Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny has been sent to a prison known for being unusually harsh and feared as a place where prisoners are subjected to intense psychological pressure, former inmates and prisoners’ rights activists said.
Last month, Navalny was sentenced to more than two and a half years in a penal colony for allegedly violating his parole for a 2014 fraud conviction that has been widely denounced internationally as politically motivated. He was arrested after returning to Russia after his near-fatal nerve agent poisoning.
Navalny was moved from a Moscow detention center to a prison colony last week, and officially the authorities have still not said where he is. However, Russian state media reported on Monday that Navalny is now in a prison in the Vladimirskaya region, about 100 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 the Russian Prison Service and his Attorney General, over Navalny’s poisoning and imprisonment. The Biden government also said it limited some forms of cooperation with the Russian space industry.
The prison Navalny was sent to, penal colony No. 2 in Pokrov village, is “a breaking camp,” Pyotr Kuryanov, a lawyer with the NGO Fund for the Defense of Prisoners’ Rights, told ABC News.
Former inmates at the prison said that while they do not expect Navalny to be beaten in prison or physically tortured because he is a high-profile inmate, 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 ten years ago. “But they will break him psychologically.”
Pereverzin was a former manager of the oil company Yukos, owned by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oligarch imprisoned for more than a decade on fraud charges that most observers say was retaliation for trying to politically challenge President Vladimir Putin. Pereverzin was sentenced to seven years for embezzlement as part of the case against Yukos and Khodorkovsky.
Russia’s penal colonies, although improved, are still set up along the lines of the gulag camps established in the 1930s. The prison consists of barracks housing a few dozen prisoners who sleep together in rows of bunk beds, and it is surrounded by high walls with barbed wire on top.
Inmates work long shifts, often sew clothes, and conditions are said to be grim. But Penal Colony No. 2, former inmates and campaigners said, stands out for the exhaustive level of scrutiny and discipline to which inmates are reportedly subjected.
From the outside, “it looks like the rest of the camps,” said Kuryanov. “But within this camp there is an excruciating atmosphere artificially created by the administrative staff, so that it has to be lived day after day, month after month, year after year.”
In practice, former inmates claimed, this means that inmates are subjected to near-constant checks and are forced to constantly follow trivial rules invented by the administration, leaving them in constant fear of punishment. Violations can be a missing button or not saying hello.
Ordinary new inmates reportedly undergo a grim induction, beaten by guards and inmates working for the administration, according to several reports of former inmates published online. Almost every moment of a prisoner’s time is accounted for, and guards would often have him participate in repetitive, pointless exercises designed to break them down, such as being forced to repeat their names and crimes over and over or forced to standing for hours. head bowed, Dmitry Dyomushkin, a nationalist activist who spent time in the camp, told Russian media.
“Even flies don’t fly there without asking,” Dyomushkin told Moscow radio station Echo.
In the penal colonies, discipline is usually enforced by prisoners themselves, either by prisoners who work with the guards or by criminal gang leaders. Colonies run by prisoners working with the authorities are known as “Red Zones” in Russian criminal jargon.
At penal colony. No. 2, there is a strong stance between the administration and cooperating prisoners, those with alleged experience there, which allows the warden to completely dominate a prisoner.
“It’s the reddest of the red,” Maria Eismont, a lawyer for an activist convicted there in 2019, told Open Media, an opposition news site. “Everything is being done there to isolate political prisoners,” she said, claiming that other prisoners were prohibited from talking to her client.
Dyomoshkin said he faced similar tactics and spent months without speaking to anyone despite being held in the overcrowded barracks.
Guards would also often make prisoners’ lives unbearable by turning other inmates against them. Guards would tell some inmates that other inmates were responsible for taking away collective privileges, former inmates said.
Pereverzin said that while he was in prison, the pressure got so bad that he used a razor to cut wounds in his stomach to force guards to move him to another barrack.
“There is nothing good there,” said Pereverzin. “You feel completely helpless.”