The Return of the Torture Chambers
By Bret Stephens
For The St. Petersburg Times
The protest began after OMON had been brought to Correctional Colony No. 5 and started massive beatings of the prisoners. People in camouflage and masks were beating with batons inmates taken outside unclothed in the freezing cold. ... As a protest, 39 prisoners immediately cut their veins open.
“Next day, on Jan 17, the ‘special operation’ was repeated in an even more humiliating and massive form. At that time, about 700 inmates cut their veins open.”
This description comes from a report received by the Moscow-based Foundation for Defense of Prisoners’ Rights. This is not Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Russia. It’s President Vladimir Putin’s and the year is 2008. And Correctional Colony No. 5, located not far from the Manchurian border, located in the Takhtamygda village in the Amur region, does not even make the list of the worst penal colonies in the country.
That distinction belongs to the newly revived institution of pytochniye kolony, or torture colonies. After all but disappearing in the 1990s under the liberal regime of President Boris Yeltsin, there are now about 50 pytochniye kolony among the roughly 700 colonies that house the bulk of Russia’s convict population, according to the foundation’s co-founder Lev Ponomarev. And while they cannot be compared to the Soviet gulag in terms of scope or the percentage of prisoners who are innocent of any real crime, they are fast approaching it in terms of sheer cruelty.
The cruelty to prisoners often begins prior to their actual sentencing. “When people are transported from prisons to courts to attend their hearings, they are jammed in a tiny room where they can barely stand. There’s no toilet. If they have to relieve themselves, it has to be right there,” said Ponomarev. “Then they are put on trucks. It’s extremely cold in winter, extremely hot in summer, no ventilation, no heating. These are basically metal containers. They have to be there for hours. Healthy people are held together with people with tuberculosis, creating a breeding ground for the disease.”
Once sentenced, prisoners are transported in packed train wagons to distant correctional colonies that, under Russian law, range from relatively lax “general regime” colonies to “strict,” “special,” and — most terrifying of all — “medical” colonies. Arrival in the camps is particularly harrowing. According to prisoner testimonies collected by Ponomarev, in the winter of 2005 convicts from one torture colony in Karelia, near the Finnish border, were shipped to the IK-1 torture colony near the village of Yagul, in the Udmurtia republic, about 800 kilometers east of Moscow.
At IK-1, a prisoner with a broken leg named Zurab Baroyan made the mistake of testifying to conditions at the colony to a staff representative of the human rights ombudsman. “After this,” Baroyan reported, the commandant of the colony” threatened to let me rot in the dungeon. They did not finish treating me in the hospital. My leg festered [and] pus ran from the bandage. ... Then the festering crossed over to the second leg.”
Not surprisingly, suicide attempts at these colonies are common. One convict, named Mishchikin, sought to commit suicide by swallowing “a wire and nails tied together crosswise.” As punishment, he was denied medical assistance for 12 days. Another convict, named Fargiyev, was held in handcuffs for 52 days after stabbing himself; he never fully recovered motor function in his hands.
Even the smallest of prisoner infractions can be met with savage reprisals. In one case, authorities noticed the smell of cigarette smoke in a “penalty isolation” cell where seven convicts were being held. “A fire engine was called in. ... The entire cell, including the convicts and their personal things, was flooded with cold water.” The convicts were left in wet clothes in temperatures of 10 degree Celsius for a week.
As a legal matter, the torture colonies don’t even exist, and Ponomarev doubts that there has ever been an explicit directive from Putin ordering the kind of treatment they meet. Rather, for the most part the standards of punishment are determined at the whim of colony commandants, often in areas where the traditions of the gulag never went away.
That doesn’t excuse the Kremlin, however. Under Yeltsin, the prison system operated under a sunshine policy, as part of a larger effort to distance Russia from its Soviet past. “But when Putin came to power, a new tone was set,” Ponomarev said. “The sadists who had previously been ‘behaving’ simply stopped behaving.”
Now reports of torture are systematically ignored or suppressed while regional governments refuse to act on evidence of abuse. Commandants at “general regime” colonies can always threaten misbehaving convicts with transfer to a torture colony — a useful way of keeping them in line. The Kremlin, too, benefits from the implied threat. “The correct word for this is ‘gulag,’ even if it’s on a smaller scale,” warned Ponomarev. “This is the reappearance of totalitarianism in the state. Unless we eradicate it, it will spread throughout the entire country.”
Readers interested in a closer look at what is described above may do a YouTube search for” Yekaterinburg Prison Camp.” The short video, apparently filmed by a prison guard and delivered anonymously to Ponomarev’s organization, is a modern-day version of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” It isn’t easy to watch.
But it is an invaluable window on what Russia has become in the Age of Putin, Person of the Year.
Bret Stephens is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, where this comment appeared.
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