Riot Days

by Maria Alyokhina

  i am a body

  They transport you. You’re a convict. They laugh at you and ignore your questions about your destination. We are not privy to this information. We are not supposed to know where we’re going, what time it is, or anything that affects us. If you beg, they might tell you the time.

  But only if you beg.

  not allowed

  In the transfer prison a guard with a dog carried my heavy bag from the gate to my cell. His workmate recognized me and smiled. There are beds in the cell, a regular toilet, and an electrical outlet. You plop yourself down, thinking only about drinking tea. In the Stolypin car, you practically have to beg for hot water and toilet privileges, which is why we are all so thrilled.

  The head of SIZO No. 2, Sergei Nikolaevich, takes me to his office and speaks politely, addressing me by my last name. He reminds me that ‘we are far from politics here, and we don’t have time for Moscow’s problems,’ but he still asks about Ksenia Sobchak, the activist daughter of Putin’s former boss in St Petersburg. He seems to listen to me attentively. I wax eloquent on the relations between Putin and the patriarch.

  far from politics

  Prison makes you feel more acutely that a person is internally captive. It makes you understand anxiety and learn how to hold it close and keep it in check. We all know anxiety and we all know confinement. I remember them both when they overtook me on the streets and at meetings, when they swirled in the leaves above my head, and when I was alone or wanted to be alone. Here there is no safety net, no kindred spirit, and so if you give yourself over to anxiety, it is so huge, limitless and thrilling, so rapid and endless. Abstract, broken into a thousand pieces, quarrels, loss of words, pity, fatigue in the end.

  don’t ask superfluous questions

  Convoy again. On the train, I find out that we’re going to Perm. The authorities have a sense of humour – I’ll be serving my sentence in the newly proclaimed ‘cultural capital’. This train hardly moves, either. Now there are three of us in the compartment – or, rather semi-compartment, since there are bunks on only one side. I’m in the company of a girl who’s being sent back to the penal colony from a psychiatric clinic.

  aminazine

  Why would they send you to a psychiatric clinic? You can figure it out. For any deviation from the sacred formula ‘form, norm, regime’, they prescribe Aminazine, an antipsychotic. Nothing has changed since the Soviet era. If you hear someone talking about ‘humane’ treatment in Russian prisons, block your ears and turn away. Even better, challenge it as the lie that it is. Because there are no words to describe the eyes of a person pumped full of Aminazine. It’s as if their tears are frozen in place.

  frozen tears

  In one of my enormous bags I’m carrying books. At night, in the car, I read poetry. When I read out loud, everyone around me quietens down.

  goes quiet

  ‘Parting is more terrible at dawn than at sunset,’ Boris Ryzhy wrote.

  ‘Who’s reading?’ a convict calls out.

  ‘Don’t you know?’ comes a voice from another compartment. ‘Pussy Riot’s here!’

  a more terrible dawn

  In the roof of a Stolypin car there is an opening for a fan. There’s no fan, but there is an opening. The convicts in other cars drop notes through it; so far. I’ve received about twenty photographs. On the back, they write who they are and why they’re in prison. The photographs are no different from the pictures of friends on social networks.

  photos of friends

  7. The Perm Experiment

  I arrive at the penal colony after a month. November in the Urals is cold and wild. The women in the prison transport who had already done time gave me this advice: Don’t talk to anyone; first, take a good look around; and, please, don’t talk politics.

  don’t talk politics

  I have no desire to talk politics. I want to sleep. Shuddering at dawn, 6 a.m. wake-up, I jump off my bed and run to wash my face in icy-cold water. I run so that I can find a free washbasin, but I see there’s already a queue. I run in the other direction, to the storage room, where my huge checked bag with all my belongings is stowed, which is only open for half an hour. We aren’t allowed to keep our things with us; they must be stored in this special room. I rush there to put away my pyjamas. But I see that a queue has already formed there, too.

  shuddering at dawn

  In the 1990s, when I was a little girl, there were queues in every store. People stood in queues to buy clothes, food, tickets. I’m twenty-five now. I’ve grown up. I was told that the country had changed, although, here, I find the same queues. The irony is that, this time, you don’t get anything in return. Nothing; no food. No tickets to freedom in the next couple of years. I can’t sleep while I queue. But I’d like to. Lean into the wall like a giraffe, cover myself with the spots of solitude and go to sleep.

  ‘Attention, women!’ shouts a prisoner attendant, as the head guards turn to inspect the quarantine barracks.

  a woman’s attention

  Whenever we hear ‘Attention!’, we have to stand up and say, ‘Good day!’ in chorus. These are the rules. It is the first lesson in politeness, which I must master, because to reform is to know and fulfil the orders. Politely.

  So we stand up. Forty women run to their assigned spots.

  ‘Who was sleeping during the recitation of regulations?’ the guard shouts, entering the barracks.

  We remain silent. The day before, we had been herded like cattle into one room and forced to sit there for three hours, reading and repeating the prison regulations in unison.

  ‘I said, Who the fuck was sleeping?!’ the second guard bellows from behind the first guard’s back. They never make their rounds alone.

  a sisterhood of jailbirds

  In the corner of the room there is a surveillance camera. This is how they were able to see that one of us sitting on the wooden benches had discreetly rested her head on her palm and dozed off. We all wear identical checked uniforms. We look so much alike it must be hard to distinguish whose head had dipped down. We stand in our places, not budging, and look at each other. Someone smiles, another whispers, and a third sighs wearily. Someone else stares at the others’ faces with interest. I am not interested, and I don’t think this is funny. Because I know who was caught on camera sleeping for ten minutes. It was me.

  it’s me

  You have to think up things to do to stay awake: tie cigarettes together (the packs themselves are forbidden; they throw them away during searches and the cigarettes are dumped into a big bag). Put matches back in a box. Sew name tags into your uniform. Make a list of your belongings. All so you won’t fall asleep. Sleeping is a violation of the rules. A missing or poorly attached name tag is a violation. A coat unbuttoned during inspection is a violation.

  violation. violation. violation

  ‘This is not a holiday resort!’ the head guard roars.

  ‘This is not a health spa!’ the second screams.

  ‘Out of the room, everyone! It’s time for a search,’ the first one says, and it becomes suddenly clear to everyone why the guards are here. It is not about who was sleeping. It’s the search.

  shakedown

  The first rule of every search is that it’s unexpected. Russia has known this since the 1930s, when the ‘Black Raven’ vans would round up sleepy, terrified people for interrogation in the middle of the night. Now they prefer mornings. This is so that they can take you by surprise, disarm you. Then they can take whatever they want from you with no resistance. So they drop into our quarantine barracks, somewhere in Russia in the middle of nowhere, to check whether we’re hiding an extra sweater or a T-shirt or a dress that ‘doesn’t meet the standards’.

  russian standards

  We wrap ourselves in green coats like sacks with name tags on our chests, tie thin shawls around our heads, crawl out of the barracks and assemble in the prison yard. It’s not even dawn yet. There is snow on the ground, and the wind blows up our clothes. no matte
r how much we wear – and we don’t get to wear much – and we wait. We wait outside for the search to end, about forty minutes. After the guards emerge from the barracks we are allowed to go back inside. They come out holding small black rubbish bags. The bags are stuffed with the things they’ve confiscated, things that are prohibited. They are stored in a locked room and returned to us at the end of our terms, when we are released.

  ‘Masha,’ one of the women says to me in a whisper, while we are warming tea in the kitchen. ‘If someone comes to visit you – you know, from Moscow – tell them. Don’t be silent. Tell them how we live here. You’re a political. We have rights. We may be prisoners, but we’re still people. Tell them.’

  don’t be silent

  ‘Hurry up, Crocodile!’

  ‘What are you waiting for?’

  They don’t call her by her name. They don’t tell her to come to the table. She sits in a corner, with a white shock of hair, and a wooden stick nearby – her crutch. She is sitting down, but what does it matter, whether on a solid chair or a rickety bench? Prison or freedom? She is already dead and gone, though she is still alive, still breathing. Crocodile. That’s what they call her, after the drug that turned her into a walking corpse.

  ‘Keep up!’

  ‘You hear?’

  Her hearing isn’t so good; she can’t answer. Her legs are covered with bruises because they are putrefying, rotting away. Her child is in an orphanage, because how can a child be part of her life? And maybe there is no child at all; she’s not very clear. She can hardly remember, she can hardly walk. She’s no good for anything, no good for anyone. No good.

  crocodile

  I take her by the arm. She clutches my elbow. And presses her crutch to her side. She tries to walk like everyone else. With all her strength. We are lagging behind the formation on the way to the sanatorium to have our medical checks. She might not live until the end of her term. If you have to walk across the whole penal colony, you get cold. Very cold.

  ‘Go faster, bitch!’ screams the quarantine unit monitor.

  ‘Shut up,’ I say. ‘She’s walking as fast as she can.’

  ‘Nature in the North is not indifferent, not apathetic – it’s in cahoots with the ones who sent us here.’

  – Varlam Shalamov

  the republic of convicts …

  … is what they call the Perm region.

  This is where the camps of the Gulag were, and the last camps of the Soviet dissidents.

  Total isolation, hand-picked prison guards, a harsh northern climate.

  the perm experiment

  I was assigned from the quarantine barracks to the barracks of Unit No. 11.

  My third day in the unit. They swarm around me in the evening. An hour before the lights go out.

  ‘Wait.’

  I try. To wait. This is interesting.

  There are three of them – women. One is serving a term of ten years; another more than twice as long. The third one is an accomplice. All of them are repeat offenders.

  ‘Why did you come here?’

  They don’t like it that I’ve come to their prison camp. But I didn’t choose to come here. I was brought in an autozak. I stare at them. They surround me. Why are they surrounding me? I smoke a cigarette. They do, too – each one starts to smoke. We are alike, I think. Why are they are encircling me like this?

  ‘are you deaf?’

  I’m not deaf. They want me to leave their prison camp. They don’t like me, it seems. But why don’t they like me? I think I’m okay. I look at my hands. They’re not trembling. The cigarette is almost finished. The women want to smoke again. Okay, let’s smoke again. We light up. Still, why don’t they like me? They say the guards aren’t giving them room to breathe since I arrived. Aren’t giving them room to breathe.

  ‘are you fucking crazy?’

  says a gypsy with a squint and wearing a woollen kerchief. She suggests that I organize a hunger strike. A mass hunger strike. The gypsy laughs. ‘You are to blame for everything,’ she says. All her teeth are gold, like stars in a children’s story.

  ‘The world is unjust; if you accept it, you become an accomplice. If you want to change it, you become an executioner.’

  – Jean-Paul Sartre

  blame for everything

  They transferred me to a cell on my own, for my ‘safety’. I agreed. It’s November. Snow. In the Urals, there is so much snow that my legs sink in it on the way from the unit barracks to the disciplinary block, where the single cell is. Legs disappear in the white sea.

  don’t fall

  I have to keep walking. If I collapse in the snow from exhaustion in front of the disciplinary block, I’ll never forgive myself. Never.

  no downfalls

  ‘This is your cell.’

  It’s so dark. When I lower the bunk bed, it screeches. Like bones being crushed. The door closes; I sit on the bench. I need to understand what has happened. I need to understand. The turn my life has taken. My life in prison. Hold on. I have to remember things in the proper order. I need order.

  Order.

  i need to understand

  ‘Lights out! Alyokhina, get into bed!’

  It’s not a bed. It’s a bunk. Two long wooden boards held up by black chains. On the bottom is my bed. And on the top one? Nothing. It’s empty. They took all my things. They took everything from me. The surveillance camera is over in the corner. Right above the shit-hole on the floor. Don’t cry. Just don’t cry.

  ‘Are you deaf? Lights out!’

  don’t cry

  I wake up alone, my legs frozen. I have no tights to put on. My things are locked away in another room. Next to my cell. I pound on the door with my fist.

  open up!

  Please. All these term – ‘ShIZO’, ‘PKT’, ‘ordinary regimen’ – I didn’t come up with them, with these regulations, these laws. The regimen. I understand none of it. I need to understand. Otherwise, I’ll never get out of here. I need a copy of the Criminal Code. It’s all in there.

  I have things.

  I have rights.

  I have a voice.

  Those women deliberately provoked me. I’ve worked it out. And what to do now? Try to remember what happened. If I don’t look back, I won’t understand.

  First, they swarmed around me. A gypsy with gold teeth. Then I left. Then the gypsy was there again. Then I called the guard. They took me to an office. What was there, in the office? Remember, focus. There is no one here. No one will help you. A tiny window, blocked up. A dim lightbulb. A door and bars. The guard shouts from behind the door.

  ‘Alyokhina, get up off the bench! You aren’t allowed to sleep on it!’

  look back

  Bright lights and a bald chief. Martsenyuk, the head of surveillance.

  ‘Don’t worry, Ms Alyokhina. It isn’t solitary confinement, it’s for your safety,’ he had said. A slow, soft, reassuring voice. I signed. I agreed. I agreed to go to ‘a safe place’. Damn.

  ‘I said, get off the bench, Alyokhina!’ the guard yells.

  On the sink is rust. No letters, no phone calls. Nothing. It’s futile to beat on the door with your fists. They don’t give a damn.

  ‘It’s all according to the law, Ms Alyokhina,’ Martsenyuk said about my isolation.

  ‘Are you deaf? Stand up, I said!’ the guard yells again.

  I have to understand the law.

  ‘Where is it written that I have no right to lie down on the bench?’

  understand the law

  We know less about women’s penal colonies than we do about men’s, because everyone is happy in women’s colonies. Women have to get released quicker. To get out. At any cost. So there are no mass hunger strikes in women’s colonies; no one goes on hunger strike at all. There are no riots. A society of the willing. ‘Everything is okay, dear chief.’ The dear chief grows kinder and allows you to drink a cup of coffee after lights out, and to kiss someone in the warehouse. And not just kiss.

  dear ch
ief

  5.20 a.m. Waking. I have to slide off the bunk and make the bed. The guard switches off the dim yellow lightbulb, turns on a dim white one, and asks, ‘Shall we go for a walk?’

  22ºF below zero, strong wind

  ‘Sure,’ I say.

  If you don’t walk, you can’t wake up. So I walk. I grab a shovel – a wooden one with a broad metal scoop – and carry it in my hand.

  The exercise yard is cordoned off by three rows of metal fencing; behind them is a stone wall. Dogs bark. The searchlights are blinding. They are placed along the wall and in the corners. Snow falls from the black sky.

  I clean a few strips of asphalt with my shovel, stop for a bit and light a cigarette. It takes ten matches. I watch the snow cover my clean strips of asphalt. By the time I throw away my cigarette butt, the strips have disappeared.

  barking, searchlights, stone wall