Read & Riot

by Nadya Tolokonnikova

My mind is swimming as I scribble my thoughts. It’s what I was thinking at that time, but I didn’t have to write it down to remember it all my life:

  “There are so many things I haven’t managed to do. I had so many ideas. I have done so little for my age. If I had only known I would be thrown in jail when I was twenty-two. . . . Are headache tablets permitted in jail? I need them. I take them every day. And . . . and there is a text I still haven’t finished writing. Tomorrow is my daughter Gera’s birthday. We never finished buying her presents. What will she think? How is she doing without me? When will I be able to come back? Will I be able to? Where am I? What happens when a person is imprisoned? It’s like she is dead to other people, right?”

  Your first jail cell is a relief. Finally, cops and investigators no longer surround you. There are no more questions. It is just you and the wall opposite you.

  I turn on the radio. “Members of the controversial group Pussy Riot, who disturbed the peace in Christ the Savior Cathedral, have been detained and placed in a temporary detention facility. They are under investigation,” reports Radio Russia.

  “Thanks, goddamnit, for the news. We didn’t need you to tell us,” I say to the radio as I shiver on my bunk.

  Three days after our arrest we are brought to the court that—surprise!—decided to keep us locked up during the investigation (the investigation of a highly dangerous criminal activity—girls jumping around for forty seconds).

  This is what was written in my criminal case, case no. 17780: “Pretrial restrictions not involving detention cannot guarantee the accused will honor the obligations imposed on her by the Criminal Procedure Code and will permit Tolokonnikova to escape, obstruct the investigation, and continue to engage in the activity that has led to the filing of these criminal charges.” That’s what law enforcement people normally say in situations when they need to hold someone for a long time. And it’s not like what they said was untrue: no doubt if I stayed out of prison, I would indeed “continue to engage in the activity that has led to the filing of these criminal charges.” No doubt about that at all.

  * * *

  Women’s Pretrial Detention Facility No. 6 is a place of magical, malicious beauty. The old, fortresslike brick building is constructed in the shape of a rectangle. It contains a huge yard where, in a concrete structure divided into sectors, suspects, defendants, and convicts are walked.

  It’s a clammy brick castle pervaded by the never-fading stench of rotting garbage. And by the chimes coming from a nearby church on Sundays.

  Some jail cells contain fifty-four people, even though they have only forty-one beds. Girls sleep under benches, come out from under the table in the morning. A pregnant girl sleeps on a broken cot. The cells are full of yelling and shouting.

  New arrivals are led into a gloomy room with dark-green walls and old, dusty lights. In its depths sits a woman who is either very young or going on forty. It’s hard to say, because the expression of indifference and hopeless fatigue imprinted on her face would age even an eighteen-year-old woman. She issues you a mattress.

  Hugging the mattress and swaying after ten days without food, you climb to the third floor. A semicircular brick wall patterned with narrow windows made of thick, opaque glass frames the staircase.

  With each passing day of the hunger strike, your blood pressure falls. Headaches have become so bad it is hard to get out of bed. For the first time in your life you can feel your own kidneys (because they are sick too), and your skin is dry, and your lips are cracked.

  Finally, you chew a piece of prison bread, washing it down with the local tea, a sweet, light-brown, lukewarm liquid. After your hunger strike, you respect the prison bread from that day on.

  * * *

  I’ve learned some things in jail. I used to never be able to do push-ups, touching my breasts to the floor. In prison, I can pump them out. During strolls, I wear myself out by doing hundreds of exercises.

  * * *

  Six months after our arrest, the court bailiffs’ dog, which had sat next to our cage for three hours with a sad, tormented expression on its mug, suddenly stiffened, its body twisted in a light convulsion, and spewed a puddle of vomit on the courtroom’s parquet floor.

  The bailiffs glanced at the dog reproachfully, and the judge paused for a moment, but the trial went on without a hitch. The people in the gallery laughed. We watched the dog sympathetically for the rest of the court day. Who knows why, but the puddle was not cleaned up for another three hours.

  “Hold still! No sudden movements!”

  In the basement of the lockup at the court building, we are under attack by another dog and its master, a sullen, wiry man resembling both the anti-intellectual hero of a Hollywood action movie and a porn actor playing the role of a rough, simple man. The dog barks its head off and tries to attack us. The guy digs his sinewy legs into the floor and uses his whole weight to try and pull the dog away. The dog continues to yowl.

  “Excuse me, but why is your dog so agitated?” I ask.

  “She has been trained to react to jail smell.”

  Great. Now even dogs will treat me as an inferior because I am in jail.

  * * *

  A lot of strange things happened while we stayed in pretrial detention.

  I was locked in a cell with a former police investigator. She was one of those people who had followed her heart and joined the police after watching a TV series about good cops in her childhood. During the 1990s she investigated crimes, saving citizens from malevolent cops, and she was happy. In 2003 she resigned, because she lost interest. Nobody needed crimes solved. Instead, total submission and unconditional loyalty were all that were required, even the willingness to break the law. Her ex-husband, also a cop, put her in jail for a crime she did not commit. She was accused of being a fraud. But in fact her ex-husband openly told her that her criminal case was bullshit, and if she’d give him a flat she owned, he’d make this case disappear and she’d be free. She refused to give him the flat. So she was in jail.

  One day during the Pussy Riot trial, she had a revelation that what John the Evangelist had written about would come to pass, purging Russia of the Putinist abomination.

  Meanwhile, a priest who wanted to apologize to Pussy Riot was banned from the ministry by the church.

  A man who claimed to be a supporter of Pussy Riot tried to kill with an ax the judge who had given permission to arrest us.

  Orthodox activists were walking around the court chanting, “All power is from God! Send the witches to the bonfire.” People dressed like Cossacks attempted to light a fire for the witches.

  * * *

  PENITENTIARY NEW YEAR RECIPES

  OLIVIER SALAD

  Instant noodles (substitute for potatoes because boiling potatoes is restricted)

  Pickled cucumbers

  Canned peas

  Onion

  Mayonnaise (a lot)

  Canned fish/beef (instead of popular Doktorskaya sausage)

  NEW YEAR’S EVE CAKE

  Cookies

  Butter

  Condensed milk (a lot)

  Put the ingredients in the mayo container (there are no other bowls anyway) and combine.

  Enjoy your meal! Happy New Year!

  * * *

  The court was surrounded by people who supported us. And by some who hated us—Orthodox Christian activists who were asking for ten years of prison for us and were walking around in “Orthodox Christianity or death” T-shirts.

  Our judge complained that she was being publicly shamed for fulfilling her duties. Indeed, activists who saw her walking the corridors of court would start to scream, “Shame on you! Shame on you!” The day before the verdict in the Pussy Riot trial was announced, our judge was assigned a personal government security detail.

  The cells are located in the court basement, where you wait until guards bring you to the courtroom. These cells are always outstandingly dirty, dark, and small. So you’re sitting there chewing your crackers, reading
notes that have been left for you by other prisoners: “Russia will be free,” “Sun shines for thieves, sun does not shine for cops,” “ACAB,” prison love poetry (the whole genre).

  You sit on a dirty bench. Guards are shooting idiotic comments at you and you’re swallowing it. You’re trying not to lose a sense of self-respect, though. You’ll be brought to your friends, relatives, all your supporters who wait outside. You don’t want to show them how humiliating and discouraging your whole experience in jail is. You’re smiling and your smile is an act of resistance. It’s a matter of principle, if you wish. It’s tough and gloomy here in jail, but you don’t give those who put you here joy in observing your sufferings. Fuck you, dear government. My smile is my ultimate weapon.

  It’s awkward to hear your own sentence being read out. I’d only seen things like that in movies before. You’re expected not to sleep the night before your sentence. I resisted this tradition in my own fashion and slept like a baby. If you’re about to be transported to a prison camp where you’ll have to work as a slave, you’d better get some good sleep while you have the chance.

  When they read your sentence, you have to be handcuffed. For four hours you stand, handcuffed, listening to the bullshit that your judge did not even write herself. This kind of decision comes from the administration of the president. You’re listening to your sentence and know already—from your interrogators, from prosecutors, from Putin’s comments on your case, and from TV propaganda—that you won’t get out of prison soon.

  “Defendants’ behavior cannot be corrected without isolation from society,” says the judge, and you know what this formula means. You’re going to a labor camp. And then she adds, “Two years.” It sounds like forever. Every day in prison lasts forever.

  We were transported back to the detention center surrounded by five police cars and a couple of police buses. They literally blocked roads to transport us to the facility, because they were scared that protesters would try to free us. I was thinking about my future life in a penal colony and trying to convince myself that it was an exciting challenge to me as an activist.

  Heroes

  emmeline pankhurst

  The fight for women’s suffrage—the right of women to vote in elections—has been long and hard. The white male oligarchs who hold power have been reluctant to give the vote to anyone other than themselves—even today, look how hard they are working to take the vote away from poor and minority voters in the United States. So at the turn of the twentieth century, when women came together to demand rights similar to men, it was clear: the struggle was going to be difficult.

  One of the great pioneers of the women’s vote was Emmeline Pankhurst. I learned about Pankhurst when I was a schoolgirl. There was an English language lesson and I had to pick an influential historical figure to talk about. My affair with Emmeline started from me misspelling her surname: I was sure for a while that it was “Punkhurst,” which sounded super dope to my Russian ear, more like “Punk Thirst.” As a result, I believed that Pankhurst was the mother of English punk.

  Emmeline Goulden was born in Manchester, England, in 1858. The man she married, Richard Pankhurst, was a lawyer who supported voting rights for women and drafted a suffrage bill in the 1860s. With her husband’s support, Emmeline founded the Women’s Franchise League and won the right to vote in local elections. After his death, she founded the Women’s Social and Political Union, which included her daughters Christabel and Sylvia. The organization worked for social reforms, in particular the vote. Give us the right to vote, the women said, and we will fulfill our obligation as citizens.

  Frustrated by an immobile government, the women got “militant”—which is what men say when women misbehave. Emmeline was arrested often, and when she went on hunger strikes in prison, she was force-fed. When my prison doctors approached me on my eighth day of hunger strike to say I was about to be force-fed, I thought about Emmeline.

  Christabel organized a group of women arsonists. Women all over the world began doing organized radical actions. They poured acid in mailboxes, broke windows, and chained themselves to railings. In the most dramatic action, a woman named Emily Davison went out on the racecourse during the biggest horse race in England, the Derby, and was trampled to death.

  Although male onlookers were horrified by such unladylike actions, the suffragists were absolutely fearless. The British government decided it didn’t look good to stick feeding tubes down the throats of ladies in prison to stop them from starving themselves to death, so they passed the “Cat and Mouse Act.” Women who went on hunger strike were released and rearrested when they regained some strength. Emmeline was let out of prison and arrested twelve times in a year under this act.

  Emmeline described herself as a “soldier.” She was clear on what had to be done to get women to be treated as human beings. The government was going to have to either kill women or give them the vote.

  In 1913, she made a speech to supporters in Hartford, Connecticut. (Women suffragists were jailed and force-fed in the United States too, of course.) “You have two babies very hungry and wanting to be fed,” she said. “One baby is a patient baby, and waits indefinitely until its mother is ready to feed it. The other baby is an impatient baby and cries lustily, screams and kicks and makes everybody unpleasant until it is fed. Well, we know perfectly well which baby is attended to first. That is the whole history of politics.”

  Then came World War I. It was hard for even the most reactionary government to deny the contribution made by women to the war, and women in the United States and Britain got the vote shortly after, but only those over thirty in the United Kingdom (along with millions of men over twenty-one with no “property”). In 1928, the year Emmeline Pankhurst died, the women’s voting age was brought into line with the men’s.

  Like a lot of rights unwillingly granted by states, the right to vote is fragile. Women only got the right to vote in Swiss national elections in 1971. Don’t even ask about Saudi Arabia. A woman’s right to choose is being taken on nationally and locally. Seven US states have only one legal clinic licensed to perform abortions. How secure is gay marriage? Or Medicare and Medicaid? Rights hard won by women like Emmeline Pankhurst aren’t won forever. We have to not only work for new rights but protect the ones we already have. Like hungry babies, we must kick and scream and raise hell to be fed.

  Rule № 8

  BREAK OUT FROM PRISON

  * * *

  The modern prison system, in the form in which it exists in Russia, the United States, China, Brazil, India, and many, many other countries—as an island of legalized torture—should be destroyed. That’s it.

  * * *

  The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

  FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD

  I’m suggesting that we abolish the social function of prisons.

  ANGELA DAVIS

  While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

  EUGENE V. DEBS, STATEMENT TO THE COURT UPON BEING CONVICTED OF VIOLATING THE SEDITION ACT, SEPTEMBER 18, 1918

  Have not prisons—which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe—always been universities of crime?

  PYOTR KROPOTKIN, ANARCHISM: ITS PHILOSOPHY AND IDEAL

  Oh bondage! Up yours!

  X-RAY SPEX, “OH BONDAGE UP YOURS!”

  Words

  the prison-industrial complex

  It’s a well-known fact: when you extract profits and then label yourself a savior, you’re the worst sort of douche—you’re a hypocritical douche. People like this use desperation and poverty, discrimination and racism to build one of the most profitable of all global enterprises, the prison-industrial complex. It’s been said that prisons are here to help us, but this is not so—we don’t get much help from them. We’re silence
d, enslaved, and used. They say that it’s about “rehabilitation,” but often prisoners don’t even have the freedom to read books, talk to relatives, or go to church—they are too busy working, making profits for the penitentiary owners.

  Hopelessness partnered with cynicism and cruelty is what I’ve seen in the eyes of those who have to go through the prison system as it exists in modern Russia and in modern America. During the two years I spent in Russian prisons, I dreamed of another, alternative prison system that would give prisoners a chance to explore their inner worlds, get educated, read, create art. I literally had dreams about it: dreams about a penal colony where inmates would learn about other cultures—Chinese, Indian, Iranian, Japanese cultures. A strange thing happened: I woke up with the English word “REVIVAL” pulsing in my head. In my dream, it was written on a chalkboard in a prison class. I had no idea what this word meant at that time, but I wrote it down. I explored its meaning later.

  In reality, the nightmare of prison couldn’t have been more different from what I witnessed in my dreams. It was dehumanizing, barbaric. “The prison . . . is not only anti-social, but anti-human, and at best is bad enough to reflect the ignorance, stupidity and inhumanity of the society it serves.” That’s from Eugene V. Debs (from his book Walls and Bars, published in 1927, after Debs’s death), a political organizer and labor union leader who ran for president from prison, where he spent six months as the result of his socialist activity.

  “It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity,” writes Howard Zinn in You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.