Oksana Darova. Dark brown eyes. A short blonde, wearing jeans and a jacket. She’s my lawyer. I am Oksana’s only female client. ‘I don’t like working with women’ was the first thing she said when we met.
‘Why not?’
‘Because they’re all hens. The only thing they know how to do is cluck. If you press them on anything, they immediately take it all back.’
She is honest. She could have spoken about women more politely, but she speaks honestly.
‘What can we do so that women stop being hens?’ I ask her, looking her straight in the eye.
‘We can dispute the prison guards’ disciplinary orders against you in court. They’ll get scared, that’s for sure,’ Oksana says. She doesn’t quite believe that I really want this court action. It won’t change anything, of course, and it will make my life infinitely more complicated.
I realize that I love complications.
in the middle of nowhere
When I return to my cell, it looks like a ship wrecked in a storm. Food, papers, books are strewn all over. The bedding has been turned inside out. There are scraps of newspaper flung about. Pages ripped from a notebook.
‘Remember, you can complain to whoever you want. Even the Holy Pope of Rome. I don’t give a damn.’
No one else has a minder. But I do. Ksenia Ivanovna. A surveillance officer. Martsenyuk’s deputy. She should have a whip. She ordered the search of my cell while I was with my lawyer. First, she ordered the search and now she’s come to take me to answer a phone call. She has come to see how I react to my cell being turned upside down.
she doesn’t give a damn
‘How are you, Masha? Maybe there’s something we can send you?’ my friend asks over the phone. My minder stares at me coldly. Lips pursed, her fingers drum on the table. She’s sick of having to fetch me every day to take phone calls. She’s sick of people sending me food parcels. She’s sick of my lawyer’s visits, hates having to read the miles of letters I receive, letters with Mandelstam’s poetry in them instead of plans to commit crimes. She doesn’t always give my letters to me.
miles of letters
‘How are you, Masha? Your mother is worried – why are you in a cell on your own, alone? When will you ever live like everyone else does?’
What can I say? I can’t live like everyone else. My friend knows that, and I know it, too, but my mother and father worry. They really worry. But my friend doesn’t know why I am in a single cell. Should I tell him or not? The minder stares. Fingers drumming the table top. The blue walls of the small room for phone calls. I’ll tell it like it is.
no one should be like everyone else
‘Tell the press – the screws set me up in my cell.’
The call is interrupted. The minder rushes over to my chair.
‘Screws? Are you fucking crazy?’
The voice rings out. A whip. Actually, yes, I’m fucking crazy. No need to be ashamed of it, Ksenia Ivanovna.
‘Don’t you know we have a law against slander in this country? Do you want to be slapped with another term?’
‘Where are my letters, Ksenia Ivanovna?’
a law against slander
She looks at me with hatred. She looks, but she can’t do anything. She can’t beat me. Try to beat me – the whole world will hear about it. Take your Holy Pope and the search and the single cell. And tomorrow is the first hearing of my court action against you and your superiors. I want to win. Like never before. Like no one has before.
fucking gulag
We return to the cell in silence. We walk along the barracks from the guards’ club, where one telephone hangs for a thousand people. The girls look at us from behind the unit fence and laugh. No one else in the penal colony has a guard to accompany them everywhere. They go by themselves to the factory, the dining hall, the sanatorium; only I go around shadowed by a guard.
hero/haemorrhoids
After I wrote a short article about the prison camp, after I told human rights advocates about the prisoners having no warm shawls or hot water or proper pay for our work, I suddenly became something of a haemorrhoid in the guards’ asses.
‘Shit. Looks like the fucking Gulag.’ Under the dim lamp in my single cell, I read comments on photographs from the web of Penal Colony 28. They were included in the first letters I received from friends. Behind the colony fence there are only ruins.
chasms in the russian land
A snowstorm covers the broken asphalt of the penal colony, the ruins of buildings beyond its fence, me – a small figure in a single cell – and all of Berezniki.
Berezniki used to be a city that once knew abundance: several factories, an airport, a train station. Now it’s known only for its holes.
Yawning chasms in the ground where there used to be coal mines.
the most original national idea
I examine the photographs of the chasms. There is no better metaphor for Russia than them. In my cell, I read about the Search for a National Idea competition in the newspapers. I want to propose the Berezniki chasms as the national idea for Russia at the start of the twenty-first century. But I won’t be able to send this idea to Vladimir Putin’s talent contest – my letters won’t get past the censor.
Any phrase that includes the word ‘Putin’ is crossed out by my minder.
putin
Another day, my minder, Ksenia Ivanovna, comes.
‘Let’s go, Alyokhina. We need to have a talk.’
I walk behind her down the corridor from my cell to the office and sense how much she hates me. She holds a high position – she’s a boss. She’s tall. The camouflage uniform is pulled tight over her ass. They gave her orders to deal with me. She could be a stripper if she chose to. In her spare time. I smile. She would explode into pieces if I said that aloud.
spare time
‘Sit down, Alyokhina,’ she says, and moves the chair. We’ve come to an office where she can put me in my place, using all her severity. I must act like a little mouse, like an ordinary convict. Then everything will be fine. The office walls are green. The door is closed. The window is barred, and there is an aching emptiness.
being ordinary
‘What’s with the grin, Alyokhina? You think this is funny?’
I have two violations for oversleeping on my record. My minder says they’ll take me to a disciplinary commission and punish me. She speaks sharply, spitting out the words. A whip. Her voice rings out. Well, keep talking. I’m listening. Her hair is pulled back in a tight ponytail. She speaks confidently about how, if I don’t shut up and stop complaining, they can extend my sentence. For subverting authority, for example. A whip. Or for slander, maybe. Ksenia. Ivanovna.
subversion of authority
‘Slander is a criminal offence,’ it says in the document I sign. ‘Acknowledged.’
‘Subversion of authority in the penal colony is a criminal offence.’ I sign. ‘Acknowledged.’
‘You think you’re special? You’re just like everyone else!’
And my minder pulls out another pile of paper.
look!
She places in front of me photocopies of Voina art group’s performance: ‘Fuck in honour of Little Bear the Successor’ (Medvedev, now Putin’s prime minister, is the little bear).
I would call this performance the most inflammatory for the cops, those of all stripes and colours, who cannot get used to naked bodies on display in a public place.
Naked Tolokonnikova, Verzilov, Vorotnikov change places in Major Ksenia’s hands, until I ask, trying to suppress my laughter: ‘And should I write “Acknowledged” here, too?’
‘Yes,’ she answers in a tight voice.
‘And do you feel that you are hereby fulfilling your duty towards the motherland?’ I ask.
‘Alyokhina, I hope they’ll release you as soon as possible. I mean it,’ she replies.
do you mean it?
That neither I nor Nadya would be released ‘as soon as possible’ was clear from the star
t.
Power built on totalitarian principles cannot admit its mistakes. To admit a mistake is to show weakness, to back down. To lose. This power sees conspiracy everywhere behind its back, so it lives with its head turned backwards, checking that no one is following it, that no one is dreaming up a revolution. This power must always be on its guard, it claims supreme power, is invincible to itself, the absolute made flesh.
head turned backwards
Inert, its actions are devoid of logic, it is cruel, it loses all touch with reality. A colony has a head official and he is the master of this colony. His nickname within the colony is ‘master’, and his right-hand man is nicknamed ‘the godfather’. And these two men, in a faraway fiefdom enclosed by stone walls, don’t take orders from anyone. This means everything is permitted.
we rule here
The godfather of my colony, No. 28, is Roman Ignatov. He’s a bigshot, a major, the deputy in charge of ‘regimen and safety’. Here he is, sitting in an enormous chair. Facing him, the guards of the colony are sitting in three rows. The chairs are like classroom chairs. Almost all the guards, like exemplary schoolgirls, have thick, waist-long braids. This is the disciplinary commission.
disciplinary commission, exemplary girls
‘Alyokhina violated the regimen again.’ The head of Unit No. 11 reads the charge.
‘In what way?’ the godfather inquires lazily.
‘She failed to get up on command at 5.20 a.m.’
‘When did she get up?’
‘At 5.45.’
‘That’s a serious violation. How do you explain yourself, Alyokhina?’ Major Ignatov asks, tapping on the desk.
nonentity
This commission is brought together for one purpose only: to suppress. Who do you think you are, you pathetic thing, standing there in your checked uniform with a name tag and your unit number? Who do you think you are? You’re a nonentity. A nonentity dropped in the far-flung reaches of this country, into a circle of people who are ready to lie to your face, set you up, sign their names to their lies in indelible black ink. To lie without end, until retirement. Until you die.
When are you honest, Major Ignatov? This is what I would like to ask this lazy, sleepy official. But instead I say: ‘It’s not true. I didn’t oversleep. They just didn’t wake me up.’
when are you honest
For some reason, I still believe I can explain things to them. To these people who are prepared to send women to freeze for days on end as punishment for being stubborn and obstinate. The major smirks.
‘You are lying now, Alyokhina. You know that slander is a criminal offence?’
‘Yes.’
‘And so, do you admit that you violated the regimen?’
The words of the dissident Bukovsky come to me: forty years ago, he did time in a labour camp not far from where Major Ignatov wants me to plead guilty: ‘They no longer want people to believe in a bright future; they want submission.’
violated the regimen?
And if I accept their authority, by agreeing to lies about violating the regimen, I would be submitting, too. I’d be pleading guilty to a crime I didn’t commit. Such moments of choice, made in prison, will stay with you for the rest of your life. These decisions become the most important ones you ever make. Because you can’t forget anything you do here within the prison walls. Once you betray yourself, even a single time, you can’t stop. You become another person, a stranger to yourself. You become a prisoner. And that means you have been defeated. They will have truly deprived you of your freedom.
to back down an inch is to give up a mile
‘I will take you to court,’ I say.
‘You can send your complaints to the prosecutor. The court won’t consider them,’ the major says dismissively.
The guards all laugh.
Several months later, I win the first case against the guards in the history of this penal colony.
case against the guards
‘ “But what is the black spot, Captain?” I asked.
‘ “That’s a summons, mate.” ’
– Treasure Island
New Year’s Eve. I’m preparing to celebrate it, but in my own way. On the outside, people are decorating their trees, going out to buy presents. I have other presents: official papers. Here they are on the bench. I am putting them in order.
The first is a pile of the complaints I have written to the head of the colony, with her responses. I look around. The television, a tape recorder, books on the upper bunk – a whole library, a kettle, coffee, an extension cord. Complaints addressed to the head of the colony demanding these things as my legal right had been successful. Good. I have a reason to congratulate myself.
getting ready to celebrate
‘Alyokhina, turn off the television!’
If I hadn’t complained, I wouldn’t have a television.
Now the second pile: complaints to human rights advocates about the prosecutor. Because the prosecutor is a fucking sell-out who drinks expensive cognac with the deputy for regimen and safety. He approved (in writing) the legality of keeping me in a single cell. He gave the screws their legitimacy.
alyokhina, turn off the television!
The main pile, the third, is for the court. While people outside are decorating their Christmas trees, I’m getting ready to take the guards to court. There are three folders, a different colours for each case, and each folder contains regulations and intradepartmental orders. In one of these, for example, there are instructions about how to properly search a prisoner. ‘If the object is nervous, check his pockets with extra vigilance.’ ‘The object’. The person who writes this kind of crap is definitely an ‘object’.’
alyokhina!
I hear the guard’s footsteps walking down the corridor to my cell. She’s coming because the television is turned on. The guard doesn’t yet know that it is illegal to control when and how much television is watched. I will tell her in a few minutes. For the moment, I turn up a good song, ‘Down with the Polizei!’
down with the polizei
‘I came to the court for all those who have no rights, for all those who have no voice, for those who are deprived of their voices by those who have the power to do so.’
– Statement to the court, 7 February 2013
for those who have no rights
A large hall in the guards’ club. In this hall, the disciplinary commission holds its sessions and punishes the prisoners. It is panelled, with rows of chairs and an oak table. A room that serves guards has been turned into a courtroom where guards are now put on trial.
I have two advocates working on my case against the penal colony. My slight and lively blonde lawyer, Oksana, and Alexander Podrabinek, the Soviet-era dissident who hid us in Moscow. The judge refused to allow me to be present in the courthouse, so I am videoconferencing from the hall. This means that expensive equipment has been installed for the first time in the colony – monitors and microphones – so that I can address the court about the ways in which my rights are being infringed.
trial in a guards’ club
I stand up. I look at the screen. The judge’s face is broken into pixels. The head of Unit No. 11 Nikolaeva’s white braid is broken into pixels; the fleshy cheeks of Major Ignatov are broken into pixels. The courtroom in Berezniki is broken into pixels. I say:
‘I can’t quite see you, Your Honour. You appear only as a black silhouette.’
A mechanical voice from a small speaker answers, with much interference:
‘Sit down, Alyokhina. You have not been asked to speak yet.’
noisy rights
I request that someone explain to me what kind of law forbids prisoners from sleeping during the day. The guards squirm and give answers that skirt the issue. Finally, they say: the regulations for maintaining internal order guarantee prisoners eight hours of unbroken sleep.
‘But this does not prohibit them from sleeping in the daytime, does it?’
‘No, it is not
prohibited,’ the guard agrees.
‘Then why am I not allowed to sleep during the day?’
The guard rolls her eyes, and the judge comes to her aid: ‘That is not germane to the matter under consideration.’
not germane to the matter
Darova asks Ignatov why the excerpt of the minutes of the disciplinary commission on 28 December 2012, which led to me being punished, contains much more information than the full version of the minutes itself. How can a part of the whole be larger than the whole? Ignatov tries to summon all his mental resources to come up with an answer, but he can’t think of one. He says nothing. The judge repeats Darova’s question.
‘Evidently, the disciplinary commission secretary made a mistake,’ Ignatov says finally.
a mistake
A report from Ignatov is filed with the court about a disciplinary conversation he had with me explaining the obligations of prisoners according to Federal Law No. 125. Darova takes a look at Law No. 125 and is utterly confused: this law deals with the ratification of some sort of treaty between Russia and Angola. What does Angola have to do with anything? Georgia, maybe; but Angola? ‘That was a misprint,’ Ignatov says superciliously.
Riot Days Page 10