A 21st Century Gulag
February 14th, 2008 by JEB KOOGLER
This article by Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal will make you wonder whether the cruelty of the Soviet era did, in fact, end decisively in 1991. The answer, in many regards, is no. Under Vladimir Putin, some of the most despicable and cruel tactics of the Communist years have been reinvented - from the intimidation of opposition leaders, to the killing of journalists, to the infamous brutality towards detainees, the “new” Russia is looking increasingly like its prior self.
But it is the incredible, systematic abuse of prisoners - not entirely dissimilar from Stalin’s gulag system - at which Stephens takes aim. He notes that of the 700 prison camps in Russia, around 50 are designated as Pytochnye kolonii — or, torture colonies. While these camps can’t be “compared to the Soviet Gulag in terms of scope or the percentage of prisoners who are innocent of any real crime, they are fast approaching it in terms of sheer cruelty.” Beatings, torture, deliberate lack of medical treatment, and arbitrary punishments are standard fare.
At IK-1, a prisoner with a broken leg named Zurab Baroyan made the mistake of testifying to conditions at the colony to a staff representative of the Human Rights Ombudsman of the Russian Federation. “After this,” Mr. Baroyan reported, the commandant of the colony “threatened to rot me in the dungeon. They did not complete treating me in the hospital. The leg festers [and] pus runs from the bandage. . . The festering has crossed over to the second leg.”
Not surprisingly, suicide attempts at these colonies are common. One convict, named Mishchikin, sought to commit suicide by swallowing “a wire and nails tied together crosswise.” As punishment, he was denied medical assistance for 12 days. Another convict, named Fargiyev, was held in handcuffs for 52 days after stabbing himself; he never fully recovered motor function in his hands.
Even the smallest of prisoner infractions can be met with savage reprisals. In one case, authorities noticed the smell of cigarette smoke in a so-called “penalty isolator” cell where seven convicts were being held. “A fire engine was called in. . . . The entire cell, including the convicts and their personal things, was flooded with cold water.” The convicts were left in wet clothes in 50 degree Fahrenheit temperatures for a week.
Yeltsin’s government had tried to put an end to prisoner mistreatment. Yet the Putin administration, without directly authorizing it, has essentially adopted a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that allows for prison directors to quietly institutionalize such abuse. As the co-founder of the Foundation for Defense of Rights of Prisoners, Lev Ponomarev, has suggested: “…when Putin came to power, a new tone was set. The sadists who had previously been ‘behaving’ [under Yeltsin] simply stopped behaving.”
There’s actually a video of one of these prisons that was smuggled out by a guard and is now circulating on YouTube. The following description is provided: “A video discovered by Russian human rights activist Lev Ponomarev reveals cases of significant human rights abuses in a Yekaterinaburg prisoner camp, as the OMON police beat, torture, and intimidate the inmates as part of a ‘preventative action’ to manage the prison population. The footage, which is from 2006, was captured covertly at great personal risk by a prison guard, and later leaked to Ponomarev, who succeeded in getting a brief excerpt aired on REN-TV very late at night. Here is the first full version of the video, brought to public distribution by the lawyer Robert Amsterdam, lawyer for the political prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky.”
This is graphic, but it certainly needs to be shown. I encourage people to post this on their blogs, email it colleagues, and otherwise disseminate this video to the broader public. Viewer discretion is advised.
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 1:39 pm and is filed under Russia. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
