Riot Days

by Maria Alyokhina

  October. The people of Nizhny Novgorod come home after work and turn on the lights in their apartments across the road. But, here in our colony, it’s already lights out. We stand side by side near a tree and smoke. This is forbidden. One last prisoner sweeps the area in the North. The bristles of her broom scratch ashes and dust off the asphalt.

  very close

  ‘Do you know how the Romans used to say goodbye?’ Anya asks.

  I shake my head. I want to tell her that I don’t want to say goodbye, but instead I drop another sarcastic remark about her compromised position as a privileged prisoner.

  ‘Give me your hand,’ Anya says, and holds out hers, in a black, fingerless glove. I touch her fingers. Her hand moves up the sleeve of my coat. And my hand moves up her sleeve.

  ‘It means that we aren’t hiding daggers,’ she says.

  If you touch each other’s elbows, the autumn wind is powerless to chill the rest of your bodies.

  ‘It means we trust each other,’ she says.

  trust each other

  The guards put Anya’s girlfriend in solitary. If you make friends with me, you will be victimized.

  ‘Sluts! Fucking screws!’ Anya’s anger is spilling out.

  But you work with them, with the fucking screws, I think. It’s the first time I witness a sell-out wanting to go up against the head guards.

  ‘Let’s go, Anya,’ I say.

  against the head guards

  I leave the barracks with a poster. We made the poster together. It’s a collage. Anarchy, Munch’s Scream, swastikas, lightning, graves. We wrote ‘IK-2’ at the top, the name of our colony.

  For the first time, Anya loses her confident step. She’s shaking. We go out to the square, and all the colony is standing there in formation. Happy junkies, sly con artists, gypsies, robbers, murderers – they all stand in identical green padded coats. Green all year round. Like evergreens.

  ‘Form ranks, girls! Formations of five!’ the unit heads shout.

  We walk up and down the rows, holding the poster. Anya looks at me. I look at her. At her pirate’s black bandana drawn on the poster. We stop and ask everyone, ‘What you think of it, girls? Like it?’

  The girls like our poster. They laugh. I look at Anya and think: this is what protest should be – desperate, sudden, and joyous.

  we can work it out

  ‘I don’t take me seriously. If we get some giggles, I don’t mind.’

  – Paul McCartney

  ‘Why did you hold up a poster during inspection?’ asks the head of our unit the next morning.

  ‘I thought that we lacked art.’

  ‘Art?’

  ‘Yes. By the way, where is our poster? Where’s it gone?’ I ask.

  ‘The poster is in the bin, Alyokhina. Precisely where it belongs,’ answers the unit head.

  desperate, sudden, joyous

  November came, snow fell.

  Celebrating a birthday in prison, knowing that the next one will be here, too, behind bars. I stand with Olga in the North. I smoke; she receives birthday wishes from everyone. She’s thirty. She’s the centre of attention, because she wants to be, and I like to see how she smiles.

  books without bars

  Her shift ends at five in the evening, and I rush from the library to meet her. I’m a little late, because I’m always late. I run to the gates. A crowd has gathered there. The women all look different; something in them has changed. They aren’t slouching, they’re looking up and laughing. The guards are milling around, uncomfortable. What the hell is going on?

  ‘Look!’

  A huge banner is hanging from the balcony of the house across the street.

  RUSSIA WITHOUT PRISONS!

  FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS!

  This is her birthday present from the party. It is beautiful. At sunset. I catch myself thinking that the flag was hung by Limonov’s party members, who are against Ukraine’s Maidan revolution; they support Putin’s war. But, here in the colony, who gives a damn? This evening is more important. Olga – my ‘political opponent’ – Anya ‘the snitch’ and I are standing together and laughing. I like how they are laughing.

  free political prisoners

  A guard is stationed by the door of the library. ‘Now you’ve done it,’ she says. There’s another guard posted on the stairway. And another one at the door of the barracks.

  The wind is cold. The colony is empty; everyone has been chased inside the barracks. I hear a voice behind me say, ‘Guess what? They’re transferring Olga on the convoy. Shipping her out. They gave her half an hour to get ready. The autozak is waiting for her. I saw it.’

  All of a sudden, as always. Without warning. They don’t want two politicals in one prison. They begged Moscow and were given a green light. Olga still has a year and a half to go.

  ‘Anya, tell me where they’re sending her. I know you know.’

  ‘To Siberia. She’ll be on the convoy for two months at least.’

  you’ve done it

  I didn’t even have time to say thank you. Thank you, Anya, for letting me know. I run to the gates to shout goodbye. Scum. That’s how the prison authorities treat us. They make us line up, chase us into the barracks, stuff us on to planks that pass as bunks, lock us up in solitary, refuse to pay us for our work. Then they say, ‘You shouldn’t have committed a crime.’ This is the system; it’s the way it works. I run to the gates and weep, and feel that I must do something about this fucking establishment, where a human being can be tossed into an autozak like a sack of shit and shipped off to Siberia, beaten to death in a Stolypin car, thrown off the train during transit.

  Olga waves to me from the search room before she’s sent away.

  profitable property

  Two politicals turned out to be ‘too much’ for one colony. This is their ‘land’ and they are defending their interests. What kind of interests? To profit from a woman’s desire to return to her family, for example.

  I wrote an article. I sent it to Moscow, to a political magazine. I wrote it secretly, in the library. And away it went.

  family values are sacred

  Women who have worked for 3–4 years in prison receive on their release a reference for one year’s experience or less. This is common practice in a colony when the mandatory annual paid leave was denied to prisoners for several years. Prisoners were told, ‘You have to work, otherwise you’ll owe money to the colony.

  to the toilet – by token

  Sewing workshop No. 2 is in effect an unventilated room with an extractor hood. Five to seven metres from the entrance is a large pile of manure. In the summer, women have trouble sewing because of the swarms of flies, the overpowering smell, and the rats scurrying under their feet. The floor is collapsing, the plaster is falling off the walls, several sewing machines are without protective guards, most have exposed electric wires. There is no running water, just one tap for 100 people, but it’s broken, so the women have to bring water in buckets from the administrative building.

  rats

  The maximum you can earn in these working conditions, even if you fill 140 per cent of the quota, is $20 per month. Visiting human rights groups don’t see workshop No. 2; they see workshops No. 1 and No. 25 as typical examples. The salaries there are about $3–4 per month.

  quota

  Of course, my article was read in Moscow. The pile of manure was removed almost immediately, taken out on three trucks through the colony’s main gates. The other issues were also resolved quickly. The barracks were repaired, the prisoners’ salaries paid as they should be, the central prison authorities carried out inspections – all basic human rights.

  But the image of the model colony had been damaged. Something had to be done.

  image rescue

  December. A priest was scheduled to visit the colony. And not just any priest – the archbishop himself, the head of the entire Nizhny Novgorod diocese. A visit like this was a big event. Several weeks prior to it, announcements and sign-up
sheets were posted in the barrack corridors. There would be a sermon, a question-and-answer session – all very serious. I signed up. Public events in the colony are always interesting, but this was especially so. After all, I was doing time for religious hatred. I had to show up. To get some religious love.

  The big day arrived. It began as usual – wake up, inspection, formation – all according to the timetable. I sat in the library and read a book. One after another. It was already past noon, and the archbishop still hadn’t shown up. I’m sorry, but you can’t just fuck with prisoners like that. I gathered my things and decided to sneak off work, not to take this sitting down – it was a meeting with the archbishop, after all! I went outside, and the colony was empty. Not a soul in sight.

  religious love

  The ‘clean-up’, that’s what we called an operation when the guards corral us into the barracks within seconds. There’s always ‘a clean-up’ when an inspector, a human rights commission, or anyone comes from the outside. The archbishop was no exception. He’s here, I thought, so I ran towards the chapel. How strange – I put my name on their list. Why hadn’t anyone called me from work, let me know that he was here?

  ‘Alyokhina, what are you doing here?’ the deputy chief asked me.

  ‘I came to see the priest. To hear the sermon.’

  ‘You aren’t allowed. These are your work hours.’

  I hovered near the chapel, where the prisoners were entering in pairs. The archbishop, the warden and a few of his assistants were striking poses, embracing for the photographers. Several film cameras were trained on them, and a television crew was making a video of the event for the evening news.

  ‘Women prisoners produced a gift for the archbishop, a beaded icon.

  These days, there is a huge lack of faith in our lives and in our soul.’

  – Website of prison department of Nizhny Novgorod

  ‘But I want to hear the archbishop!’ I said indignantly. ‘The court sent me to prison for religious hatred! I want to reform!’

  ‘The church is no place for joking, Alyokhina.’

  ‘But I’m not joking!’

  religious hatred

  Unit monitors and sell-outs fanned out in a semicircle around the chapel door, where the archbishop and the head guards were headed. The guards formed a second semicircle. It felt as if this whole afternoon spectacle had been arranged to show me that I was barred from hearing the sermon. There were about twenty of them there altogether. All keeping me from the words of Christ.

  ‘We bear them no malice. The Church should have no malice at all.’

  – Patriarch Kirill, two years later

  the royal night

  Later. A night I couldn’t sleep. I was in love. I woke to a morning like any other. An ordinary morning in the colony: 23 December 2013.

  Marina and I left the North and went for a walk around the barracks. I read her Mandelstam from a grey book, a book that had travelled with me since the beginning, through my whole prison term, through all convoys and colonies.

  Marina had an affair with heroin. That’s why she ended up behind bars. Deep wrinkles line her forehead. ‘Five years have gone by, but I still want it. I dream about it at night,’ she said about the junk, just like they say about lovers in Russian novels. Marina had done time for drugs twice – she was a repeat offender.

  affair with heroin

  Marina is the soul of our unit. Everyone loves her. She works three shifts in a row, she plays the guitar, and sings at concerts – she really can sing; even the bosses come to listen and cry. At the point when we get to know each other, Marina is about to leave on parole. To go home to her country town. ‘You’ll cook borscht,’ I say, trying to joke. Marina doesn’t laugh; she doesn’t get the joke. Although maybe it isn’t really very funny – after all, it’s one of the president’s favourite insults – you should teach your wives to make borscht. Eventually, we joke about borscht together. And because of this joking with me, Marina is denied parole. Borscht jokes.

  kinder, küche, kirche

  Marina is a seamstress – ‘Just an ordinary gal, Masha. That’s all I am.’ Her hands are dry from chalk and thread; she’s used to her wrinkles. Anyway, who’d listen to her complain? She spends half of her pay – $10 – on cigarettes, and the other half she puts aside for sweets. She sends them in a parcel to her son, who lives in an orphanage. Every two months, he gets a package from her; once a week, a phone call.

  i’ll be back

  ‘Alyokhina, you have some visitors!’ somebody interrupts me. ‘I’ll be back to read to the end,’ I say to Marina, and leave for the meeting room. ‘Hold on to the book for now.’

  In the room, I see all my things packed into my checked bags and placed in the corner. ‘Sign this,’ says the unit head. There is a piece of paper on the table pronouncing the amnesty.

  I go to the window. Outside is snow and the morning inspection. The whole colony, a thousand prisoners, is lining up along the barracks in green padded coats. They have no gloves, no mittens; they push their hands up into their sleeves. And their coats try to warm them.

  a green padded coat

  From the meeting room, I was led to the loading bay, a sectioned-off strip between the huge rusty entrance gates to the Zone and the exit gates that open out to the outside. Dante would have called the area ‘limbo’. But it’s not limbo; it’s just a stinking five-metre strip where trucks load and unload. A black Volga was waiting there for me. Never before had anyone been taken out of the colony in a government car. ‘Get in,’ said the unit head.

  black volga

  Imagine if we had the power to meet our own future. We would have a fireworks display by the colony’s stone walls, catch the train with minutes to spare, leave those prison diaries behind untouched, get off the train in Moscow to be met by a packed platform; we’d run through the crowd of journalists with white roses.

  white roses

  What’s this circus about? Putin’s amnesty, a black Volga, a deserted part of the train station where they drop me off. All that had happened and all that will happen. But what will happen? Another strange life in the front pages of the newspapers. My face on the front page.

  What’s next?

  ‘What is your dream, Masha?’ the gypsy girl asked. She was only nineteen but serving a long sentence, about six years. For selling drugs. She gave me a hairclip, a crab with blue stones. We were smoking in the North. Putin had signed a decree ordering an amnesty. He signed the amnesty to save face in the West ahead of the Olympic Games in Sochi. A copy of the newspaper with the published presidential decree was passed from one prisoner to the next.

  ‘I want to go on a trip around the world,’ said one girl.

  ‘I want to go to the moon,’ said another.

  And the gypsy girl said, ‘I want to be released in the amnesty. I want to see my child. That’s what I want most of all.’

  She was not released in the amnesty. Nadya and I were released. Nadya and I and three other women. Five women from the world’s largest country. Everyone needed this amnesty but me.

  vip amnesty

  Big, black, childlike eyes. To her I was a heroine in a fairy tale.

  ‘I want to write a book,’ I said. ‘Will I be in it?’ she asked. ‘Definitely.’

  no pasarán!

  ‘Well, Maria Vladimirovna, you’re free,’ said the unit head.

  Freedom doesn’t exist unless you fight for it every day. And I’m riding in a car that’s picking up speed.

  Thanks to:

  Nastya and Max for the house in which I lived, my grandma’s coat and this story.

  Olya for courage, patience, bread with jam, for picking up the pieces.

  Marat for understanding and Naum for a white-coloured house.

  Slava for the titles, voice memos, white Montenegrin cheese.

  Arsen R. for what he did, when I didn’t even have money for cigarettes.

  Danya for the room in Harlem, where I came to spend the night an
d stayed for two months, and for the work on the translation.

  Yura V. for Riverside Drive. Sasha Ch. for great care and miracles.

  Nadya, who went a long way with me and found the strength to ‘no longer be in hell.’

  Finally, Petya.

  p.s.

  Those who helped me translate this book from Russian to English (especially Emily), and to find its form in the first place.

  For pictures, thanks to my son Filipp.

  Thanks to Olga Borisova, who edited the Russian manuscript.

  THE BEGINNING

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