.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Masha Gessen steps into the fray with a perceptive account of the new czar.”

  —The Daily Beast

  “Part psychological profile, part conspiracy study. As a Moscow native who has written perceptively for both Russian and Western publications, Gessen knows the cultures and pathologies of Russia… [and has] a delicious command of the English language… A fiercely independent journalist… Gessen’s armchair psychoanalysis of Putin is speculative. But it is a clever and sometimes convincing speculation, based on a close reading of Putin’s own inadvertently revealing accounts of his life, and on interviews with people who knew Putin before he mattered.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “[An] incisive bildingsroman of Putin and his regime… Alongside an acute apprehension of the post-Soviet dynamics that facilitated Putin’s rise, Gessen balances narratives of Putin-as-bureaucrat and Putin-as-kleptocrat with a wider indictment of the ‘Mafia clan’ that retains him solely as its Godfather.”

  —The Daily

  “Illuminating… It is with [the] explosive revelations that Gessen truly excels…. An electrif
ying read from what can only be described as an incredibly brave writer.”

  —Columbia Journalism Review

  “Engrossing and insightful.”

  —Bloomberg

  “A chilling and brave work of nonfiction…. With The Man Without a Face, Gessen has succeeded in convincingly portraying the forces that made Putin who he is today… [a] crafty, canny, power-hungry man whose hold on Russia shows no sign of slacking.”

  —BookPage

  ALSO BY MASHA GESSEN

  Dead Again: The Russian Intelligentsia After Communism

  Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler’s War and Stalin’s Peace

  Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene

  Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century

  The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

  Copyright

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