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ARTICLE

Russia’s political prisoners endure isolation, poor food and arbitrary punishment
www.latimes.com
DASHA LITVINOVA
2-28-2024 11:15 a.m. EST
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2024-02-28/whats-life-like-for-russias-political-prisoners-isolation-poor-food-and-arbitrary-punishment

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 the Associated Press. When he collected the sheets, a guard with a camera appeared and told him he had 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, healthcare that is poor or 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.

“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.

THE GULAG’S LEGACY

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.” (excerpt)