Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny has been sent to a prison known as unusually harsh and feared as a place where prisoners are subjected to intense psychological pressure, according to former detainees and prisoners’ rights activists.
Last month, Navalny was sentenced to serve two and a half years in a penal colony for allegedly violating his probation for a 2014 fraud conviction, which was widely denounced internationally as politically motivated. He was arrested after returning to Russia following his near-fatal poisoning with a nervous agent.
Navalny was moved last week from a detention center in Moscow to a prison colony and officially, authorities have not yet said where he is. However, Russian state media reported Monday that Navalny is now in a prison in the Vladimirskaya region, about 60 miles east of Moscow.
The United States and the European Union on Tuesday imposed new sanctions on several senior Russian officials, including the head of the Russian penitentiary service and its attorney general, for the poisoning and imprisonment of Navalny. The Biden administration also said it was limiting some forms of co-operation with the Russian space industry.
The prison where Navalny was sent, Criminal Colony no. 2 in the village of Pokrov is a “breaking camp,” Pyotr Kuryanov, a lawyer for the NGO Fund for the Defense of Prisoners’ Rights, told ABC News.
Former prison inmates said that while Navalny is not expected to face beatings or physical torture in prison because he is a prisoner, they believe he will be subjected to pressure and isolation that would amount to “psychological torture.” . “
“No one will beat or torture him,” said Vladimir Pereverzin, who spent two years in prison 10 years ago. “But they will break it psychologically.”
Pereverzin was a former manager at the Yukos oil company, which was owned by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oligarch who was jailed for more than a decade on charges of fraud, which most observers believe are retribution for trying to provoke him politically. President Vladimir Putin. Pereverzin was sentenced to seven years on charges of embezzlement as part of the case against Yukos and Khodorkovsky.
Russia’s penal colonies, although improved, are still being established along the lines of Gulag camps set up in the 1930s.
Detainees work long shifts, often sew clothes and the conditions seem bleak. But the Criminal Colony no. 2, said the former detainees and militants, is distinguished by the exhausting level of control and discipline to which the detainees would be subjected.
From the outside, “it looks like all the other camps,” Kuryanov said. “But inside this camp, there is an unbearable atmosphere artificially created by the administration staff, so it has to be lived day by day, month by month, year by year.”
In practice, they have claimed former detainees, which means that detainees are subject to almost constant checks and are forced to continuously follow the banal rules invented by the administration, leaving them in constant fear of punishment. Violations may include a missing button or omitted greeting.
The new ordinary detainees allegedly went through a gloomy induction, beaten by guards and detainees working for the administration, according to several former detainees’ accounts published online. Almost every moment of the prisoner’s time is considered, and guards would often make them take part in unnecessary repetitive exercises meant to break them down, such as being forced to repeat their names and crimes several times or being forced to Dmitry Dyomushkin, a nationalist activist who spent time in the camp, told Russian media for hours.
“There, even flies do not fly without asking,” Dyomushkin told Echo of Moscow.
In penal colonies, discipline is usually maintained by the prisoners themselves, either by the detainees collaborating with the guards or by the leaders of the criminal gangs. Colonies run by detainees working with authorities are known as the “Red Zones” in Russian criminal slang.
At the Criminal Colony. Nr. 2, there is a strong structure between the administration and the collaborating detainees, presumably those with experience there, which allows the director to completely dominate a detainee.
“It’s the reddest of the red,” Maria Eismont, a lawyer for an activist who was convicted there in 2019, told Open Media, an opposition news site. “There, everything is done to isolate political prisoners.” she said, claiming that other detainees were banned from talking to her client.
Dyomoshkin said he faced similar tactics, spending months without talking to anyone, despite being held in crowded barracks.
Guards would also often make life unbearable for detainees by turning other prisoners against them. The guards would tell some detainees that other detainees were responsible for removing the collective privileges, former detainees said.
Pereverzin said that while he was in prison, the pressure became so severe that he used a razor to cut his tears on his stomach to force the guards to move him to another barracks.
“There is nothing good there,” Pereverzin said. “You feel completely helpless.”