a misprint
In the United States, witnesses take an oath to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. In Russia, we are only required to sign a statement that we have read the rules of perjury. Perhaps we should introduce an oath? Perhaps this would stop the perjury that goes on every day? But who am I kidding? Nothing will stop it. Epaulettes are stronger than oaths.
epaulettes are stronger?
The court takes a recess.
The guards take a lunch break.
I am taken to my cell. While I’m walking there, the girls are herded into the barracks. No one should know what is going on. No one should know about the attempt to undermine the system from my single cell. It should stay within the white-stitched pages of the case.
the white-stitched past
The girls look out of the windows as I walk along the barracks. The asphalt on the colony’s paths is broken up, lined with cracks like the faces of the guards in the courtroom. One of the girls refuses to go inside. She waves at me. ‘We’re with you! Thank you!’
‘Here in the colony there are many inmates who want to express their disagreement with the administration’s decisions. But if one of them dares to make a complaint, then it will not go beyond the colony.’
– Statement to the court, 7 February 2013
country with a strict regimen
‘Masha, you haven’t touched your food,’ Irina Vasilievna says.
She is the only one of the hundreds of guards who calls me by my first name. She doesn’t shout ‘Alyokhina, move it!’ or ‘Get over here!’ She says, ‘Masha’. She opens the door.
‘Masha, the recess is ending. The hearing will resume in fifteen minutes. Focus.’
one of the hundreds
Irina Vasilievna has worked in the colony for forty years. Most of her life. Before Colony No. 28 used to be a colony with a strict regimen. There were only two such colonies for women in Russia. For serious offenders. While we’re walking back to court, I say, ‘Before, I heard that there was a strict regimen here, but now it is an ordinary one. You were here under the strict one. What has changed?’
Irina Vasilievna is kind. If I ask foolish questions, she never tells me they’re foolish.
‘Nothing, Masha. Nothing has changed. Look around you. Does it look like anything ever changes in this country?’
look around
I look around. I want very much to remember it all so that, later, I can tell about it.
‘Revolution is not a bed of roses. Revolution is a battle between the future and the past.’
– Fidel Castro
He waits for me in the guards’ hall, which is now the courtroom. He waits for me with a video camera in his hands, his head leaning back against the wall. He dozes. He is tired. The head of surveillance. He’s bald, he has a moustache. Martsenyuk. He is the one who put me in the single cell. He is the one who told the three women to surround me and what to say to me. To him, women are just cogs in the machine. I know; I have heard his conversations with his subordinates. To him, they’re just the same as his prisoners: made of the same material.
materialist!
‘Hello, Roman Stanislavovich,’ I say.
His eyes look me over from head to toe. Who does he think he is to look me over? I have seen how girls cry in the colony when he does things to make their lives unbearable. It’s so easy to do: withhold their letters; make them work 16 hours a day then thrust a shovel into their hands, saying, ‘Go out and dig!’ ‘Go on, I’m talking to you!’ He can break up any friendship, promoting one prisoner to a higher position. To him, women are inanimate dolls. He looks into the mirror and sees a general. He is my minder Ksenia’s boss and colleague. He’s bald, he has a moustache. Herr Fritz, that’s what the girls call him.
can break up any friendship
‘Hello, Maria Vladimirovna,’ Martsenyuk answers.
It will not be long before the recess is over, a matter of minutes. He is just pretending to doze, leaning back in his chair. In fact, he is recording every move I make.
‘Roman Stanislavovich, do you know what the law says?’ I ask. He doesn’t speak. ‘It says that inmates engaged in lesbian relations can be placed in solitary confinement, doesn’t it?’
He knows that this is so. It is an old Soviet norm that our lawmakers wouldn’t want to change. He nods his head in agreement.
the soviet norm of love
‘And if I love a woman? What then?’ I taunt him. ‘If I love someone, if it’s real love, you know, true love for a woman. For an inmate. What am I supposed to do then? Will you put me in solitary for this?’
He raises his head and says, ‘Do you think that is normal, Masha, the love of a woman for another woman?’
‘Isn’t it?’ I answer. He shakes his head, then says suddenly, ‘But they disturb other people’s sleep!’
I smile. ‘So does snoring. You snore, don’t you, Roman Stanislavovich?’
He blushes.
kisses, gulag!
‘Victimization of prisoners will cease, guards in the administration will understand that we are people, that prison uniform and a name tag doesn’t change anything. We are people. That is all.’
– Statement to the court, 7 February 2013
Dissident Podrabinek and Major Ignatov stand opposing each other in court. They look each other in the face. In my court case, a dissident defends me against a guard.
‘Masha, people are saying on the internet that you are the colony’s prosecutor,’ Podrabinek says to me before the session begins.
I try to believe him, although I believe much more strongly that there is no internet, that there is no world out there; there is only this, behind the white walls, with Major Ignatov, with Ksenia Ivanovna, with Head of Surveillance Martsenyuk and his bald head.
the world behind the white walls
The judge retreats to her office and returns with the court’s decision; it has ruled in my favour. Three of the disciplinary commission’s four orders against me are struck down as illegal. After the decision, Martsenyuk turns red and rushes angrily out of the room. Both he and Major Ignatov will be deprived of their annual bonuses. There has been too much attention directed at colony No. 28. The regional prison administration has ordered them to follow the law. They have been told to reduce the prisoners’ workload and increase their pay.
‘Masha, come closer!’
After the court session is over, my friends from home wave to me through the court camera. They smile. They say, ‘We won, Masha!’ ‘Look this way! Wave to us!’ They have camped out two thousand miles away from home to support me. They wave at me from the courtroom and congratulate me. Because we have won. For the first time in the history of this penal colony, where no one had ever before taken the guards to court and had never thought about the rights of prisoners.
‘If you dream alone, the dream remains only a dream; but if you dream with others, you create reality.’
– Subcomandante Marcos
create reality
February. One year ago, we were rehearsing for our performance in the cathedral. We jumped around and fell on our knees. ‘Girls, girls! Do it faster!’ ‘Virgin Mother!’ ‘Don’t forget the microphone!’ We couldn’t fit it all into two minutes, we could only do it in six. That was too long. No one would give us that much time. I look at my watch. They certainly didn’t give us six. They made us stop at two. Years.
time
If I hold the watch up to my ear, I can hear it ticking, the watch my mother gave me. I think there is something significant in this, that I measure the minutes of my term with the watch my mother gave me. The victories, the shouts, the court statements – it would all get mixed up and lost if it weren’t for the watch, which I can only hear if I hold my wrist close to my ear. Very close to my ear.
The haters. They said my family meant nothing to me. Many of them said that. But I won’t listen to them, I will listen to the time. And believe that I am right.
8. Justice in the Zon
e
No one calls a colony a colony. A colony is called the Zone.
Spring is here. Flowers have started blooming along the walls of the disciplinary block where my cell is. Red tulips. A prisoner who worked in my cell block as a cleaner planted and watered them. When the tulips bloomed, it became apparent that they spelled out the acronym for ‘disciplinary block’ (ShIZO). I asked the guard why the flowers had been planted this way; she said it contributed to the overall beauty of the place.
beauty will save the world
Working as a cleaner, mopping the floors, is a job for prisoners who have the right connections. The majority of the prisoners work in the sewing factory. They sew uniforms for the police and the Russian army. In twelve-hour shifts. I will not see the inner workings of the factory. I won’t see how the prisoners’ fingers bleed from the work, how they get bashed over their heads with their stools for failing to fulfil their quotas. The zone’s administration will do everything possible to make sure I know nothing about it.
bashed over the head with a stool
News of the prisoners receiving warm shawls reached me only by chance. It was the result of one of my complaints to the human rights advocates.
‘Did they really give them out? To everyone?’ I was jumping up and down with excitement in the corridor at the sewing school. To stop me from having access to the factory, the guards had made me an instructor at the school. The factory is located in the colony’s industrial zone, which you reach through a checkpoint. The school, the barracks, the club and the disciplinary block are in the residential zone.
I couldn’t believe it when one of the girls mentioned the shawls. It hadn’t been easy to get such a concession. It took many complaints, calls to my Moscow lawyer, requests from the local lawyer – all of this so that the system, stalling and then capitulating, would give the women clothes suitable for the minus-30-degree cold.
dressing women
‘It’s true,’ the girl said. ‘Thank you.’
Her thanks meant so much to me.
to the head of surveillance!
This girl was new here and didn’t yet know that she wasn’t supposed to talk to me. If they noticed anyone standing near me in the school’s smoking area more than twice, they’d call that person to see the head of surveillance.
Martsenyuk, sprawled in his chair, would ask, ‘Have you been smoking with Alyokhina?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you talk about?’
‘Shawls.’
‘So, you decided to play politics, huh?’
‘Politics? What politics? We were talking about shawls!’
‘Now you listen to me. You can get another three years for subverting authority. If you don’t want us to extend your sentence, don’t go near her again.’
don’t go near her
They said, ‘If you continue talking to Maria Alyokhina, you will not get out of here. And if you speak to anyone after your release, you’ll serve time again, you’ll serve again with her. Her life is written off – she’ll be doing time for the rest of her days.’
doing time for the rest of my days
There’s no third party in the guard–prisoner relationship. The guards make sure of it. Because a third party – an observer, a witness, a human rights advocate – will tell others what is going on. Everything that happens in the Zone stays in the Zone.
third party
‘What happens in our country is our business.’ Patriots who accuse the opposition of being a fifth column, traitors to the nation, love to repeat this over and over. Who is a traitor? Who is a foreign agent? Anyone who observes, who records, who makes public what they have seen – everything they want to keep hidden behind the walls of the Zone. The Zone of Russia.
the fifth column
‘What’s wrong now, Alyokhina? Just sign it!’ Martsenyuk tells me. We are in an office in the disciplinary block. He has brought me written replies to my complaints from the head of the colony.
‘Nothing,’ I say.
‘Then sign here that you acknowledge receipt of these documents, and I can go home.’
He is annoyed that I won’t sign off on the stupid official replies to my complaint about body searches.
When Ksenia Ivanovna, my minder, refused to work with me, he began bringing the documents to me himself. I had made plenty of complaints, and the head of the colony had to answer them one by one.
read it through first
In his reply, the head of the colony stated that all the body searches carried out are legal. Outside, we’d call these searches a gynaecological exam. In January, I had four of these exams a week, with no medical instruments or an examining table. It was a blatant means of causing pain in revenge for my magazine article describing life in the prison as ‘anti-life’. I’d managed to smuggle it past the guard, so they searched me ‘in full’ before and after every lawyer’s visit. As if I could fit ten pages of typed text into the place where children come out. That’s just moronic.
gynaecological exam
‘Alyokhina, sign it! Or is there something in the response that you don’t understand?’
‘No, I understand everything.’
‘What’s the problem, then?’
‘You.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘The problem is you. I’m going to go to court with each and every response like this one, every humiliation I suffer. The other prisoners can’t, they don’t have the money. And you know it. And you use that because no one outside these walls sees what you do. No one knows what you do here.’
‘Fine. What’s your point?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s all pointless.’ I felt a sudden wash of despair. ‘I’m outnumbered. Maybe I’m not doing things right.’
Pause.
I sit in my chair, not knowing how to finish this conversation, already regretting the things I’ve said. You can’t show weakness, or doubt yourself out loud, I say to myself about myself.
‘No, we’re the ones who aren’t doing things right,’ Martsenyuk says, in his own strange moment of doubt. He stands up, grabs the document and, no longer interested in my signature, heads towards the door.
not doing things right
‘Let Mothers Go!’ reads the sign my son is holding outside, after an extended visit in January. Behind him is a vast field of snow, and the white wall of my penal colony.
An extended visit is for three days, due every three months. Mine has ended now. I have another year until my term is over.
let mothers go
Lena has two long braids and big eyes. She’s the only one in the whole colony who isn’t afraid to talk to me. Via other prisoners, she passes me secret notes about the working conditions in the factory and the living conditions in the units. I receive them at the school, where I am accompanied to work every day by a guard.
‘That November when they moved you to a single cell, they gathered us all together in an instruction room and made us watch porn.’
‘What?’
‘Porn. They told us that Alyokhina acts in porn films.’
There is no one around in the sick bay, where we met by chance. Second floor, lunch break.
dangerous liaisons
‘They told us, see what a slut she is? Look at the kind of life she lives!’
‘What did you do?’
‘We watched. You need to re-join Unit No. 11 to see it all,’ Lena says.
‘To see what?’ I ask.
‘The Zone,’ Lena says.
return to the unit
Lena resembles an anime character. If you painted her nails and put her in a miniskirt, she’d be an exact replica. Neither miniskirts nor nail polish are allowed in the Zone. Lena was sentenced to five years for fraud. They don’t like her any more than they like me. They don’t like either of us for our arrogance and piercing voices. And just like me, she hates mopping floors.
everyone talks about the weather – we don’t
Lena says
: ‘Listen, I’ve got a plan. I’ll bring sheets and felt-tip markers to the sewing factory. On my night shift. Piece of cake. All the guards will be drinking in their rooms. Then I’ll write what I know on the sheets. I’ll hang them from the windows.
‘I’ll write: “We get paid a hundred rubles a month.”
‘I’ll write: “We are sick with TB.”
‘I’ll write: “They hate us and don’t see us as human.” ’
The sewing factory windows look out on to the world beyond the colony.
unit no. 11
In April, I win my case demanding that I leave my single cell and rejoin the unit. I am allowed back into Unit No. 11.
We line up wearing our green coats, name tags on our chests. We’re going to the baths, carrying our tubs on our heads.
The bathhouse is old: wall tiles crumbling or missing altogether. One rusty tap spews boiling-hot water, another streams ice-cold. You put the tub in a washbasin fixed to the wall and it fills up in a minute, it overflows, the water splashes on to the ground, dozens of waterfalls wash the dark-red floor and pool around the drains.
Riot Days Page 11