coloured water
I’m still not able to sleep. Today they threatened me with solitary confinement for not folding my blanket properly.
solitary confinement
Nina keeps saying it can’t get any worse. Nina doesn’t believe in change. Today is the first day that I can walk normally. I exercised for twenty minutes in a small square with concrete walls and a rusty grille overhead.
run, masha
In SIZO No. 6, you aren’t allowed to receive any books except the Bible. They accepted one today from my mother at the parcel reception point, but they still haven’t given it to me.
out of the bible
Nina is probably right, it won’t get any worse than this.
It’s bitterly cold. There are huge cracks between the walls and the windows. Thousands of dried-up balls of dough. You don’t notice them at first. Then you realize what they are. You realize what they are, but you don’t understand what these thousands of balls of dough are doing here. I can tell you: they’re a way of protecting yourself from the cold. Here and there, you can see a sanitary pad. Cheap sanitary pads which they distribute to the women here. They protect you from the cold, along with the little balls of dough.
cheap sanitary pads and balls of dough
Fluorescent lights, those grim, dreary Soviet tubes. From 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., the light sears my eyes. I can’t turn them off. At night, a yellow lightbulb burns above the door. No one’s allowed to use a torch: electrical equipment is forbidden. Сandles are forbidden.
access to light is forbidden
There is no logic to these ‘laws’. I can have an immersion coil, but not a kettle. What is an immersion coil? A dangerous object, banned in most European countries. A burning immersion coil can be used to kill. I can have a coil. But not a kettle.
no logic
A table connected to a shelf with iron bars. This ‘bench-table’ structure is bolted to the floor. Just in case I take it into my head to fuck someone up with it. Such garbage.
I want to fall and fall asleep. Fall deep into sleep.
I’m wrapped in a blanket, but my teeth still chatter from the cold.
‘Rise and shine, ladies!’ shouts the warden in a voice that used to be a woman’s, and bangs on the iron door with an iron key.
don’t obey
She looks through the peephole. My cellmate bounces up from the iron mesh of her bed like a ball. I remain where I am. The warden goes away and I think: she still has to wake up half the prison, it’s 5.30 in the morning, I’ve got no energy at all.
‘Which part of rise and shine do you not understand?’ I hear when she next bangs on the door.
I can’t fall asleep immediately after nine days of hunger strike. It’s the first day since I started eating again. I only managed to sleep right before morning. Won’t she just go away? Turning over on my side, I draw my legs up under my coat against the cold.
‘You’re only making it worse,’ my cellmate says, shaking her head. ‘They can turn really fierce sometimes.’
wrapped in a blanket
At this very moment, the door opens with a clang.
‘You think this is a fucking holiday resort? Or are you deaf? Get out of bed now, scum!’
‘Now, that was uncalled for,’ I mumble through my sleep. ‘Why, may I ask –’
‘Think you’re so smart, scum? I said, Get up!’
I drag myself up off the bed.
‘Patriarch Kirill claimed that the country has no future if the mockery of sacred things becomes a form of political protest. He noted that it pained him to see how people who call themselves Orthodox Christians are defending Pussy Riot.’
– News item, 24 March 2012
mockery of sacred things
I have a good mattress compared to my cellmate’s. She has to fold hers double and lie on top of it just to feel there’s something between her body and the bed’s iron mesh. That’s how thin it is.
a mattress folded double
The food hatch opens and breakfast bowls appear. A rank mixture of cabbage, tendons and sinews of some sort. I am a vegetarian. I drink tea and eat bread instead. But the bread isn’t quite bread. It’s rations.
rations that aren’t quite bread
Sticky, it’s made of the lowest-grade flour. It tastes something like bread, but after eating it for a couple of days I am stricken with a catastrophe down below – terrible sharp pains in my gut. Aside from this bread ration and some strange substance they insist on calling porridge, there is nothing I can eat. Everything else contains meat. Or something that is supposed to look like meat. Bearing a slight resemblance to it.
a shadow of meat
Pussy Riot were called provocateurs and the ‘Punk Prayer’ a provocation. For the first days and weeks they expected new provocations from us. Only, this time, not in a church but in a detention centre. What were they afraid of? That we’d stand on the tables and shout, ‘God is a lie!’ That we’d kill them with the immersion coil?
new provocations
I think they feared we could incite the other prisoners to overthrow the guards, to overthrow Putin. They themselves were afraid of being overthrown.
why not?
They were afraid that others would behave the same way as us.
Everything that happens to me is captured on video. The camera is either pinned to the guard’s breast pocket or it’s in her palm. The camera is always pointed in my direction.
human rights advocates
A commission arrives: two human rights advocates. The guards at SIZO No. 6 are unhappy about this. Their video camera is visibly trembling in one of the guards’ hands.
‘Do you have any complaints?’ one of the human rights advocates asks.
The guards standing in the back shake their heads, warning me not to complain about anything. They shake them from side to side.
Your heads are wobbling like Soviet toys, I almost say out loud.
soviet children’s toys
‘Do you have any complaints about being held in the detention centre?’ one of the advocates asks, leaning over to me. She adds, ‘You can tell me, I’m on your side.’
I look at her. At the grim, silent guards. At my cellmate. She is shivering from cold and tries to gesture to me to remind them she has poor eyesight.
‘I suppose I have no complaints,’ I say slowly.
The guards smile and nod in approval.
‘But there are a few matters that are, to put it mildly, very puzzling,’ I add quickly, nearly losing my composure. ‘First, we haven’t been sentenced yet. Guilt for the crimes we’ve been charged with has not yet been established. There are more than one thousand people being held here, and all of us are under investigation. We might still be proven innocent. Even if that doesn’t happen, we’re still human beings. Should human beings have to live in ice-cold rooms, stuffing bread crumbs into cracks in the wall to keep out the draughts? I don’t think so.’
The human rights advocates go over to the windows and see that they are indeed plugged with balls of dough.
staying human
‘The temperature in the room is within standard norms,’ hisses the head doctor, who has joined the visitors.
‘That is sacrilege, using bread for that purpose!’ a guard shouts from behind the doctor.
‘Why do you think we’re wearing all our clothes? So we can stay warm, or maybe you think we want to be pretty when you film us?’
‘So you want to joke around, do you?’ the guard yells.
cold, cold, cold
‘Second,’ I go on seriously, ‘the mattresses. At night, we sleep in our overcoats because of the cold, on mattresses that consist of nothing but rags. They’ve literally been disembowelled. My cellmate folds her mattress in two at night and sleeps on a portion about a foot and a half wide. And this morning, we woke up to shouting and cursing –’
‘That’s enough!’ the guards shout, nearly in chorus.
no, it’s not
Th
e human rights advocates tell us they understand. They ask Nina whether she has any complaints. She answers in a barely audible voice, ‘I need glasses. Honest to god, I can’t see a thing without them. And the investigator took away the ones I had.’
‘They should return her glasses,’ one of the advocates says softly, turning to the doctor.
The doctor nods in silence.
The next day, without saying a word, they give us new mattresses.
And the day after that, my cellmate gets her glasses back. She has to sign a document to get them. The doctor notes that this has never been allowed to anyone before.
There’s something to this, I think. I’ll have to find out more about human rights advocacy.
fight!
Society as a notion doesn’t exist in Russia. No one believes that there are things in the world that depend on them. On the contrary, everyone thinks that nothing depends on them.
I spent a week in quarantine, and I had the whole day, every day, free. If you call that freedom.
freedom within your cell
The time drags. Days become unbearably long.
I read the prison code. I brewed tea, drank it from an aluminium mug, a free aluminium mug. I later realize: you only get those mugs in a prison in the capital, you don’t get them in other prisons. I walk around the cell. I write a letter. I don’t have any envelopes. But you can write it now and send it later. Which is what I did.
A low brick square divided into compartments, miniature exercise yards. Rough, cold, black concrete covers the walls. A door leads into the square; then there are doors to each exercise yard that open off a long corridor of streetlights, just like a boulevard, a regular street, just as if they might open to the courtyard of a regular apartment block or a house. A sewage grate. I am a prisoner, and I’m going for a stroll. The light in the security camera blinks. My hands are behind my back. My hands are holding one another. The guard walks behind me. He tells me where to stop. The door closes behind me for an hour. I am a prisoner. I walk in a circle, crouch, stretch my arms out in front and crouch on a wooden bench. I stare at the gap between the mesh ceiling and the roof above it, stare right at the sky. The rain drips down, and the drops, like beetles, gouge holes in the cement, burrow canals between the holes, then live a communal life, in puddles. I make another round, then, after a running start, jump and plant both feet on the wall. Colourless chunks crumble off and sink into the wetness. The ceiling above each exercise yard is a rusty mesh of bars and lattice. Thick upright poles, rough-hewn reinforcement. A guard oversees each exercise yard, either moving around or standing still. Now he’s watching me.
he’s watching me
You count your last cigarettes. You realize no one on the outside knows that you are running out. In fact, no one knows that you’re now in this detention centre. That you’ve moved from the old one. I have a pack and a half left. I smoke a pack a day, and I don’t know when they’ll bring me more.
Finally, the lawyer arrives. I ask, ‘What’s the news?’
‘Archpriest Chaplin is planning to visit Pussy Riot in detention.’
‘Is he bringing cigarettes?’ I ask.
But Chaplin didn’t bring me cigarettes. He didn’t come to the detention centre at all.
40 women
From quarantine, I was taken to the general cell.
40 women stream out all at once and surround me. On television the evening before – and they do have television – there was a programme about us. It painted us as blasphemers, how we danced in church.
‘Why? Why did you do that?’
‘Why?’
They are insistent; they demand to know.
Yesterday, they saw a person on TV and now they see the same person in the flesh. They had been forewarned: the ultimate talk show. The cell monitor had told them that a ‘celebrity’ was coming. They were waiting.
‘What does “Pussy Riot” mean in Russian?’
‘Pussy Riot is something like “Kitty Revolt”. Then I add that, in English, the word ‘pussy’ also has another meaning. They say, ‘Oh, so it’s like “Cunt Revolt”.’ We all laugh and go into the kitchen. The most popular food here is Chinese instant noodles: Doshirak. They share some with me, too.
cunt revolt
There was nothing malicious in their questions, just bewilderment. When you talk to people, they change their opinion about you. People without cotton wads in their ears can change their minds quickly.
without cotton wads
The guards check us twice a day: first thing in the morning and right before bedtime. The cell door opens. Girls move out of the cell, one by one, hands behind their back, line up against the wall. The cell supervisor reports: ‘Forty people in cell 203.’
‘All good?’ the inspector asks.
‘All good,’ the cell monitor answers.
‘All good’ is the only acceptable report. It must be ‘all good’, twice a day.
all good
… the girls gave me a nightgown with roses on it. It’s sweet and white, and I look like a peasant. Through the window, you can see that the snow has almost all melted. In the morning, it smells like the sea here; in the evening, we don’t open the windows. We have a lot of shoes; they stand in a row and make friends, though they have the potential to stomp on a cellmate’s toe – I can see that clearly from up here. I sort of don’t like it that the shoes aren’t able to see the streetlights and that they are denied justice; but possibly the streetlight has faith in god, and the one divine invisible sandal touches its bright glow.
denied justice
‘At tomorrow’s inspection in the corridor, we go naked,’ the cell monitor says.
In my hand, I hold a clear plastic bag with my belongings in it. This is all I have. After a few weeks in prison, I have come to understand how easy it is to fit life into a plastic bag, but after hearing the words of the cell monitor I drop the bag.
‘What do you mean, naked?’
‘Just that. You take everything off, wrap yourself in a sheet and step out of the cell.’
‘But why?’
‘Because tomorrow is Thursday.’
Naked Thursday is the dark secret of SIZO No. 6. At the evening inspection on Thursdays, the women line up wrapped in white sheets. When the guard and the prison doctor walk down the formation, they stop by each woman, who then unwraps the sheet and shows herself to them.
naked thursday
‘But why?’
They say, ‘We have to make sure the prisoners have no tattoos.’
What did we reply?
Nothing.
We unwrapped our sheets. One by one.
political
‘The Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, Sergei Lavrov, called Pussy Riot’s “Punk Prayer” “a blasphemy, a sacrilege”. Some, he said, “including in the West, have in fact interpreted it as a freedom of speech, albeit frolicsome”. But Russian society would not accept such behaviour.’
– News item, 20 March 2012
Officially, there are no political prisoners in the Russian criminal justice system. But, in official quarters, they called me a ‘political’ – a political prisoner, that is.
In prison, there’s a lot you can do if you have money. I don’t have money. It wouldn’t matter if I did. If there’s a clandestine phone making the rounds in the cell block, I don’t know about it because I’m a political. With a political, regulations must be strictly enforced: no phones, no TV after lights out. Obey the rules.
The Bass Player sent me some books, they were taken down to the basement for inspection. Now I have to go and explain why Georges Sand and Simone de Beauvoir represent no sort of danger to anyone.
the danger of simone
After a few days, the prosecutor, a portly man, arrives. All the women stand in a line in front of him. He asks, ‘Is everything in order?’ And they answer, ‘Everything’s in order.’ Then he takes me behind the iron door, and asks, ‘Is everything satisfactory?�
� I remember he wore glasses. I tell him that, on Thursdays, the women have to stand in the corridor naked. He seems taken aback; his expression changes.
the prosecutor
Then he asks, ‘Any other problems?’
‘Books,’ I say.
That is, the absence of them.
The library is a cardboard box full of romance novels under the bed.
It sounds like the only things I don’t like are Naked Thursdays and romance novels.
i don’t like naked thursdays and romance novels
After the prosecutor left, they moved me to another room. Fifteen minutes later. I had to roll up the mattress again. I was taken to a cell for people requiring closer supervision. A cell for four. No. 210. For people suspected of serious economic crime; ex-members of the police force; stool pigeons; people of my ilk.
I spent half a year in cell no. 210.
Today, Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia is on TV. My cellmates are nice. Aya is nearly forty, but she’s more like a child than I am. Larisa is truly bold and fearless, and she has a furry black cat curled up on her lap. The convoy escort is puffing and panting outside the window – they’re bringing someone back from court. After midnight. Our ‘Punk Prayer’ is the subject of constant debate – good practice for making public statements.
Riot Days Page 5