Read & Riot
Page 13
Time and again, the needle in your sewing machine breaks, but there are no spare needles. You have to sew, but there are no needles. So you find old, blunt needles on the wooden floor and you sew. They do not punch through the fabric, and the thread gets tangled and breaks off. But you are sewing, and that’s the main thing.
At night you have a good dream that makes you wake up with a smile on your face: you dream that you are presented with a set of needles. You wake up, look around, and realize that no, it was only a dream, a beautiful, rose-tinted dream. In reality, you will again sew the whole day with the blunt needles you scare up in the manufacturing zone.
“My imprisonment, my women’s prison colony is lethargy, a dream,” I wrote in a letter from the camp. “It is infinity, and it seems my whole life has passed here. At the same time, it is one frozen moment, a single day, which by the will of some evil genius must now last forever, must be repeated again and again till death do us part. My imprisonment is the reverse, material side of the Matrix, hundreds of bodies put into operation, weak, pale, dumb bodies, hundreds of physical existences enveloped in the slime of the eternal return, the slime of apathy and stagnation.”
* * *
Forced prisoners’ labor has been used in Mordovia since the late 1920s. The Mordovian camp complex was established during the “reforging of socially dangerous elements,” as proclaimed by Stalin. Before Stalin, political prisoners were able to hit the books, educate themselves, and write. Everything changed abruptly during Stalin’s time. Forced labor was declared the primary method of reeducation. The goals of the planned Soviet economy were achieved at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives of the people sent to the camps.
Even after Stalin’s death in 1953, Mordovia remained a place where political prisoners were sentenced to hard labor. From 1961 to 1972, the Mordovian correctional labor camps were the only ones in the Soviet Union where inmates convicted on political charges (say, for distributing illegal literature) were sent.
My first impression of Mordovia came from the words uttered by my penal colony’s deputy warden: “You should know that when it comes to politics, I am a Stalinist.”
In Stalin’s time, if a prisoner failed or refused to go to work three times, he was shot. In our time, he is just subjected to a good kicking and locked in an ice-cold solitary confinement cell, where he is supposed to freeze, get sick, and slowly die.
Sometimes you find a pig’s tail in your prison gruel. Or the canned fish in the soup will be so rancid that you have diarrhea for three days. Convicts are always given stale bread, generously watered-down milk, exceptionally rancid millet, and rotten potatoes. In the summer, sacks of slimy, black potatoes were brought to the prison in bulk. And they were fed to us.
We sew on obsolete and worn-out machines. According to the Labor Code, when equipment does not comply with current industry standards, production quotas must be lowered vis-à-vis standard industry norms. But the quotas only increase, abruptly and without warning. “If you let them see you can deliver one hundred uniforms, they’ll raise the minimum to one hundred and twenty!” say veteran machine operators. And you cannot fail to deliver either, or else the whole unit will be punished, the entire shift. Punished, for instance, by everyone being forced to stand on the parade ground for hours. Without the right to go to the toilet. Without the right to take a sip of water.
There is a widely implemented system of unofficial punishments for maintaining discipline and obedience, such as forbidding prisoners from entering their barracks in the autumn and winter (I knew a woman who ended up so badly frostbitten after a day outside that her fingers and one of her feet had to be amputated) or forbidding prisoners from washing up or going to the toilet.
Dreaming only of sleep and a sip of tea, the exhausted, harassed, and dirty convict becomes obedient putty in the hands of the wardens, who see us solely as an unpaid workforce. In June 2013, my monthly wages came to 50 cents.
Sanitary conditions at the prison are calculated to make the prisoner feel like a disempowered, filthy animal. 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. We are allowed to wash our hair once a week. However, even this bathing day gets canceled. 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 toilets 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.
The wardens force people to remain silent, stooping to the lowest and cruelest methods to this end. Complaints simply do not leave the prison. The only chance is to complain through a lawyer or relatives. The administration, petty and vengeful, meanwhile uses all the means at its disposal for pressuring the convict until she understands that her complaints will not make anything better for anyone but will only make things worse.
What happens to different things when they are placed in boiling water? Soft things, like eggs, become hard. Hard things, like carrots, become soft. Coffee dissolves and permeates everything. The point of the parable is this: be like coffee. In prison, I am like that coffee.
* * *
There is little crying in here: everyone understands that it won’t change anything. It’s more like a deep sorrow that is not expressed in crying. Laughing isn’t tolerated much here. If someone does laugh, she is approached and told, “What, you having fun?” Or, “What, you got nothing better to do?” But I laugh anyway.
It’s 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 your unit, or even the entire prison, has to endure your punishment along with you. The most vile thing is that this includes people you’ve come to care about. One of my friends was reprimanded for drinking tea with me and was denied parole, which she had been working toward for seven years by diligently overfulfilling quotas in the manufacturing zone.
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, “You probably don’t have any friends left!”
* * *
I continued to dream about starting a prison labor movement.
I had a small circle of people I could trust in my camp, and we would share plans of our upcoming labor war. When our endless conversations looked suspicious to prison wardens, we would pretend that we were all just flirting with each other, talking about flowers, and everything was just fine.
Our intention was to force the prison administration to register a labor union of inmates. I ordered law books for research. It was not easy to get through the censors and convince the prison administration that it was my basic right to study books on Russian law in prison. “Was I sent here because I broke the law?” I asked the administrators.
“Correct,” they said.
“Do you want me to obey the law in the future?”
“Yes.”
“Sweet. Then I have to get my books to learn the law.” I got the books.
I studied the law that regulates a prisoner’s life. I learned labor law too. I had to learn the basics by heart, because I was aware that my books would be confiscated the moment I started an open war with the administration about our labor conditions.
And conditions are truly horrible. If you think you live in a civilized world and we don’t have slavery, you’re wrong. Here’s what life is like for an inmate in a Russian prison:
You have to work twice as long as allowed by the labor code (sixteen hours).
You work seven days a week with ancient, falling-apart, and thus really dangerous equipment.
Quotas are undoable and twice as high as regular workshops outside the prison.
You get paid a ridiculously small amount of money; my salary varied from
50 cents to $10 . . . a month.
You go through severe psychological and physical pressure if you don’t fulfill your quota.
Unsurprisingly, our plan of creating a legal prison labor union was broken by the administration, which simply did not accept our papers. That’s why we had to operate illegally.
We had a plan B. Plan B was me trying to talk nicely to the administration. I visited the head of my prison camp multiple times. Honestly I think he really enjoyed my attention, and he even asked me—more than once—to write a book about how horrible he was (you get two paragraphs, you’re welcome). He liked to talk with me about Putin and democracy in Russia (his thought was that Russians love and accept only authoritarian rule). I assume it all made him think he was an important figure and not there just to steal money—like he was on an important special service mission, to break the will of the enemy of the state and make me obedient and therefore less annoying to the government. I have to admit that this prick had a serious talent for breaking people’s will. He was born for it. He was—openly and proudly—a sadist.
Anyway, I tried to talk nicely to this person. I told him, if we work for eight hours a day instead of sixteen, I’ll chill out. It did work, but it worked badly for me: I was severely punished, sent to dig trenches around the prison church, saw wood, and pull up concrete slabs all around the camp. My unit suffered too: the administration turned off the hot water in our barrack, and worse than that, they forbade us from washing ourselves with the cold water. Don’t even ask how we managed to survive. It was ugly.
That’s how I learned that nice talks never work with those who have power over you.
That’s how I learned that sometimes there is no other option than showing your teeth and going on the warpath.
In September of 2013 I started the most dangerous hunger strike I’d ever done. I handed a letter to the prison officials: “I will not remain silent, watching in resignation as my fellow prisoners collapse under slave-like conditions. I demand that human rights be observed at the prison. I demand that the law be obeyed in this Mordovian camp. 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.”
* * *
THE DEMANDS I MADE DURING MY HUNGER STRIKE
Reduce the workday to eight hours.
Reduce the number of police uniforms we have to sew each day.
Introduce two days off each week.
Punish and dismiss the deputy warden, who threatened to kill me and other inmates critical of conditions in the colony.
Do not persecute or put pressure on inmates who file complaints against the colony.
* * *
“So you are a revolutionary?” my prison boss asked me. “Maybe legends will be spun about you, as they are now spun about revolutionaries, but right now you are here. With us. And don’t you forget it. So keep your views to yourself while you are here. For your own good, you had better keep silent.”
Prison is an island of legalized totalitarianism. The objective is to standardize the thoughts and actions of the people who end up on the island. If you dare to rebel in a totalitarian state, be prepared to be shot.
It was not an easy decision to rebel in a labor camp. But, you know, it is not enough to sacrifice lambs, calves, doves. Sometimes you have to sacrifice more.
“It was here, in Butyrka prison, that I gave some honest words to myself, some kind of word, that I embraced something,” writes gulag survivor Varlam Shalamov. “What were these words? The main thing was matching word and deed. The capacity for self-sacrifice. The sacrifice was life. How it would be taken. And how it would be used.”
Resistance gave me the strength to live. It gave me a feeling that life behind bars is not a waste of time.
It was my third hunger strike. The first one lasted for nine days, the second and third ones for five days. I finished my third hunger strike after the prison warden came to my bed with his mobile phone and asked me if I wanted to talk with the Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights in Russia. A really high person in their hierarchy. Needless to say, prisoners are not supposed to use mobile phones, and wardens are positively not supposed to provide mobile phones to prisoners. But they decided to break all possible rules to deal with this situation. It was all uncomfortable to them: my hunger strike and, of course, massive support from the outside—activists, with my comrade Peter Verzilov among them, were camping outside the prison, constantly rallying, chanting, and setting off fireworks. They were filing endless complaints and following the wardens everywhere, asking unpleasant questions about what’s up with prison conditions and why on earth they treat human beings as slaves.
The Presidential Council guaranteed me that there would be an investigation of the human rights violations I’d mentioned in an open letter I wrote describing the reasons for my hunger strike. He told me that I’d even be invited to be on the public supervisory board when I got out. You learn one thing in prison: all officials recklessly lie all the time. You cannot trust anyone. But it still sounded like a good point to start negotiations.
As a result of my hunger strike, a major review of my penal colony happened. It was indeed initiated by that council. Most inmates were too intimidated to talk with the supervisory commission about violations, but the workday was reduced in my penitentiary to eight hours for some time. Food was better. The head of the penal colony lost his job.
Quite soon I was transported from Mordovia, which is located in central Russia, to Siberia. Feds in Moscow thought it would be easier to deal with me if I was far away. They hoped that activists, lawyers, and media wouldn’t follow me to Siberia. Spoiler: they were wrong. Peter the Great Verzilov, a nightmare for prison officials, popped up in Siberia even before I was transported there. He immediately organized a local community of activists to help me, and when I finally—after one month in prison trains and transit jails—found myself in Siberia, there was already a camp outside my prison.
* * *
Hilarious situations arose after my hunger strike. I was still in prison, but guards totally changed their attitude to me. They treated me as an equal. I was shocked in the beginning, but then I just chilled and began to enjoy it. Christmas had come in the middle of summer. Sometimes it felt like officials were even slightly intimidated by my presence in their facility. I turned effectively from a prisoner into a member of a public supervisory commission in their eyes. I gained lots of symbolic power and weight. They were well aware of the trouble that prison wardens in my Mordovian camp had to face because of my open letter and protest. They did not want to lose their jobs too.
For a month they just hid me from everybody and switched me from one facility to another. My friends and relatives had no idea where I was or whether I was dead or alive. But I was celebrating the changes. When you jump in a van or a train for transporting prisoners, it’s a dark and gloomy place, but it fills you with hope. Because you know it cannot get any worse than it is right now. Therefore, it has to become better.
When I arrived at my next facility, I could see the highest prison officials lining up, meeting me and checking how it’s going. All of a sudden they started to care about following every single law.
I got back all the letters that censors in Mordovia had hidden from me for a year. I felt like I had just won the biggest lottery that has ever existed. Four giant, human-size sacks of letters in Russian, English, Chinese, French, Spanish, and more. Packages and packages of postcards that wonderful and truly alive people were sending from all over the world. Little knitted balaclavas. Rainbow balaclavas. I cried over these gifts and cards: for a year in Mordovia when I was having literally the hardest time in my life, I had no idea how many passionate activists were following our story and were dedicated enough to write an actual note to a Russian prison camp located in the middle of nowhere.
I also got back all the books that had been stolen from me by Mordovian officials. They stole them because who wants a prisoner to be inspired to act? Definitely not prison guards.
These were memoirs of Soviet dissidents, Varlam Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn. I read the notes of Dina Kaminskaya, a lawyer who courageously defended a good half of the dissidents in the USSR and therefore ended up being closely followed herself. I read about dissident and poet Yuri Galanskov, who died in 1972 in a Mordovian prison hospital where a large part of my struggle with prison administration took place. I read Vladimir Bukovsky, who managed to keep his spirit while being force-fed or made to undergo traumatic labor in camps. The memoirs of Natalya Gorbanevskaya, who was one of the dissidents who showed up in Red Square in 1968—right after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia—with a banner reading “For our and your freedom” (participants in this action were sent to labor camps for up to three years or forced to go through treatment at psychiatric institutions). I was reading and wondering if there were any limits to the power of the human spirit and will.