TALLINN, Estonia (news agencies) — Vladimir Kara-Murza could only laugh when officials in Penal Colony No. 6 inexplicably put a small cabinet in his already-cramped concrete cell, next to a fold-up cot, stool, sink and latrine.
That moment of dark humor came because the only things he had to store in it were a toothbrush and a mug, said his wife, Yevgenia, since the opposition activist wasn’t allowed any personal belongings in solitary confinement.
Another time, she said, Kara-Murza was told to collect his bedding from across the corridor — except that prisoners must keep their hands behind their backs whenever outside their cells.
“How was he supposed to pick it up? With his teeth?” Yevgenia Kara-Murza told media. When he collected the sheets, a guard with a camera appeared and told him he violated the rules, bringing more discipline.
For political prisoners like Kara-Murza, life in Russia’s penal colonies is a grim reality of physical and psychological pressure, sleep deprivation, insufficient food, health care that is poor or simply denied, and a dizzying set of arbitrary rules.
This month brought the stunning news from a remote Arctic penal colony, one of Russia’s harshest facilities: the still-unexplained death of Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin’s fiercest foe.
“No one in the Russian penitentiary system is safe,” says Grigory Vaypan, a lawyer with Memorial, a group founded to document repression in the Soviet Union, especially from the Stalinist prison system known as the gulag.
“For political prisoners, the situation is often worse, because the state aims to additionally punish them, or additionally isolate them from the world, or do everything to break their spirit,” Vaypan said. His group counts 680 political prisoners in Russia.
Kara-Murza was convicted of treason last year for denouncing the war in Ukraine. He is serving 25 years, the stiffest sentence for a Kremlin critic in modern Russia, and is among a growing number of dissidents held in increasingly severe conditions under President Vladimir Putin’s political crackdown.
Former inmates, their relatives and human rights advocates paint a bleak picture of a prison system that descended from the USSR’s gulag, documented by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” and “The Gulag Archipelago.”
While undergoing reforms, it “more or less still has the backbone of the Soviet system,” says Oleg Kozlovksy, Amnesty International’s Russia researcher.
Most often, inmates live in barracks tightly packed with bunk beds. Konstantin Kotov, an activist who spent over a year in Penal Colony No. 2 in the Vladimir region — Navalny’s prison from 2021 until June 2022 — recalls cramped quarters of up to 60 men per room.
Not even the pandemic changed that, Kotov told news agencies. Masks were required from 6 a.m. until 10 p.m., but he doubts they helped much. “Every now and then, people had high fever. They were taken to the infirmary, then brought back, and that was it,” he said.
Meals are basic and unsatisfying.
Breakfast was porridge, lunch was soup with little or no meat, mashed potatoes and a meat or fish cutlet; as was dinner, Kotov said. Inmates got two eggs a week, and fruit and vegetables were a luxury almost always sold out at prison kiosks, he added.
“The ration is not enough, and often it’s inedible. So almost no one lives on rations alone,” Navalny once said. His wife described his meals as porridge for breakfast, soup and porridge for lunch, and porridge with herring for dinner.
Additional food is sold, or relatives can send parcels, within limits. Those in punishment cells get no packages.
There is a strict regimen of menial tasks and duties, like cleaning and standing at attention.
Andrei Pivovarov, serving four years for running a banned political organization, must clean his solitary cell for several hours a day and listen to a recording of prison regulations, says his wife, Tatyana Usmanova. But he can’t do both at the same time, or finish quickly and rest, she added. Guards watching via CCTV punish rule-breakers.
There are just under 700 penitentiary facilities in Russia, and most are penal colonies of varying security, from minimum to “special regime.” There are about 30-40 penal colonies for women.
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