Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny has been sent to a prison known as unusually harsh and dreaded as a place where prisoners are subjected to intense psychological pressure, according to former prisoners and prisoners ’rights defenders.
Last month, Navalny was sentenced to more than two and a half years in a penal colony for alleged breach of his parole for a 2014 fraud conviction, which has been widely denounced internationally as a political motivation. He was arrested after returning to Russia after his practical fatal poisoning with a nervous agent.
Navalny was transferred last week from a Moscow detention center to a prison colony, and officials have not yet said where he is. However, Russian state media reported on Monday that Navalny is now in a prison in the Vladimirskaya region, about 60 kilometers east of Moscow.
The United States and the European Union on Tuesday imposed new sanctions on several senior Russian officials, including the head of Russia’s penitentiary service and its attorney general, for Navalny’s poisoning and imprisonment. The Biden administration also said it was limiting some forms of cooperation with Russia’s space industry.
The prison where Navalny was sent, Criminal Colony no. 2, in the village of Pokrov, is “a breakaway camp,” Pyotr Kuryanov, a lawyer for the NGO Fund for the Defense of the Rights of Prisoners, told ABC News.
Former prison inmates said that while they do not expect Navalny to face beatings or physical torture in prison because he is a well-known prisoner, they believe he will be subjected to pressures and isolations that would involve “psychological torture. “. “
“No one will beat him or torture him,” said Vladimir Pereverzin, who spent two years in prison ten years ago. “But they’ll break it psychologically.”
Pereverzin was a former manager of the Yukos oil company, owned by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oligarch who was jailed for more than a decade on charges of fraud that most observers believe were retribution for trying to politically challenge 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, remain established along the lines of the Gulag camps created in the 1930s. The prison consists of barracks that house several dozen inmates sleeping in rows of bunk beds together and is surrounded by high walls topped with wire.
Prisoners work long working days, often sewing clothes, and conditions are severe. But the Criminal Colony no. 2, as former inmates and activists said, is distinguished by the exhausting level of control and discipline to which inmates are supposed to be subjected.
From the outside, “it looks like the rest of the fields,” Kuryanov said. “But within this camp there is an unbearable atmosphere artificially created by administration staff, so you have to live day after day, month after month, year after year.”
In practice, as the former inmates claimed, this means that the inmates are subjected to almost constant checks and forced to continually follow the trivial rules invented by the administration, leaving them in a constant fear of being punished. Violations may include a missing button or not saying hello.
According to reports posted online, regular inmates go through a harsh induction, beaten by guards and prisoners working in the administration. Almost every moment of the inmates’ time is explained, and the guards allegedly make them engage in repetitive useless exercises designed to break them down, such as having their names and crimes repeated over and over again. be forced to stay for hours. with his head down, he told Russian media Dmitry Dyomushkin, a nationalist activist who spent time in the camp.
“There, even flies do not fly without asking,” Dyomushkin told Moscow radio station Echo.
In penal colonies, discipline is usually maintained by the prisoners themselves, either by inmates collaborating with the guards or by criminal gang leaders. Prison-run colonies working with authorities are known as “red zones” in Russian criminal slang.
In the Penal Colony. No. 2, there is a strong configuration between the administration and the collaborating prisoners, presumably those with alleged experience, that allows the guardian to completely dominate a prisoner.
“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. “Everything is being done there to isolate political prisoners. “he said, alleging that other inmates were forbidden to speak to his client.
Dyomoshkin said he faced similar tactics, spending months without talking to anyone, despite being kept in the crowded barracks.
Often, guards reportedly would make life unbearable for inmates by turning them against other prisoners. Guards would tell some inmates that other inmates were responsible for the withdrawal of collective privileges, former inmates said.
Pereverzin said that while in prison, the pressure became so bad, that he used a knife to cut his stomach to force the guards to move him to a different barracks.
“There’s nothing good there,” Pereverzin said. “Feel completely helpless.”