Organised into work brigades and subjected to the violent whims of sadistic military guards, the day-to-day lives of the inmates are punctuated only by malnourishment, corporal punishment and death. The penal colony is a place where the authorities can act with impunity, free to torture prisoners in the hope of extracting a false confession.
Such a description no doubt evokes memories of the worst years of the 20th century, an era of totalitarian horror that is fast fading from living memory. It is certainly not an image that one would immediately associate with anywhere on the modern European continent. But the truth is that, thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, such places continue to exist in Russia — as Alexander Navalny, Putin’s most prominent political enemy, is currently finding out.
Last week, the opposition politician was transferred to Penal Colony Number 2 in the small provincial town of Pokrov, roughly two hours’s drive east of Moscow. It will be his home, if you can call it that, for the next two and a half years after he was found guilty of breaking a parole violation from a previous charge of embezzlement in 2014 — although the European Court of Human Rights has described the allegations as “arbitrary and unfair”.
Unlike in Germany, where the death and concentration camps of the Nazi regime have become monuments to the sins of fascism, the spirit of Stalinist oppression so vividly described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn has survived in modern Russia, with penal colonies constituting an integral part of the country’s correctional system. In fact, these “corrective labour colonies” are the most common type of prison in the Russian Federation.
Some of the modern labour camps — including the notorious Penal Colony Number 14 in Mordovia — exist on the sites of their Gulag forerunners. Indeed, in many cases all that has changed is their name: from falling under the auspices of the Gulag, a Russian acronym for “Main Camp Directorate”, to today’s Federal Penitentiary Service. Little else has changed, with many of the buildings and facilities in the penal colonies dating back to the time of the USSR.
The offences that lead to incarceration also bear some resemblance to those of the past. Just as the Gulag system imprisoned enemies of the Communist regime, the penal colonies of today are home to dissidents who have dared to criticise the rule of President Putin.
Similarly, the ways in which anti-establishment figures are treated have also stood the tests of time. Navalny hinted at this in a message posted on his Instagram account last week: “I had no idea that it was possible to arrange a real concentration camp 100km from Moscow,” it said. “I think someone upstairs read Orwell’s 1984 and said: ‘Yeah, cool. Let’s do this.’” Navalny went on to clarify that, so far, he has “not seen any violence”, but can still “easily believe the numerous stories that, not long ago, people here were beaten to within an inch of their lives with wooden hammers”.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeThe article inaccurately gives Navalny’s name as Alexander. It is actually Alexei.
Funnily enough I read ‘A Voice From The Chorus’ just last year. This is an account by Abram Tertz of his time in a Russian labour camp in the late 1960s, as told through letters to his wife. (So, very heavily censored and, probably, far from the full story). Either way, it would appear that things are possibly worse now than they were then. But that’s Russia for you, and the Russians do seem to like an autocrat.
Sadly, the predilection for a “strong leader” is not just Russian. In the UK, part of Boris’ attraction was that he was willing to break the law and lie and cheat to bring about his aims. Whether he is turning out to be as strong a leader as he pretended remains unclear. A similar phenomenon may have occurred in the US (and readers can label whichever side they like as the cheats there).
That sort of thing doesn’t seem to be good for democracy. Any chance of a return to the rule of law here, do you think?
What over-egged nonsense! There is no comparison worth making between Boris (for all his faults) and Putin.
Well they both have Russian names…
You’d probably be more annoyed if you’d understood my point, John. I was comparing the Russian people and some of the English people who supported Boris, in their appetite for “strong” leadership. What starts with someone like Boris may end with someone more like Vladimir.
For the avoidance of doubt, Boris is not as bad, and the English people as a whole are less keen on self-styled strongmen – in spite of the Home Secretary’s incessant attempts to be tough on people of whom she does not approve.
When in a hole, stop digging.
You are right but in the wrong way. Johnstone is nowhere near the leader Putin is and his government’s mishandling of the not so dread virus graphically demonstrates that. He’s also a war criminal because in addition to having special forces illegally in Syria Britain participated in the missile attack after the obvious false flag CW attack in Douma, unless you can invent a plausible reason why the Syrian government would do that when on the verge of routing the terrorist forces there.
Johnson, not Johnstone!
Do the downvoters actually think that Boris puts the rule of law above doing what he wants to do? If he doesn’t, then he’s going down the Putin route, whether you support him or not.
Navalny was not “charged” with fraud, he was convicted and sentenced then broke parole conditions, at least you get that part right. Navalny has at best 2% support in Russia that’s not exactly a huge concern to Putin who is massively popular.
Oh those Russians….
I find their directness refreshing.
What?!
“Navalny hinted at this in a message posted on his Instagram account last week:…”
Um, what’s wrong in this picture? Relative to the tenor of this article?
You’re kidding, right…?
And in the news this morning, Navalny has suddenly died….R.I.P.
Navalny is dead. I always thought why, why would he go back to Russia knowing he would suffer and be killed. Matyrdom yes, but I think he could have done more if he’d stayed outside of Russia.
Actually, I think you meant Tsar Nicholas II’s gulags.
The Siberian gulags vastly predated Stalin and Lenin and Khrushchev and Brezhnev and Putin and were merely a continuity of the pre-existing gulag archipelago of the thousand years of Tsars.
Indeed Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Yeltsin, Medvedev and Putin are simply modern iterations of the Tsars, no more, no less.
Just as Xi and Deng and Mao are simply the latest in a 6,000 year line of Chinese emperors.
Nonsense. The Tsarist penal system was not an extensive system of torture-to-death in the Soviet style and it did not target political prisoners, who received softer treatment – exile in Siberia. In all, just over six thousand were exiled to Siberia in the whole of the nineteenth century – sometimes with servants; Stalin routinely sent that number to a terrible, agonising death in the course of a day. Why not check some facts before lashing out with such wild, inaccurate allegations? Or are you hoping to whitewash communism’s history of continual crime by pretending that it was nothing new?
I am afraid that is not accurate.
If you read he account of the Bolsheviks who were exiled to Siberia it was holiday in comparison,
.
What a splendidly uplifting piece.
I so wish we had something like this here, where we could finally install the likes of Diane Abbott, David Lammy, BLM, Stonewall, Ash Sarkar, Julie Bindelsque feminist atrocities, Extinction Rebellion, transvester-anything, and media Jews writing article after article suggesting the extinction of white people.
The thought of just getting on with life, and actually progressing as a nation, rather than pandering to the machinations of Third World imbeciles and self-appointed mendacious middle eastern chosen people seems overwhelming – almost too blissful to contemplate. Because there’s always the grim reality of ‘equality’ that you eventually have to open your eyelids to.
Well said.