Putin v Punk Pussy: the truth comes out and Putin goes to hell
THREE years ago Nadia Tolokonnikova donned a balaclava and, with two partners in the Pussy Riot band, cavorted near the altar of Moscow’s biggest cathedral, screeching out a “punk prayer” in protest against the imminent re-election of Vladimir Putin as president. For her pains she was sentenced to two years in a penal colony. Though still an ardent opponent of Russia’s leader, Ms Tolokonnikova has narrowed the focus of her dissent to the conditions of prisoners in the country’s far-flung archipelago of jails. It is a worthy cause.
At the last count there were 657,000 Russians behind bars, one of the world’s highest ratios of prisoners to population. “Our current, vile law-enforcement system”, she says, “still grinds people to a pulp and spits them out into their graves.” The frequency of deaths in custody amounts to a “Russian Ebola”. Tuberculosis is the commonest killer, she says, followed by HIV-AIDS, which may affect 75,000 prisoners. The offences for which Russians are most often imprisoned, she says, concern drugs.
When she was first incarcerated in Penal Colony 14 in Mordovia, a Stalin-era camp about 500km (310 miles) south-east of Moscow, prisoners routinely had to work for 16 hours a day. Ms Tolokonnikova shared a dormitory and three functioning (and seatless) toilets with 100-150 women. They were each allowed one shower a week. The food was barely edible. Corrupt prison administrators, she says, would steal part of the money allocated for food. “You might get a pig’s ear or tail, drowning in cooking oil.”
There was no television and no radio apart from the camp tannoy, and no time to read. Family visits were restricted to one every two months. Few prisoners could afford telephone calls; most women had one a month. Bullying, especially by old lags favoured by the warders as discipline-enforcers, was routine.
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