Prisoners at Easter Festival in St Petersburg's Kresty prison. (c) Igor Russak / RIA Novosti. All rights reserved.This week, a letter from civic activist Ildar Dadin, who is currently serving a three-year sentence for violating legislation on public demonstrations, has forced Russian society to look again at the practices that dominate Russia’s penitentiary system. The letter describes the humiliation and torture Dadin has faced as a new arrival at Penal Colony 7 in Segezha, Karelia, including group beatings, being hung up by the handcuffs and having his head thrust down the prison toilet.
There’s nothing particularly new in Dadin’s letter. What, we didn’t know that people are tortured in Russia’s prison system? That people are illegally placed in punishment cells, and have to face unbearable living conditions every day? Since the era of the Gulag, the use of physical force against a prisoner has been a means of making him or her obedient and dependent on the prison administration.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel laureate and a former prisoner himself, remembers in The Gulag Archipelago how Soviet prison guards had 52 forms of torture in their arsenal. “Their branch of service does not require them to be educated people of broad culture and broad views — and they are not. Their branch of service does not require them to think logically — and they do not. Their branch of service requires only that they carry out orders exactly and be impervious to suffering — and that is what they do and who they are.”
