a matter of principle
Before lights out, the guard takes the padlock off the door to my ward in the sick bay. She takes me to smoke a cigarette. In the sick bay, everyone smokes in the back yard: three mesh fences, a no-go area, a white stone wall. Behind it, behind the wall, is an abandoned factory. A railway – trains used to come here, but now they’re gone. Stars hang low in the sky. I smoke; the guard stands next to me, I sit on the steps. I sit on the steps in my uniform with its name tags, my legs tucked under me. Night time. I don’t yet know that tomorrow will be the last, the eleventh, day of my hunger strike. I don’t yet know that Major Ignatov will remove the padlocks, that I have won. Stars hang low in the sky. One shines steadily, the others shimmer.
‘Have you finished your cigarette? Time to go back.’
Wait a minute, I want to remember something. I want to remember this night.
Then the guard says suddenly, ‘Alyokhina, what are you trying to achieve? What is this hunger strike all about?’ She adds: ‘You know that everyone is just fucking tired of you.’
low star
Of course, she would say that. Simple. Why are you going on hunger strike? What’s the problem? Do your time, then leave, and protest on the outside. On the streets, or wherever you hold your protests. That’s how she thinks. Sometimes, she says it out loud. Both this guard and the other, the one who took me for a smoke yesterday, say the same thing. This one has a black ponytail, a big black walkie-talkie on her belt. The one from yesterday is Yana, a tall blonde with freckles. For the half-year I’ve been in the colony, the guards – all except one – have failed to understand why, when you’ve been thrown in prison for protesting, you still keep protesting. Do your time, and when you get out from the Zone you can start your protests again. What kind of answer can I give you, Guard? I protest wherever I can, wherever I need to. That’s my nature. I need to protest.
justice in the zone!
Major Nikolayeva with the long blonde braid sits on my bed. Her plump legs in black stockings are crossed.
‘Everything’s all right, Masha. Let’s go. There are no padlocks on the fence gates.’
She holds out a statement, a pen for me to sign it with. She waits. She is waiting for me to put my signature to a statement: ‘The hunger strike is finished.’ She knows that they will soon take me away from this colony. She knows that the chiefs put in a request to Moscow. And Moscow gave the okay. And Ignatov removed the padlocks.
‘So? Are you going to sign?’
shall we sign?
We leave the sick bay because I don’t believe the padlocks have gone. She walks on ahead, but it’s hard for me to keep up. If you are on hunger strike, you get out of breath quickly.
‘I can’t keep up with you, Major.’
She turns around. She looks at me with compassion, waits, then starts walking again. Soon, she is far ahead of me. The June sunshine is hot, the air is stuffy. The padlocks have gone; women in uniforms with name tags walk between the units in formation. One of them waves at me and, in complete silence, her lips form the words: ‘Thank you, Masha.’ Victory. So, shall we sign?
women walking in formation
I think about fate. About how many prisoners who protested have died and now lie in the ground. It is just an illusion that you go on hunger strike to achieve results. Yes, that’s how it begins but, later, you realize that it’s not for the imagined outcome, but for the very right to protest. A narrow sliver of a right, in a huge field of injustice and mistreatment. You also realize that your right will always be just a narrow sliver in the field. Not there, with the majority. But I love this sliver of freedom, however little it’s noticed by those on the other side of the wall.
The major’s blonde braid is a reminder of death. I sign the paper saying I will end the hunger strike. I will not die.
end the hunger strike
In Penal Colony No. 28, there is one telephone for a thousand people. In the club on the second floor, where the telephone is located, they introduced a timetable for prisoners to receive a phone call once a month.
‘If we were to put a phone in every unit, who’d keep track of the calls, Maria Vladimirovna?’ Martsenyuk, who has called me in for a disciplinary conversation, asks.
‘I don’t care,’ I answer. ‘Families are being destroyed because you don’t have enough telephones.’
‘We don’t have enough guards. Do you think people are lining up to work in this place?’
‘Those are just excuses.’
‘Hey, watch what you say!’
After two months of intensive human rights correspondence, telephones are installed in each unit.
simple women
After the hunger strike, I returned to the unit. The unit monitor gave me a birthday card. She wrote in it: ‘Masha, I wish you simple women’s happiness.’
Then I was called to the office. The heads are sitting on chairs in a semicircle, and I stand across from them.
‘So, Masha. It will be as you wished,’ the head of regimen and safety begins.
the heads smiled
‘You will be going to court. To your next parole appeal. This time you’ll be able to take part in person in the courthouse,’ says the head of surveillance.
‘You need to collect all your things,’ says the head of regimen and safety.
‘So that you leave nothing behind,’ says the head of surveillance.
If they are so glad, it can’t be just that I’m going to a court hearing. They’re glad because they’re getting what they wanted; I’m being transferred to another region. Far from their taiga.
I run around the colony, gathering my bags, the things that the guards confiscated during their searches, and take them all to my unit.
‘I need to make a phone call.’
‘All our lines are down.’
‘You don’t understand. I’m not leaving here without a phone call.’
‘Fine, we’ll have them fixed.’
Of course, nothing was broken in the first place.
other people’s letters
I’m sitting on the floor. With two guards. They are looking through my papers. Hundreds of pages are strewn around. They have orders to read everything to make sure I don’t leave with anyone else’s letters or any records. ‘There are no records, no papers,’ I tell them. ‘We know,’ they say. ‘But we have orders.’ And they continue. Bags are packed. There are four bags; they weigh more than twice as much as I do.
a gleaming autozak
They carry the bags; we walk to the iron gates of the camp. It’s hot. It’s July.
We walk through the gates, where a small, gleaming autozak is waiting, two brand-new surveillance cameras inside it. I get in, look out of the window. Suddenly, all the heads and guards come out. They stand in a line by the gates and wave goodbye. All of them together. Like an old-fashioned photograph of a family. They keep waving to me until we are far down the road and the colony disappears from view.
A year later, the general of the prisons of this region will be dismissed from his post.
Two years later, the general will be wanted by the police.
But that will happen later. Right now, we are saying goodbye.
9. No Pasaran!
Usually, they lie low; they don’t get mixed up in the conflicts in the Zone. They make up about a quarter of the women prisoners. They are the murderers: they killed husbands or partners who’d been beating them for years. The towns where they come from – mostly – provincial towns, sometimes villages – want to forget them. Their families don’t send letters; they have written them off. When they leave the Zone, they have no home to return to. The homes they shared with their victims are given by the courts to the victims’ families. To the mothers and sisters of their murdered husbands.
russian suffragettes
This is a Russian story. The story of how she loved him and drank with him. Of how she grew old and stooped by the time she turned thirty. He beat her when he came home af
ter being with a neighbour. He locked her in the basement. He stole her wages. He handcuffed her to the radiator. He was no better than her, nor any worse; he just had bigger muscles. They drank vodka from cheap glasses.
She called the police, and they took him to a cell for the night. When he got back home, he beat her even harder. So she stopped calling the police. Then he began to make friends with the cops. Because they were men, too.
my hell – my rules
Of course, I didn’t go back to Berezniki. I was sent to Nizhny Novgorod. IK-2, Correctional Institution No. 2.
It was another month’s convoy on the same route, in autozaks and Stolypin cars, only this time coming back from the Urals. I travelled with five enormous checked shopping bags full of possessions and books.
IK-2 is considered a model penal colony. It is on the fringes of Nizhny Novgorod. There is an apartment building right opposite the colony gates. The barracks are not fenced off with iron mesh; you can walk around them, holding another girl by the hand.
And there is also a church. A big, white church. They say that it was built with money from prisoners who desperately wanted an early release.
The prisoners kiss each other behind the church walls.
Closer to the political centre, to the capital, IK-2 was strikingly different from Berezniki – on the surface. In reality, it was the same system, just with a different expression on its face.
two prisons, two raisins
There was one other political prisoner in the colony. Her name was Olga. When they brought me there, the guards locked Olga up in solitary. Just like that. For a few weeks. Olga was a ‘political’, and that was enough. The guards couldn’t deal with the idea that we would get to know each other, or even become friends. Olga has a grenade tattooed on her left shoulder because she is from Limonov’s political party. ‘Another Russia’ is how they began to call themselves after Putin banned ‘the National Bolsheviks, which was their name’. I came to the colony and all the talk is only of her.
the other political
‘Why is she in solitary?’ I hear the question hover above me in the North, the area where we go to smoke. The indignant question swirls in the smoke.
‘Because of this one,’ her friends say. For several days, they look at me through narrowed eyes. ‘This one’ is what they call me – they love Olga. They don’t understand why she’s in solitary. They don’t understand what being a ‘political’ means. To them, she’s just Olga, a girl who it’s cool to sing with and play guitar with. They refuse to talk to me; they whisper together in corners, turn their backs to me if I stand nearby.
grenade on the left shoulder
Then she gets out. She acts as though nothing has happened. It’s okay, it’s just a cell.
‘It’s on their conscience, not mine,’ she says.
‘They don’t have a conscience, Olga,’ I answer.
She examines me through the thin lenses of her glasses.
‘Smoking will kill you,’ she replies.
We become friends, of course. We are so different we joke that we’d never even have said hello on the outside. Olga is one of the leaders of Limonov’s party – a Limonka. She’s also a Christian. I walk with her around the whole colony, yelling, ‘A Limonov and Jesus Christ in one package, how this is possible? Don’t you know anything about history? The Great Terror, and all that? Maybe I should get you a couple of books from the library.’
friendship against the system
I work in the library. There was an order from Moscow for me to quietly serve my sentence. So they give me things in the colony they refuse everyone else. Work in the library is usually reserved for prisoners with the right connections in the right places. But I’m in the library ‘just because’. I hear the guards talking about me in the office. ‘We have to put up with her for a couple more months,’ they say. The guards still don’t like me. And they shouldn’t.
‘What do they have against you?’ Olga looks at me, uncomprehendingly. She has a perfect green uniform, short red hair, glasses. Hands in her pockets, she is self-confident. She doesn’t understand why the senior guards are watching out for me. Why this mere girl – 5′3,″ her curls a mess – is such a problem.
5′3″
‘Stand up straight!’ She’s teaching me not to stoop. She trains me every day: how to run and not to get out of breath, to do pull-ups on the green metal stairs at the side of the barracks, how to box. But that’s a secret; she teaches boxing only when no one’s looking. I’m not very good at it yet, but I show up every day, and every day I’m more and more excited. I realize that I don’t care about politics at the moment when I’m dodging her punches. I realize I want to dodge her punches as well as I win court cases against the guards.
fight club
In a men’s colony, sex is humiliation. He gets fucked. He’s a cockerel. That’s what they say about a man who’s had sex with another prisoner, one with more authority
In a men’s colony, there is a strict hierarchy. Your status is your criminal past. In a women’s colony, there is none. But there are unit heads – protégés of the administration and their subordinates.
riot school
The North is like the agora in ancient Greece. Everyone comes here to find out the latest news. News about sex: who and with whom; parole – who’s up, everyone wants to be released early; children – everyone misses them. No one talks politics in the North. But in the autumn, in the capital, there are mayoral elections, and they are very important to me. Aleksei Navalny is running for mayor, the only opposition candidate. I talk about him with great fervour, describing how amazing he is. I tell my friends in the North, when we’re in the corner, alone. We read the newspapers out loud, discuss what we see on TV.
The elections are over. Navalny’s votes are stolen from him and, when I go to the North, dejected, I hear:
‘Hey, they say Navalny lost by just a few percentage points.’
‘Yeah, Masha will be upset.’
‘Do you think she already knows?’
The conversation among these inmates who I don’t even know shakes me up. Unbelievable – they are discussing politics!
talking politics
The administration does not like such conversations. And so Anya appears on the scene. ‘She’s a snitch! Bitch.’ Everyone hates Anya. She works with the head of regimen and safety. Every evening Anya meets her in the Cultural and Disciplinary building, which is her place of work.
Anya is in for murder. She killed when she was 19: they argued over football teams. I’m her new project – the curly haired girl who loves poetry: that’s how she sees me. She says, ‘Musya.’
She calls me what she wants, not what everyone else does.
the girl project
Anya wears green contact lenses. She outlines her eyes in black. ‘Smokey eyes,’ it’s called. (I learn this later on the outside.) Inside the colony, I’m interested in equality and rights. But those eyes. To hell with equality. They stare. At me.
‘Let’s find you a decent coat,’ she says.
She wants to dress me up. So that I’ll be pretty. So that I’ll stand out. She wants me to accept a gift from her: someone on the inside, someone who works for the prison guards. She sits on the table, legs crossed, listening to music, asking me about the Russian avant-garde. I don’t think she gives a damn about the avant-garde. Or maybe she does?
‘Why did you suddenly decide to dress me up?’
She lowers her eyes. She is silent. She’s silent for too long.
the gift from a snitch
It is getting dark in the colony. I’m summoned to the censor.
She says: ‘Let’s go.’
‘Where?’
‘You’ll see soon enough.’
The censor leads me to a brick building. Maria, the head of surveillance, is waiting there. She has auburn hair and severe green eyes behind her glasses. As we turn the corner, I see five more guards. Maria, says, ‘Wait.’
Seriousl
y? I ask myself.
Maria returns with a metal bucket.
‘What’s with the bucket? Why are all these guards standing around? Is this some sort of rite?’
It’s twilight.
‘The letters you received include calls for the overthrow of the constitutional order of Russia.’
‘Really?’
‘Don’t laugh.’
‘What exactly do they contain?’
‘Calls!’
‘Okay, what are we going to do?’
‘Burn them.’
calls to overthrow the system
And at this point Maria takes out a lighter and puts a large bundle of pages in the metal bucket. The bucket glows in the sunset. The head guards stand around in a circle. Maria sets fire to the papers, but they won’t burn. It’s too windy. She tries again. No. Again.
Then, standing there behind the building, I start laughing. ‘Have you finished defending the constitution? May I leave?’
Six pairs of women’s eyes are looking at me. And only the censor, for some reason, smiles.
‘Go. Get out then.’
the censor smiles
‘I’ll already be thirty when I get out,’ Anya says, and she comes very close to me.
Riot Days Page 13