My Fellow Prisoners

by Mikhail Khodorkovsky

  The old man unrolled the mattress, collapsed on to it and stayed there in silence for almost two days, getting up only for inspections and to go to the toilet. Nobody bothered him. On the third day he finally got up for the gruel as well. At which point we tried to engage him in conversation, but his unintelligible answers revealed nothing except what he’d been put inside for – hooliganism. The usual story.

  Ignoring, as always, the Federal Penal Enforcement Service’s misanthropic ban on sharing things, we gave him some tracksuit trousers, a jacket, underwear and a razor, supplemented his gruel with a few extras from our food parcels, and then forgot about the old man. After all, everyone has his own business to get on with, and it’s a big cell.

  Another week went by. One day I got back from a meeting with my lawyers and saw a newcomer – someone about my own age who’d clearly not had an easy life but looked pretty robust – busily tinkering with our television, having taken the back off it. I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. The television in our cell barely had a functioning picture but you could at least hear the news – and for me the news is my life.

  ‘Who’s this?’ I groaned.

  ‘Meet Valentin Ivanovich,’ my cellmates responded. ‘Remember the old guy? It’s him. He’s a radio technician. He says he can fix it.’

  Valentin Ivanovich didn’t turn round but nodded and continued with the job, kitted out as he was with a sharpened spoon and paperclips.

  A few days later we got talking. His was a familiar story: his son was killed, then his wife died, he started drinking heavily, his devious neighbours got him kicked out of his apartment, he lived on the streets for nearly a year, got into a fight – and was brought in. Later I had a chance to look at his case file – the same story, just written in officialese.

  He was pleasant to talk to, although we had very little time together because the court cases and the vast quantity of documents I had to read left only a tiny window of opportunity. He too was always busy, fixing things, equipping the cell in one way or another. The cell had clearly become his new home. And when, during my hunger-strike, the administration tried to get him to sign a false document saying that the hunger-strike hadn’t taken place, like the rest of my cellmates he refused to do so, despite coming under significant pressure.

  However, it became clear that he totally lacked the will or readiness to fight for his own fate – so crucial if you’re to keep your head above water in today’s cruel world. His future was not hard to predict: prison – street – prison – death in a ditch from exposure or heart attack.

  I have seen so many people like him over these years. And so often have I subsequently heard that they have died …

  So then, what do you think? Is it not worth trying to make our world just a bit less cruel? After all, these people need only a very small bit of help …

  Soon afterwards I was summoned to ‘have a chat’ with the prison governor and when I returned the cell was empty. They gave me fifteen minutes to get my things ready – I was being moved to a new prison.

  I was leaving without saying goodbye, but having watched the latest REN-TV news – on a television that was now working pretty well.

  The Aggrieved

  In prison they’re also called ‘the dropouts’, the ‘downcast’ and a whole litany of other far less savoury names. They are the prison’s ‘caste of untouchables’: you don’t sit at the same table as them, eat from the same dish, use the same utensils, and so on. In any disagreement within the prison community, their voice carries no weight whatsoever; as such they’re unable to count on any form of protection.

  Nowadays, thankfully, such distinctions are gradually eroding but much remains as it always was. Prison is a very conservative place.

  In the world outside people generally think that it’s only homosexuals and those who have committed the most depraved crimes like rape or child abuse who find themselves in this position.

  That hasn’t been the case for a long time. Nobody believes the courts any more, and anyone can claim that their sentence is just another result of coming into conflict with someone else’s commercial interest. It’s not easy to verify, and there are indeed a great number of cases relating to these ‘commercial’ issues.

  There are not many genuine homosexuals in prison, so those who find themselves in the ‘aggrieved’ category are generally people who are unable to stand up for themselves, who have shown some form of weakness. And it is they who are forced to carry out all kinds of unpleasant work.

  But sometimes it can turn out differently.

  Ostap is one of the dozen or so ‘aggrieved’ who live in our barracks. A barracks is one large communal space – everything and everyone is on permanent view. Ostap didn’t seem particularly different. A small, quiet guy who, like the rest of his ‘caste’, did the cleaning, took out the rubbish and washed other people’s clothes. Nowadays, at least, this type of work is paid for in tea, cigarettes and the like.

  Showing an interest in how someone came to be in this position is just not done.

  Self-respecting detainees try to have a normal sort of relationship with the ‘aggrieved’, and avoid being discourteous, but those who feel that life has dealt them a raw deal and are more arrogant often look to bolster their own self-esteem by denigrating this defenceless group.

  One day Ostap was just getting on with tidying up under a bed when a loutish bloke blatantly poked him below the waist as he went past, accompanying this distinctly offensive gesture with a no less offensive comment.

  It was a run-of-the-mill occurrence, and usually the ‘aggrieved’ put up with it. And so Ostap, without standing up straight, muttered something quietly under his breath and moved slowly into the nearest corner.

  Some halfwits standing a little way off started sniggering; to hear what Ostap was muttering you had to stand pretty close to him. He was repeating just one phrase: ‘I’ll kill you.’

  When, half a minute later, Ostap finally stood up straight, in his hand was an enormous shank he’d pulled out from somewhere – a thirty-centimetre-long piece of file, sharpened to be as lethal as a dagger.

  I literally leapt out of the way. I had no desire whatsoever to get a piece of forged steel like that in my side.

  But Ostap was already heading towards his tormentor. The latter made a dash for the only door, but this was blocked by a surge of people racing for the exit – also keen to avoid getting caught up in the heat of the moment. The rest just stood there, petrified.

  Ostap moved slowly but deliberately, and his opponent began to howl. That’s the only way to describe the drawn-out, bloodcurdling cry of a man who had just a few seconds left to live.

  At this point we pulled ourselves together. Someone also screamed, someone, more cool-headed, moved the beds, preventing Ostap from reaching his target. His friends jumped in, grabbed him by the arms, dragged him off …

  The reprieved victim eventually broke out of the barracks. He didn’t come back – ‘abandoning the detachment as a safety precaution’. A humiliating turn-of-phrase for the camp …

  The following day Ostap was cleaning out the barracks once again, but people looked at him differently from then on. And when the regional prosecutor visited the camp for an inspection and invited anyone who wanted to meet him on a one-to-one basis (and this can be fraught with consequences), nobody was surprised when the only person who marched across the apparently deserted camp was Ostap.

  ‘Our Ostap’, as he was now called in the detachment, with a note of pride.

  Roma

  Half the criminals freed on parole return to the familiar world of the labour camp.

  Every morning in our barracks starts with the deafening sound of an alarm and a wild screech.

  If you think that a yell of almost a hundred decibels can’t have any meaningful content, you’re sorely mistaken.

  The person doing the yelling is Roma, the night-time orderly. His job is to get everyone up. And he does so with considerable inventive aplomb
. The melody emitted under his direction from an ordinary bell, and the words that go with it, are different virtually every time. Sometimes the gags are so good you just can’t get up from laughing so hard.

  Roma even looks like something from a gothic fable: sturdy, not very tall, with expressive, laughing eyes and a smile that reveals a single tooth in the middle of an otherwise empty mouth.

  It was the booze that put Roma in jail. Whether it was just a fight or a robbery during a fight – he’s none too clear. ‘I don’t remember’ is all he can say.

  Roma is making an effort to ‘get back on track’ and wants to apply for parole. Working as an orderly should help.

  Occasionally I tease him. ‘Why do you want to get out? It’s pretty good here – there’s food, protection, you’re kept off the booze …’

  Roma is suddenly serious; he talks wistfully of how he’ll get out, fix his teeth, get a job at the local factory. He can rely on that …

  The seriousness disappears as quickly as it came on, and he skips off to do a session on the horizontal bars, where he also performs wonders.

  Then comes the court hearing. It’s a positive result. Ten days till freedom. Roma doesn’t know what to do with himself. From time to time he comes up to me and describes in detail, day by day, what he’ll do ‘beyond the fence’. I listen attentively. He obviously needs to get it out of his system, but I know the statistics only too well: 50 per cent come back for another ‘stay’.

  Roma can sense my scepticism and tries passionately to convince me: ‘I’m not coming back here again, ever!’

  I pull his leg: ‘Roma, at least try to get those teeth done.’ For which I’m subjected to another detailed repetition of his plans.

  Release day. Roma’s somehow found himself a tracksuit and trainers, and he walks along the detachment yard followed by good wishes and goodbyes.

  A month passes, and then another. No news from Roma. Some of the guys are starting to get seriously worried – they gave him money and are waiting for the packages they ordered.

  Soon, however, word comes through. With a new intake of prisoners sent from a local prison. Alas, Roma is already there. He got drunk, got in a fight, nicked a phone. The town is small – he was recognized, of course, and arrested.

  Why on earth did he do it? Who knows? Most likely he just didn’t know what to do with himself and subconsciously wanted to return to the familiar world of the labour camp.

  Sometimes you get the feeling that the police and the courts are playing a strange kind of game, by releasing on parole just the sort of people who they know they’ll soon be locking up again. And they do absolutely nothing on the other side of the prison fence to make this a less frequent, or even less immediate, occurrence.

  The explanation, of course, is simple: human beings are actually less than nothing for the state – they’re just statistical report fodder.

  As for the teeth, Roma didn’t have time to get them fixed …

  Betrayal

  In the camp – as, in fact, on the other side of the barbed wire as well – it’s usually older people who are the readers. The younger ones prefer to watch television – music videos mostly.

  That’s what made the young guy, with his head constantly in a book, stand out – that and his good-natured, cheeky grin.

  In every other way he was unremarkable. Just another young lag with an alert look and a couple of tattoos (probably a souvenir from the juvenile penal colony; ‘getting inked’ is no longer popular in the adult prisons).

  He happened to come up to me one day, asked if I had a book he could read. I learned that Lyosha (as the lad was called) loved fantasy. He’d finished school and was now in prison under Article 158 – for theft. He and some mates had done the rounds of empty dachas, and got caught. And then got caught again. So yes, he had indeed been in the juvenile colony. He’d turned eighteen in there, was transferred here to see out his sentence. Two years in this place already; he was soon due for early release on parole.

  One day I noticed that, instead of reading as usual, Lyosha was pacing nervously up and down the barracks, occasionally waving his arms in despair as if engaged in some intractable conversation with someone.

  I went up to him.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Problems with the parole.’

  ‘What kind of problems?’

  There are generally two types of issues relating to conditional early release in the camps (if you discount corruption, which is both a problem and a solution). First, early release becomes much more difficult if you’ve tangled with the administration. Secondly, there’s an illegal practice whereby the Federal Penal Enforcement Service assumes the role of the court and sets additional restrictions on early release depending on the crime for which the prisoner has been convicted.

  But neither situation applied in this case. Both detainee and case were entirely unexceptional.

  ‘So what problems are there?’ I asked him.

  And at this Lyosha suddenly broke down and the whole story came pouring out.

  His father drank. He’d died not long ago. His mother drank. She was ‘deprived of parental rights’. He and his two sisters were taken into temporary care. Then his mother had a cancer operation. She stopped drinking. She took her daughters back but he had to go to an orphanage. For Lyosha it was a stab-wound to the heart.

  After the orphanage he ended up in the juvenile colony. His sisters have grown up, they’re now over eighteen. His mother’s still alive. Everything’s okay. Six months ago they promised to come and visit him. He spent a week running round trying to find a room for the visit. By hook or by crook he managed to persuade a fellow inmate to let him have his reserved meeting slot (getting a room in the colony is no easy matter).

  Then he waited. And waited. On visiting days, from the moment he wakes a prisoner’s like a cat on hot bricks – the only comparable feeling is the day of release. But they didn’t come to see Lyosha that day. A week later they told him on the phone that for some reason it just hadn’t worked out.

  Another stab-wound to the heart.

  And now, early release on parole. For that to happen, our bureaucratic police state requires you, the prisoner behind bars, to provide documents (even if they’re completely fictitious) proving that you have somewhere to live and a job on the outside.

  Lyosha asked his mother and sisters to help. They said they were too busy.

  ‘I’ve nowhere to go, and no reason to go anywhere,’ was Lyosha’s summing up of the situation.

  I understood what he was going through. The documents weren’t the issue. You can easily get someone to cobble them together – your former cellmates will do it. No, Lyosha had nothing to hold on to in life. No girlfriend, let alone a wife. How could he have? He’d been in prison since he was sixteen or seventeen. He’d lost his father, and now his mother and sisters had rejected him as well.

  There was nothing to say, except the usual, ‘Hang on in there, pal.’

  And, though I’m ashamed to admit it, I felt a deep sense of joy that I didn’t have to cope with this kind of betrayal. That there were people on the outside who loved me and were waiting for me.

  Just think how many abandoned young men are languishing in Russia’s prisons! How many of them there are in here only because they were desperately looking for someone to pay them some attention, craving a place in a world where they seemed like strangers even to those closest to them.

  Lyosha wandered around for another day. Then he got into a scrap with another detainee over some minor issue. He had to do a week of ‘additional labour duty’. He then got himself together and wrote a letter to his friends asking them to send the documents he needed.

  Everything, it seemed, had resumed its normal course.

  Except now Lyosha hardly ever smiles.

  The Nazi

  You certainly have some surprising encounters in prison. It so happened that most of the prisoners at my work-station were immigrants from Tadzhikista
n and Kyrgyzstan. They speak Russian but prefer their own language, of course. So not wanting to be a nuisance (since, when I’m around, they politely try not to switch language), I sit myself next to a tall guy, who’s swarthy and dark-haired like most of them, but who obviously prefers to speak Russian – clearly his first language.

  The young man turns out to be half-Lithuanian, from Novosibirsk. And a real-life Nazi – that’s to say he’s a member of one of Russia’s numerous National-Socialist groups. Alexander, as he was called, told me that the camp has ‘only’ twelve Nazi prisoners. They were all convicted for crimes committed as teenagers, which is why they’ve ended up in the general prison regime. He himself made bombs, and that’s what he was sent down for – though there were other things, too, hence his long sentence: seven years. He’s been doing time since he was seventeen; he’s now nineteen.

  Alexander is no fool; he got through his secondary school exams (in prison), is interested in philosophy and politics, wants to teach later on. He doesn’t smoke, and says that he doesn’t drink.

  The work we do is tedious and doesn’t stop us from talking. What’s more, I’m interested. I’ve never been able to understand how Nazism could be a phenomenon in a country where so many people lost their lives fighting it. I ask a few questions. Alexander is happy to answer them, at least as far as his general understanding and awareness allow him.

  He got himself involved with a National-Socialist cell at thirteen: just saw a notice pinned up in a stairwell and gave them a call. He reveres Hitler as the standard bearer for white racial supremacy. He doesn’t consider black or yellow people (redskins somehow don’t come into it) as fully fledged human beings. For some reason he puts immigrants from Central Asia and the Northern Caucasus in the same category.

  He doesn’t believe in the Holocaust or the concentration camps. He’s read all the relevant literature. He doesn’t show any particular enmity towards the Jews, just disdain (as if to say, look at all the bogeymen they’ve managed to come up with). He enjoys telling me about the SS death marches in the Baltic states, shows me his swastika tattoo.