‘Sergei, why such an interest in make-up?’
‘They have nothing else to spend their money on Ver-on-ikah’
I noticed the women constantly checking the state of their make-up in tiny hand mirrors. There was a chasm between the rulebook and the reality of everyday commitment to the job. Our countries were so far apart it was hard to conjure up a single point where we could agree on even one action.
Back inside, we found the inmates living in huge dormitories, about one hundred and thirty per room in two-tier bunks each with a locker, nothing else. It was spotlessly clean and very military in its way. Very cramped but neat. There was no-one in the room but that was conceivably because they were all in the workshops. Women could attend church if they wished and there was a facility offered to very stressed inmates called a relaxation course which, I was told, helped a great deal, but I was never able to pin down if this was just propaganda or if such ideas had ever been put into practice. I say this now with wisdom for it wasn’t long after this the interpreter said to me, ‘Do you believe everything you are told Ver-on-ikah?’ He did not embellish his comment but he didn’t have to. He knew only too well an act was being put on for his British guests.
The dining room was awful. A large tureen was placed at the head of each table. Prisoners could help themselves with as much as they wanted which, today was potato soup with a helping of grease on the top. A piece of bread, the size of the palm of your hand was also available. When finished, anything left in the bowls was poured back into the tureen. No waste! This was the main meal of the day.
The women were not wearing uniforms. My first agreeable sight for they were allowed to wear their own clothes. Curiously, countering this avant garde idea, they had to wear a headscarf at all times. Failure to do so might mean a punishment of some form. As to other meals, I never did find out what they had for breakfast but assumed there might have been some processed peas available.
We moved on to the workshops, which were enormous, a factory no less, making uniforms for prison staff, the armed forces and the police for national distribution. They were beautifully made. All the various stages of making a suit were here from the cloth cutting machines, sewing, checkers and packers. This work must save the State a lot of money. I learned that other women were deployed in the kitchen and some had been detailed to grow fresh vegetables outside to supplement their diet and I could see flowers brightening the rows of cabbages. I never understood why the growing of vegetables in Britain for the Service was stopped for it seemed such a good idea. I would have thought prisoners would have welcomed any chance of being outside in the fresh air and sun. Gardening could reduce boredom, the ever-present fuse to the powder kegs of the more anxious and restless inmates.
One disadvantage of being a female prisoner here was that there were relatively few female prisons in Russia compared with their male counterparts. This meant families had to travel vast distances to see a daughter or mother and, with poverty prevalent in so many villages, it could mean they were separated for the entire period of their sentence.
I was quite used to having a punishment block in my prison but I now saw how women were treated in the Russian equivalent. The door opened on a 15-year old. The cell contained just a wooden board which was let down at ten at night. There was no radio or television, no chair to sit on, nothing to read. While there was a library for the other women, this young girl had nothing to read and nothing to do. I saw a set of scales which made me believe her bread and water diet was rationed – and this was the twenty-first century! It was very hard seeing her there but we were not told why she had been sent to this most dismal of places.
That night the men in my small party suggested we go to the hotel bar for a drink but I was too tired after the lack of sleep the night before and excused myself. The next morning, refreshed from sleeping well, I asked them how they had got on.
‘Er,’ said one looking at the other. ‘Er, we were approached by a beautiful woman who said she had six equally beautiful women to choose from. Tony said:” What a shame I’m too tired.” The other man said, ‘Hang on a moment, let’s think about it. Only joking of course.’ He went on. ‘Did you see the woman on the landing as you went up last night?’
‘No,’ I answered truthfully. Maybe I had my head down in weariness.
‘Well, she was there, at the end of the corridor with her ladies in waiting.’
I repeated my mantra to myself, ‘What on God’s earth am I doing here?’
As you will have totalled up in previous pages, I do not like rodents, members of the sub-class Apterygota and Order Orthoptera, nor distilled potato juice, which were all here in abundance. Now it was prostitutes on my bedroom floor. Well, not my bedroom floor, per se, but the corridor floor on which my bedroom was sited! It was not until a couple of days later that I managed to fall into a dead sleep and was down several levels of consciousness when the telephone rang. It was three-thirty in the morning. Slightly alarmed, for it could only be someone ringing from England who was making the call (and how did they get my number?) I picked up the old, heavy handset.
‘Гулло, с кем я разговариваю?’
‘Hullo.’
There came a blast of Russian, spoken by a male, very quickly. I tried to answer by speaking more loudly, as if one is in France, but to no avail. With rather lurid magazines being all that had educated me in the past on such matters, I was certain the KGB were attempting to find out if I was in, so I climbed out of bed and looked out of the window. It was two floors down to safety. Although I was athletic in many ways, I grabbed, instead, the only chair in the room and jammed it under the door handle, just like in the Thirty-Nine Steps, and waited with bated breath. (I should make it clear that in 2000 it was not the KGB of course but the Federal Security Service, the FSS, same jobs, different titles but KGB spins up quite nicely when dining out, and well away from their wire taps).
No-one came, no-one burst in through the door and eventually, I went back to a chilly bed. What that had been all about I have no idea and I had to add this event to the growing list of things for which I had no answers.
It was time to see how the Russian men fared for there was also a men’s’ prison in Ivanovo. This visit was as upsetting as we had been warned. I had worked in Armley in Leeds, reckoned to be a tough prison but here, no Human Rights existed.
I could see, as our car rolled up, the security fence was much higher and as we ground to a halt, commands were barked out causing the scattering of prisoners to scurry towards the far fence where they turned towards it faces averted from us. They were kept that way until we passed them by.
The men were corralled (this is the right word – to use the term, lived, would be a misuse of the word) in dormitories, not cells, packed in twenty-three hours a day. They smoked, ate, defecated together in the one room measuring thirty feet by thirty feet. The stench was, of course, appalling aggravated by the fact the officers had boarded all the windows up tight ‘… to prevent escapes’ even though there were bars on the windows. There was no fresh air or light entering the room, and the whole thing was a nonsense. No wonder TB was spreading like wildfire throughout the Russian prisons. It did not need a medic to tell me that.
We were shown the exercise yard where the prisoners were packed into a courtyard, just a long narrow pen, for one hour, so tightly they were unable to move. They could smoke if they could get their hands to their pockets. To see them, we climbed up an open-tread ladder, my first, (see what I mean about wearing trousers) onto a metal platform. It was as though we were at a zoo looking down into a pen of animals, none of us could recognise. As we were taking in the miserable scene a man shouted up to us in English.
‘When are the conditions going to improve?’ I hate to think what punishment was meted out to him. I had always considered battery hens to have a rough time but this was too much for anyone to stomach. There was no physical exercise although we were told there was a gymnasium on the site but tha
t was very difficult to believe. These men were here to be punished, harshly, not to rehabilitate them for the future.
Tony, our hardened Assistant Governor with many years’ service and experience could not stand it. ‘This cannot go on,’ he said in a low voice, not wishing to broadcast his thoughts. He was shocked, horrified and in tears.
The TB was spreading through the combination of lack of light and fresh air and there were no washing facilities. It had become out of control which, for very little money could be reduced considerably.
We needed a drink. While we attempted the strong coffee, the Governor told me that the ratio of prisoner to officer was one to six hundred. ‘And what ratio do you have in England Ver-on-ikah?’
‘One to six,’ I replied waiting for the astonishment to rise up on his face. Instead, he just shook his head. My own prisoners would complain officially if the ratio increased by one or two. And I thought I was here to learn about security. There was little chance of an escape when the prisoners had no leg muscles to run, nowhere to run to and the rest were dying in hospital.
Tuned in to my thoughts, we moved on to the prison hospital where doctors and nurses were all dressed in white coats. The beds were full of very sick men suffering from HIV/Aids, TB and alcoholism. The interpreter told me many of the men had Tuberculosis. How do you recover from such a disease when the food was so poor?
Another day, another week, we were taken to Vladimir prison, closer to Moscow on the same road we came in on, in fact it was one hundred and eighty kilometres from the capital. When we arrived, the officers’ faces lit up when they knew we were being told this was the prison Gary Powers, the U2 pilot, had been held. He had been shot down on a spy-plane mission and brought here in much triumph. Now, the prison capitalises on the museum they have developed by showing off Power’s uniform and framed documents of the day. You might remember the film Bridge of Spies which showed the capture of Powers and the negotiations which went on to release him. This was also the prison where Greville Wynne had been imprisoned for eight years following the Oleg Penkovsky spying affair.
The prison had been built for high-security prisoners, terrorists, murderers and lifers. Eighty men, slept head to toe in turns, with a leader appointed to each dormitory to report any sickness or depression to ward off suicides. How anyone could commit suicide in such a crammed dormitory where every one of your actions would be seen by several men was difficult to imagine.
‘We have no suicides in Russia,’ came the comment, reflecting, neatly, my own thoughts.. ‘Not like in your country I believe?’
‘Hmm.’
The real issue quickly became apparent. The men could not get out into a workshop to alleviate the boredom, to exercise their muscles and to get fresh air. They needed fresh air, not nicotine in their lungs. And with the stench and the long-term confinement, it was astonishing that re-offending rates were still high. It was, as usual, a lack of funds which drove an uninterested populace to keep their prisons as they had been since the revolution. Or, was it just a lack of information seeping out into the cities and towns which might have brought change? During one period of government with budgets at an all-time low, the staff could not be paid. In desperation, the Ministry supplied free vodka in its place with the inevitable result that large numbers of staff became hooked on alcohol. The corner is now turned, thank goodness. The solution – to wean the younger ones off with beer. Oh, so that’s alright then!
We had been told there were no escapes in Russia. I am certain the prison governors had been told to pass this fact on to us for we were advised that no-one, but no-one, escaped from Russian prisons. This had to be the staff anthem for, we were advised, if anyone escaped from a prison, the Governor and senior staff were immediately sacked from their jobs and, I assume, there would be no recompense in the form of a pension. Hence, no escapes, real or imagined. I was reminded of this after I had returned to England when I received a begging letter from one of our interpreters saying he had been sacked following a prison escape. I can neither confirm nor deny whether this was true or false.
But, on the brighter side of our visit, the Russian countryside was beautiful. It was as if nature had taken hold of the land once it had left the grip of humans. There was no doubt the people had desecrated the landscape for miles around yet, here was sap green pushing through the rusty piles of junk. The grasses, wispy tops, bent in the slightest wind. They swayed towards our group as we approached as if to berate us for not stopping to admire them. Beyond, in the near distance, hung gold onion domes sparkling in the sun. This was the real Russia; the one I had seen in the advertisements for Aeroflot, and the one I imagined. It was cathartic after the horrors of the prisons as I tried to clean my mind of the reek of the men.
Later that week we were taken to see the Volga in what was euphemistically described as our ‘free time’ when on a tour. Each day we were bounced between one meeting and the next, but someone supervising the whole operation, perhaps, decided we needed a break. It took us about an hour driving north-east until we parked by an enormous river with calm waters. There was, this time, a church with green onion domes, white painted walls and red stone gables looking down on the serene river as if it had never witnessed the terrors of the revolution. It was a romantic day and sunny and we all forgot our work for a while and tried to learn a few words of Russian. Our hosts were so kind in clubbing together to buy me a linen tablecloth and serviettes care of the Ivanovo mills. I went out and bought some glassware to fill up my cabinet at home.
We had peeped, and pried, gaped and gasped while nodding our heads in commiseration, pitied, protested and professed our dismay. It was time to go home where we could, as individuals, pass on our concerns to those more capable of bringing them to the notice of President Putin.
Harrogate was green beneath our wings; my sanity had remained intact but had been broadened, usefully, I think, by my experiences in Russia. It meant I could speak from strength in the future. Back to a way of life I understood, I was also pleased I had been and seen the disturbing scenes in Russian prisons which I had previously witnessed only in columns in a magazine. I hadn’t believed them, putting them down as fictional claptrap forged through some hack’s foetid imagination.
Coming in to land I could see fields, this time filled with sheep and cows though without the dense forests of birch. I was home but I knew there was a lot of work to do before the Russian prisoners could get anywhere near our own Prison Service and that was for the staff as much as the prisoners.
*
I need to insert here a note or two on my visit to Australia. I was there ostensibly on holiday, staying with friends but someone heard I was in town and informed the Governor of the local prison. This was in Perth. I then received a call inviting me to visit and, why not? I had heard of the comfort, the prisoners in Australia, enjoyed. It would form a good contrast to Ivanovo.
The first thing which I realised were the similar travel distances prisoners had to travel. Travelling in Australia meant immense distances. It could take three days to get one inmate from Perth to Sydney for example. But there, all idea of similarity ended. Here was paradise. Here was extreme comfort. Here was brightness and light with prisoners walking in couples from building to building as if they were strolling down a path in a campus. This in its way was as big an eye opener, as Ivanovo, if at extreme ends of a spectrum. Somewhere in the middle was the right path and it was my feeling, now reinforced by experience, that Britain had it about right…. for the time being.
*
Three months after my return – it was already September – we prepared to receive the Russian delegation in response to ours. It was made up of one female, an Assistant Governor, one other male officer and the necessary interpreter. They arrived in Leeds where we picked them up and drove them back to New Hall prison in Wakefield. As we drove along the Yorkshire roads filled with traffic, I explained that the county was one of the industrial giants of our country and always had been, its wealt
h anchored in wool many years before. This was their first surprise because, as they asked, if it was such an industrial giant, where was the dirt, where was the depressing grime? And these disbeliefs continued for the entire length of their stay. It was as though they wanted to look behind the hoardings to find the real Britain.
We had to take them into Leeds to collect cash from a specific bank so they could pay for their hotels, and then continue to New Hall. During their entire stay, I did not see one of our visiting party spend so much as a penny. They wanted to keep the meagre subsistence allowance and take it home with them. I could understand why, having seen how they lived. Our Russians saw how we treated our prisoners, and staff, our ideas on Bail and Remand, the food we provided and the washing facilities. Even our punishment facilities could be described as comfortable when compared with that little girl in Ivanovo sleeping on a bare board with nothing to do all day.
This focus on money, or the lack of it, boiled down to three constantly asked questions. ‘Where do you get the money to pay from to pay the staff?’ ‘Where do you get the money to feed the prisoners?’ And ‘Where do you get the money from to heat the prisons in winter?’ Nothing about the welfare of the prisoners themselves.
Probably a mistake with retrospect, but, as they asked, I took them to see my own house. This caused much shaking of heads, when they realised there were three toilets in my house and the kitchen was fully fitted. Not a lot of vodka though in my cupboards, I must admit.
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