Words Will Break Cement

by Masha Gessen

  When Nadya began detailing some of the infractions with which she had been charged—such as concealing her notes on life in the colony; failing to greet a member of the administration; being present at the clubhouse without a permission slip—and the system of aesthetic values that would view these as violations, the prosecutor interrupted her and asked to address “the substance of the case and not the Putin regime.”

  The judge nodded kindly. “I will allow you to continue,” he said, “but please try to stick to the topic at hand. The question before the court is a little narrower.”

  “But I am calling on you to take a wider view,” Nadya responded frankly, and continued reciting her prepared speech. “I know that as long as Russia is subjugated by Putin, I will not see early release. But I came here, to this courtroom, so that I could shed a light, once again, on the absurdity of oil-and-gas justice that condemns people to spend senseless years in jail based on the fact that they wrote a note or failed to cover their head.”

  After a few procedural remarks by the prosecutor, the judge, and Khrunova, Nadya saw an opportunity to read her second prepared speech, a slightly shorter one.

  “I am proud of everyone who is willing to make sacrifices for the sake of standing up for their principles. That is the only way to achieve large-scale change in politics, values, or aesthetics. I am proud of those who sacrificed their quotidian comfort on a summer evening and went out into the streets on July 18 to affirm their rights and defend their human dignity.” She was referring to the largest unsanctioned protest in contemporary Russian history. A week before, about ten thousand people had come out into the streets of Moscow after opposition leader Alexei Navalny was sentenced to five years in prison, and Navalny had been released the following day—all of which Petya had told Nadya the day before the hearing, when he visited her. “I know that our symbolic power, which grows out of conviction and courage, will eventually be converted to something greater. And that is when Putin and his cronies will lose state power.”

  Not too much later, she found the opening for her third speech.

  “I’ll be happy if I am released when my term runs out rather than slapped with an additional term, like Khodorkovsky was… The word ‘correction’ is one of those upside-down words characteristic of a totalitarian state that calls slavery ‘liberty.’”

  Here the imaginary Pussy Riot clip might have come back to Maria turning her back to the court and saying, “It seems that the court is denying my right to a defense.”

  Nadya’s, Maria’s, and Kat’s arrests had heralded a new Russian crackdown. In the months following, dozens of people were arrested on charges stemming from various kinds of peaceful protest. Twenty-eight people were facing trial in connection with police-instigated violence that broke out during a march to protest Putin’s inauguration in May 2012. Thirty more were facing piracy charges for being on a Greenpeace ship protesting oil and gas drilling in the Arctic. The courts had become Russia’s sole venue for political conversation, the only place where the individual and the state confronted each other. Not that most political defendants in Russia had a clear idea of how to use such a venue, or a language for speaking in it. But Maria and Nadya knew a stage when they saw one. In the old dissident drama, Maria was choosing the role of the person who fights the court on legal grounds and Nadya was refusing to recognize the court as such and choosing to use it only for the pulpit it offered.

  They were doing what Pussy Riot had always done: illuminating the issues and proposing a conceptual framework for discussing them. As is often the case with great art, most people did not understand what they were doing. But eventually, Nadya and Maria knew, they would.

  ———

  Maria had always been moved to activism by the events or circumstances of her own life—as when she became a defender of the Utrish national park after camping there with infant Philip. Now her home was a penal colony and other inmates were her family. She felt obligated to give voice to their experience and to use her place in the public eye to draw attention to the injustice they all faced. Nadya, on the other hand, had always been driven by theory rather than experience, and now she naturally separated her public, performing persona from the daily existence of an IK-14 inmate. She endeavored to either accept or ignore the circumstances of her daily life: as she told Petya during that June visit, she just wanted her time in captivity to pass quickly and uneventfully. That was also part of the reason she deflected attempts to elicit more details of colony life that day. That, and the fact that too detailed a description would have been both shameful and dangerous.

  Some things were never talked about. Even Maria’s friend Lena Tkachenko, who described the violations in IK-28 with precision, driven by a natural aptitude for detail multiplied by five years of observation and by the will to tell as much as she could to help those she had left behind—even she would not talk to me about the particulars of what they called “personal hygiene,” or what might better be called a desperate quest to maintain dignity in the face of circumstances she was too ashamed to describe. Other things not only could be described but had to be publicized and fought. Maria did that by filing complaints on her own behalf, but more often on behalf of other inmates, against the systematic violations of inmates’ rights: the long work hours, the close quarters, the lack of hot water. The administration of IK-28 retaliated by restricting inmates’ freedom of movement further and stopping the movement of packages to inmates—closing off the prisoners’ lifeline. Maria responded by declaring a hunger strike. A war of nerves ensued. On Day Ten of her hunger strike in May 2013, Maria had to be hospitalized; she could no longer walk. On Day Eleven, the administration admitted defeat: locks that had been added to barracks apparently to teach Maria a lesson were removed and packages once again started being delivered. Petya was convinced that someone from Moscow had directed the administration to avoid at any cost having Maria die on them.

  Khrunova was devastated: “They’ll never forgive her for this,” she told me. “They’ve caved in and they’ve now made it clear to the entire inmate population that it’s Maria Alyokhina who sets policy there. And they also know this will persist even after she leaves—inmates will know they can make the administration cave.” She was right: within weeks, IK-28 engineered Maria’s transfer to a colony in a different region. After the initial shock and a bit of outrage, everyone involved had to admit that everybody had won: IK-28 was now rid of Maria, Maria was in a colony with much better living and working conditions, and the inmates of her new colony now had the benefit of sharing their lives with Maria Alyokhina, who immediately commenced her jailhouse lawyering there.

  A few months into Nadya and Maria’s sentences, the legal team had established a pattern of testing motions with Maria and following up with Nadya. After securing a judgment against IK-28 in a Berezniki court in the winter, in May they filed complaints against IK-14 in Mordovia. It backfired disastrously. Nadya woke up to discover she had become a pariah in the colony. Inmates would not speak to her. Brief moments of fun and camaraderie—like the times the inmates, finding themselves alone in the factory, would crank up a radio, climb right up on their sewing machines, and dance, moments worth living for—disappeared. For Nadya, they were replaced with humiliating experiences she was loath to describe to anyone. She concluded the complaints had been a mistake. She should not have picked this battle: the war for better conditions for Russian prison inmates was not her war. She reached for monotony, but monotony was now elusive. Things kept getting worse.

  Petya pinged me in the middle of the night of September 23. “Nadya is declaring a hunger strike tomorrow morning,” he wrote. He sent me an open letter Nadya had written over the preceding few days, as her decision had gelled. Some paragraphs were smuggled out on scraps of paper; others she had dictated to Petya. Together, these paragraphs made up the most affecting piece Nadya had ever written. It had none of the stilted quality of her letters from prison or the forced bravado of her letters from jail. It
held nothing back—not even the embarrassing parts.

  On Monday, September 23, I am declaring a hunger strike. This is an extreme method, but I am absolutely convinced it is my only recourse in the current situation.

  The prison wardens refuse to hear me. But I will not back down from my demands. I will not remain silent, watching in resignation as my fellow prisoners collapse under slave-like conditions. I demand that human rights be observed at the prison. I demand that the law be obeyed in this Mordovian camp. I demand we be treated like human beings, not slaves.

  It has been a year since I arrived at Penal Colony No. 14 [henceforth, IK-14—Trans.] in the Mordovian village of Partsa. As the women convicts say, “Those who haven’t done time in Mordovia haven’t done time at all.” I had heard about the Mordovian prison camps while I was still being held at Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 6 in Moscow. They have the harshest conditions, the longest workdays, and the most flagrant lawlessness. Prisoners see their fellows off to Mordovia as if they were headed to the scaffold. Until the last, they keep hoping: “Maybe they won’t send you to Mordovia after all? Maybe the danger will pass you by?” It didn’t pass me by, and in the autumn of 2012, I arrived in the prison country on the banks of the Partsa River.

  My first impression of Mordovia was the words uttered by the prison’s deputy warden, Lieutenant Colonel Kupriyanov, who actually runs IK-14. “You should know that when it comes to politics, I am a Stalinist.” Colonel Kulagin, the other warden (the prison is administered in tandem[19]) called me in for a chat my first day here in order to force me to confess my guilt. “A misfortune has befallen you. Isn’t that right? You’ve been sentenced to two years in prison. People usually change their views when bad things happen to them. If you want to be paroled as soon as possible, you have to confess your guilt. If you don’t, you won’t get parole.” I told him right away I would work only the eight hours a day stipulated by the Labor Code. “The code is the code. What really matters is making your quota. If you don’t, you work overtime. And we’ve broken stronger wills than yours here!” Colonel Kulagin replied.

  My whole shift works sixteen to seventeen hours a day in the sewing workshop, from seven-thirty in the morning to twelve-thirty at night. At best, we get four hours of sleep a night. We have a day off once every month and a half. We work almost every Sunday. Prisoners “voluntarily” apply to work on weekends. In fact, there is nothing “voluntary” about it. These applications are written involuntarily on the orders of the wardens and under pressure from the inmates who help enforce their will.

  No one dares disobey (that is, not apply to go to the manufacturing zone on Sunday, meaning going to work until one in the morning). Once, a fifty-year-old woman asked to go back to the dorm zone at eight p.m. instead of twelve-thirty p.m. so she could go to bed at ten p.m. and get eight hours of sleep just once that week. She was not feeling well; she had high blood pressure. In response, a dorm unit meeting was called, where the woman was scolded, humiliated, insulted, and branded a parasite.

  “What, do you think you’re the only one who wants more sleep? You need to work harder, you’re strong as a horse!” When someone from the shift doesn’t come to work on doctor’s orders, they’re bullied as well. “I sewed when I had a fever of forty centigrade, and it was fine. Who did you think was going to pick up the slack for you?”

  I was welcomed to my dorm unit by a convict finishing up a nine-year sentence. “The pigs are scared to put the squeeze on you themselves. They want to have the inmates do it.” Conditions at the prison really are organized in such a way that the inmates in charge of the work shifts and dorm units are the ones tasked by the wardens with crushing the will of inmates, terrorizing them, and turning them into speechless slaves.

  There is a widely implemented system of unofficial punishments for maintaining discipline and obedience. Prisoners are forced to “stay in the local[20] until lights-out,” meaning they are forbidden to go into the barracks, whether it is fall or winter. In the second unit, where the disabled and elderly live, there was a woman who ended up getting such bad frostbite after a day in the local that her fingers and one of her feet had to be amputated. The wardens can also “shut down sanitation” (forbid prisoners to wash up or go to the toilet) and “shut down the commissary and the tearoom” (forbid prisoners to eat their own food and drink beverages). It’s both funny and frightening when a forty-year-old woman tells you, “So we’re being punished today! I wonder whether we’ll be punished tomorrow too.” She can’t leave the sewing workshop to pee or take a piece of candy from her purse. It’s forbidden.

  Dreaming only of sleep and a sip of tea, the exhausted, harassed, and dirty convict becomes obedient putty in the hands of the administration, which sees us solely as a free work force. So, in June 2013, my monthly wages came to twenty-nine rubles [just less than one dollar]—twenty-nine rubles! Our shift sews one hundred and fifty police uniforms per day. Where does the money made from them go?

  The prison has been allocated funding to buy completely new equipment a number of times. However, the administration has only had the sewing machines repainted, with the convicts doing the work. We sew on obsolete and worn-out machines. According to the Labor Code, when equipment does not comply with current industry standards, production quotas must be lowered vis-à-vis standard industry norms. But the quotas only increase, abruptly and suddenly. “If you let them see you can deliver one hundred uniforms, they’ll raise the minimum to one hundred and twenty!” say veteran machine operators. And you cannot fail to deliver, either, or else the whole unit will be punished, the entire shift. Punished, for instance, by everyone being forced to stand on the parade ground for hours. Without the right to go to the toilet. Without the right to take a sip of water.

  Two weeks ago, the production quotas for all prison work shifts were arbitrarily increased by fifty units. If previously the minimum was one hundred uniforms a day, now it is one hundred and fifty. According to the Labor Code, workers must be notified of a change in the production quota no less than two months before it is goes into effect. At IK-14, we just woke up one day to find we had a new quota because the idea happened to have popped into the heads of the wardens of our “sweatshop” (that’s what the prisoners call the penal colony). The number of people in the work shift decreases (they are released or transferred), but the quota grows. As a result, those who remain have to work harder and harder. The mechanics say they don’t have the parts to repair the machinery and will not be getting them. “There are no spare parts! When will they come? What, you don’t live in Russia? How can you ask such questions?” During my first few months in the manufacturing zone, I nearly mastered the profession of mechanic, out of necessity and on my own. I would attack my machine, screwdriver in hand, desperate to fix it. Your hands are scratched and poked by needles, your blood is all over the table, but you keep on sewing. You are part of an assembly line, and you have to do your job alongside the experienced seamstresses. Meanwhile, the damned machine keeps breaking down. Because you’re the newcomer and there is a lack of good equipment in the prison, you end up with the worst equipment, the most worthless machine on the line. And now it’s broken down again, and once again you run off looking for the mechanic, who is impossible to find. You are yelled at and berated for slowing down production. There are no sewing classes at the prison, either. Newcomers are immediately plunked down in front of their machines and given their assignments.

  “If you weren’t Tolokonnikova, you would have had the shit kicked out of you a long time ago,” say fellow prisoners with close ties to the wardens. It’s true: other prisoners are beaten up. For not being able to keep up. They hit them in the kidneys, in the face. Convicts themselves deliver these beatings and not a single one of them happens without the approval and knowledge of the wardens. A year ago, before I came here, a gypsy woman was beaten to death in the third unit. (The third unit is the “pressure cooker”: prisoners whom the wardens want subjected to daily beatings are sent there.
) She died in the infirmary at IK-14. The administration was able to cover up the fact she had been beaten to death: a stroke was listed as the official cause of death. In another block, new seamstresses who couldn’t keep up were undressed and forced to sew naked. No one dares complain to the wardens, because all they will do is smile and send the prisoner back to the dorm unit, where the “snitch” will be beaten on the orders of those same wardens. For the prison warden, managed hazing is a convenient method for forcing convicts to totally obey their lawless regime.

  A threatening, anxious atmosphere pervades the manufacturing zone. Eternally sleep-deprived, overwhelmed by the endless race to fulfill inhumanly large quotas, the convicts are always on the verge of breaking down, screaming at each other, fighting over the smallest things. Just recently, a young woman got stabbed in the head with a pair of scissors because she didn’t turn in a pair of pants on time. Another tried to cut her own stomach open with a hacksaw. She was stopped from finishing the job.

  Those who found themselves at IK-14 in 2010, the year of smoke and wildfires[21] said that when the fire would approach the prison walls, convicts continued to go to the manufacturing zone and fulfill their quotas. Because of the smoke you couldn’t see a person standing two meters in front of you, but, covering their faces in wet kerchiefs, they all went to work anyway. Because of the emergency conditions, prisoners weren’t taken to the cafeteria for meals. Several women told me they were so horribly hungry they started keep diaries to document the horror of what was happening to them. When the fires were finally put out, prison security diligently rooted out these diaries during searches so that nothing would be leaked to the outside world.