Photo courtesy of the author. All rights reserved.In Segezha, most people are either “paper people” (workers at the local pulp and paper mill) or officers at the local prison colony. Indeed, Segezha’s Colony No.7 has a reputation: Mikhail Khodorkovsky spent two years in prison here, and in 2016, another political prisoner, Ildar Dadin, revealed he’d been brutally tortured at the colony.
Residents of Segezha recently took to the streets to demand the resignation of the town’s mayor. I went along to find out more – and found people exchanging their frustrations on local issues.
Between the prison and the paper mill
In the early 1990s, this typical company town was the second largest settlement in Karelia, which shares a border with Finland, but in the last 15 years it’s lost a quarter of its population. Residents, especially young people, are leaving for bigger cities.
