by Masha Gessen
These cameras were a spontaneous and forced invention; they appeared after I had my first visit from the Community Monitoring Commission and complained that I had been treated rudely by the staff. The video recordings are meant to “monitor personnel behavior,” but the camera is always looking in my direction, as though it were not the personnel at all but I who had to be “monitored.” Ugh. I’ll try to make a sketch.
Inmates and staff communicate mostly by means of the feeding hole. Food is delivered three times a day; correspondence is delivered once a day; a scissor knife for cutting bread and vegetables or fruit is also passed through the feeding hole. If you have a question, you have to “squash the bedbug,” which means pressing a well-worn black button that turns on a light that the staff member on duty may see if she happens to be walking through the hallway, in which case she will open the feeding hole and ask, “What you want?” The door is thick and sturdy, made of metal and painted an odd shade of beige. The viewing hole has a curtain on the outside so inmates can’t see what goes on in the hallway while staff members must monitor what goes on inside cells by regularly peeking in.
Olya, I think you know this, but just in case: you cannot put these descriptions up on the Internet or else very bad things will happen to me. Such are the rules of the institution that they can open the feeding hole at any moment to tell me I have 15 minutes to collect my things—and that goes for any of us here. They can transfer me from cell to cell once a week, forcing me to try to adjust to new people every time. A poorly made-up bed gets you solitary. Keeping letters gets you solitary. And so on. So I was thinking maybe someone else could make drawings according to my descriptions and eventually there would be enough for a show (if there is a need for such a thing). The rules here ban not just paints but pens other than blue (supposedly we could use them to make tattoos—as though we couldn’t make a tattoo with a blue pen). When you write back, tell me whether you want detailed descriptions of everything (but only when you use this mail route—do not say anything about this by e-mail!).
I was just having lunch and thinking that if I wrote so much about food, I should write about what I do with it now that I have it… I make soup. So far I’ve made soup all of one time. This is forbidden, of course, and punishable by solitary, but that’s a small detail. In the common cells, everyone makes soup; it’s more difficult here in the specs [special cells] because the cell is smaller and it’s easier to see what we are up to. I’ll try to make a sketch.
Darn, it doesn’t really look right. Immersion hot-water boilers are dangerous, but I have almost overcome my fear of them. They are allowed here, but only for the purpose of heating—cooking with them is forbidden. I still have not quite figured out at which point heating becomes cooking. So officially we heat up the vegetables in water with oil. But we have to keep mum about it at home.
I don’t know how to continue this letter. Olya. Olya.
Continued on March 30, 2012:
I learned something last night that rendered me unable to write anymore. I’ve told you there are four of us in the special cell. To explain what has happened I will have to go back and write out some details that will allow you to understand it all, I hope. Most of the cells here are “generals,” for 30 people; some are semispecs—for 12 people; and there are specs for 4 people. Living conditions in the specs are considered the best in this institution. I don’t entirely understand how people end up here; some people—and now I think there are many of them—come here after signing a paper promising to work for the administration: to inform on other inmates, in other words. When I was transferred here from a general cell, the three women already in the cell had been “primed”—all of them. They had been told that I had acted as a provocateur in the general cell. This is why it was so difficult for me the first few days here, while they studied me to see whether I was as bad as they’d been told. What’s worse, whenever I was taken out of the cell to meet with my lawyer or the detective, they were called in and told that I had gone to inform on them, that I was claiming that they were mean and bullying to me. And then we became friends and gradually I started learning all this bad stuff, and understanding what filthy, low approaches some staff members use in the work.
That was all prologue. There are three of us in the cell now because one girl has been transferred to a general. When I became friends with the other two women in the cell, this girl quietly wrote a request to be transferred, and once she was out, she gave me up. She reported that I had letters—your letters—which I had secretly brought to the cell, and said bad things about me. That I turned the other women against her and that now the whole cell is saying blasphemous things all the time and she supposedly can’t stand to listen to all that. All night last night I couldn’t believe it. When they were talking about this girl, I had been the only one who said she was good. I stood up for her, you see? I am sorry, this probably makes for uninteresting reading, Olya, but I just can’t seem to come to terms with what’s happened. Anyway, now you have learned a couple more things about this place.
I am going to do all I can to make sure you get this letter, but I will no longer be able to take your response back to my cell with me: it’s too dangerous. I am going to read it in my lawyer’s presence and try to memorize it, so please do not forget to write. And please forgive me if I forgot to write about something or didn’t have time to write it. This quotidian filth has prevented me from writing much about what I have been thinking. On the other hand, I just wrote a big article about some of that, and I hope to be able to get it out of here, and then you will read it. Thank you again for everything, all of it. Please stick together, you guys. I hope to see you soon.
Maria
———
Greetings to everyone from Pretrial Detention Center #6!
This is the detention center where they keep women and former police staff. That would include the criminal Major Yevsyukov.[4] But we are not criminals. We are punk performers, activists, artists, and citizens. So we feel fine, even when we are here. The innocent and the politicals always have an easy time behind bars. I have given shout-outs to Maria and Kat out in the walking courtyard, and they are also fine.
I have been told that there will be a hearing on our arrest on April 19. The outcome of the hearing is clear in advance. But, try as those who put us here might, we are not going to commit the sin of gloom. They cannot take our selves away from us, and so we continue to understand and learn about the world here as anywhere else.
I am writing this in a hurry because my notes are taken away from me. My letters don’t get to people, and letters don’t get to me either. They are shamelessly shutting us up, denying us the right to take part in a public discussion and attempt to reach consensus with our opponents.
We hope that those of you on the outside continue your political activity, and ours.
Punk’s not dead. [This line is written in English.]
Nadya
April 11, 2012
Nadya had been reading the New Testament, which happened to be available to her and her cellmates. She found it helped in talking to people. This had always been easy for her. Even when teachers and other authority figures turned a deaf ear, she made her peers curious and receptive, and they worked to understand her. Only in jail did she encounter people for whom her language was foreign and threatening, as was she herself. But one time she sat on her bunk reading the New Testament and one of her cellmates sat on the bunk opposite reading the same book, and they started saying verses back and forth to each other. And they seemed to reach an understanding of sorts. Plus, “sin of gloom” turned out to be a useful concept.
———
KAT DID NOT SLEEP all night because the women were talking. There were ten of them in this transit cell, where Kat’s entire four-person quarantine cell had suddenly been transferred. Quarantine had hardly been comfortable, but with the exception of one woman, who was pregnant and went on and on about how she had taken the rap for her entire gypsy clan, h
er cellmates had kept quiet enough. In the transit cell, everyone talked. A Muslim woman kept praying, kneeling on her bunk. The rest chattered endlessly about the way things worked behind bars and, more generally, in their world. One of them had coffee grounds, but, this being a transit cell, there was no electric teakettle or portable water heater, so they made coffee with hot water from the tap and kept on and on talking about it. Then a couple of them started regaling the rest with the tale of a criminal case in which a young woman was raped repeatedly throughout the night and only in the morning light did it become clear that the victim was in the final stages of AIDS. “And then the guy who did the raping got really thin,” finished one of the storytellers, and her audience roared with laughter.
I guess this is supposed to be funny, thought Kat, and this was the first time she felt despair overtaking her. She tried to tune the women out as they kept talking, and to concentrate on thinking about what had happened to her and what would happen now.
Thinking back was easier. When she was released on March 4, with Nadya and Maria staying behind bars, she had been handed a summons to report to the investigator in a few days’ time; the summons was in Irina Loktina’s name—the alias she had given. She went home that day, and the first thing her father said to her was, “Those friends of yours have been arrested. What were you doing at the cathedral?”
“I guess you’ve seen the clip by now. You know what we were doing there.”
“The patriarch is despicable,” said Stanislav. “But you still shouldn’t have done what you did.”
Kat was in no mood to argue. She just told her father he should plead Article 51 when the investigators came, and went to sleep.
She woke up with the awareness that she needed to prepare to be arrested. She messaged other Pussy Riot members—she wanted to meet up and hand over passwords to their blog, e-mail, and social-networking accounts; she was now the only keeper of the passwords who was not behind bars. No one was eager to meet. She went to see the investigator at the appointed time, accompanied by Violetta Volkova. Petya was there too—he had been summoned for the same day—but the investigator was not; an assistant handed them summonses to report back in a week, on March 15.
Even a week had not been enough to make sure that more than one other member of Pussy Riot had all the necessary passwords.
Volkova, Petya, and Kat met again. Volkova said her car had just been searched. As she drove them to the police, they called their media contacts to talk up the car search. Petya was agitated and apparently happy, as he always was when something dramatic was happening and he got to tell the media about it. Kat felt the world closing in.
Petya was the first to enter the investigator’s office. He was out a few minutes later—“Another postponement, don’t worry”—and he ran down the stairs, phone in hand. Kat went in. Artyom Ranchenkov, the head investigator in the case, was seated at his desk. At thirty-four, he was already a lieutenant colonel. He had a meaty, unmemorable face that bore a permanent stamp of displeasure. Volkova was sitting in one of the visitors’ chairs in front of him.
“What is your name?” asked Ranchenkov.
“Irina Loktina.”
“Are you sure? I am asking you again.”
“Yes, I am sure.”
“You don’t want to tell me your real name?”
“It is my real name.”
“All right, we will have to have a lineup.” Two of the cathedral’s security guards would have to pick Kat out.
Volkova and Ranchenkov haggled over the lineup for a long time. Volkova objected to the other women who had been chosen for it; they were dressed in feminine office garb and had manicured nails and nicely done hair. It was hours before all of the women were arranged to Volkova’s satisfaction, with their stockinged legs and high-heeled shoes hidden behind desks, clothes concealed under identical police jackets, hands in pockets, and hair pulled back into ponytails, as Kat’s had been the morning of the punk prayer. It was nighttime by the time Ranchenkov informed Kat she was under arrest. He was still calling her “Irina Loktina.” Kat and Volkova stepped out into the hallway.
“Tell me your name,” said the lawyer.
“Yekaterina Samutsevich.”
“Where are your documents?”
Kat had left her internal passport with a friend so she could not be identified in her own home. She told Volkova the friend’s address. Marshals came and took Kat away. The following day, at the arrest hearing, Volkova disclosed Kat’s identity.
———
THE TRANSFER FROM THE transit cell in the basement to the special cell up on the first floor was just as abrupt as Kat’s first transfer had been. The hazing in the “spec” lasted a full month. Kat’s three cellmates would not talk to her except to scream about some offense, such as leaving a crumb of bread on the table. The monotony of hell was virtually unbroken: Volkova came to see Kat once, Polozov came twice, a strange lawyer she had never heard of came once, saying that her father wanted her to change attorneys—Kat sent him away—and her father came. In addition, every Monday Stanislav sent her food from the jail’s commissary. She told him she did not like the candy, but he kept sending it anyway. Anonymous Pussy Riot supporters sent the things Kat asked for—cottage cheese and milk, which she now discovered she liked. She had to admit, she actually liked the prison food itself. No one had cooked at her house since her mother died eleven years before, and this food was cooked—overcooked—and homey: porridge in the morning, soup—she especially liked the pea soup—and barley or porridgelike peas with Spam for lunch. She liked the walks in the courtyard as well, even though they caused more contention in the “spec”: Kat’s cellmates did not usually like to go out for walks, and the guards opposed splitting up the cells. Still, Kat almost always managed to claim her hour in the ersatz outdoors. Otherwise, life was unremittingly and boringly dire.
She decided to break it up by declaring a hunger strike. She had heard that if you went on hunger strike, you were transferred to solitary. She would like that. Otherwise, she had no particular demands. That is, she was demanding attention from another human being, be it her lawyer or her father, who could not keep her preferences in candy straight; she would even have settled for attention from the jail staff, but she could not state that as a demand, so she just declared a hunger strike. She got the solitary and the attention. Her father came on Monday to order food for her, and an officer told him, “She is on hunger strike, you cannot send her food.” Stanislav called the lawyers. Volkova came, bringing Mark Feigin, who had joined the defense team as Nadya’s lawyer and immediately claimed the position of leader.
“You should have told us,” the lawyers reproached her.
“How could I have told you if you don’t come to see me?” Kat reproached the lawyers.
She quit the strike after five days. She felt refreshed; it had been worth it. Back in the special cell, the other inmates actually seemed to have warmed up to her.
———
MARIA AND NADYA HAD GONE on a hunger strike when they were first arrested, and held it for ten days, when Moscow City Court rejected their appeal of their arrest. Their second hunger strike was a group one. On June 20, they were led into court in turn—first Nadya, then (after Nadya was taken out) Kat, and finally Maria. Wearing handcuffs, each in turn was placed in a metal cage, where each in turn made the claim that she needed more time to read the case against them—and heard the judge, a striking thirtyish blonde, reject the plea. Each of them then declared a hunger strike.
They had been “familiarizing” themselves with the case, as the process was officially called, for two weeks. The case consisted of seven volumes—piles of typing paper sewn together with thick white string. The volumes contained letters and transcripts and pictures and even discs—though the discs were in sealed white sleeves, and the defendants were apparently expected to familiarize themselves with their contents by reading descriptions: “The disc contains video footage of young women engaged in dance…
A young woman, who in her appearance, movements, and voice resembles Tolokonnikova…” Kat was fascinated by the fact that the investigators created a record of watching their videos as they would have created a record of an apartment search: “In the presence of Such-and-Such and So-and-So as witnesses, the investigator clicked on the link…”
The case hardly made for a coherent narrative, but the reading process was further complicated because the staff shuffled the volumes as they saw fit and no one could be sure of being able to pick up where she had left off. The lawyers told them to take their time and hinted they should perhaps even stretch the “familiarization” process out, so they did not rush. Some days, Kat refused to leave her cell altogether, though for the most part she was grateful that the appearance of the seven volumes had finally broken up the monotony of her existence. Now, every day around lunchtime, an officer would come and fetch her to escort her to the investigative bloc, where she would be placed in a room with a pile of paper sewn together with white string.
One of the volumes contained her father’s testimony. Kat discovered Stanislav had spoken to Ranchenkov within days of her arrest. He had said things she knew could harm them. Worst of all, he had named Nadya. Kat choked with shame and fury.
When I asked Stanislav about this nearly a year later, he told me he had not realized he was giving testimony. He wanted to tell Ranchenkov that Kat had barely taken part in the action, and he also knew he needed Ranchenkov’s signature to be allowed to see Kat in jail, so he wanted to have a good, friendly talk with the investigator. And he felt he had one. “I told him she had always been a good student, and anyway, she had not been at the altar. I said, ‘Let’s watch the video—you will see that she had barely stepped on the soleas when two security guards in black grabbed her. While the others danced.’ But he said, ‘But it’s an Orthodox church! I have a hundred and fifty letters here from believers.’ But he could see I am a conservative man, an old-fashioned man, and this was why I was the first of the parents to get visitation rights. The others had to wait another month. But at the end of our conversation he asked me to sign the protocol, verifying that he had written everything down correctly. But I hadn’t said any of the things people usually say when they are interrogated. So I signed, I affirmed that he had written it all down right. And then they made me into a witness for the prosecution. And yes, I had told him I’d had a falling-out with Nadya because I felt they might all end up in jail if they kept going.”
