Since his release from prison in the Russian Volga metropolis Saratov, Sergei Saveliev has feared for his life. The young man smuggled vast amounts of video material out of jail in order to make the depths of the prison system public. “They are videos full of terrible, sadistic scenes,” says the 31-year-old, who was granted asylum in France. You can see naked, bound prisoners who are tortured in every possible way.
The fact that prisoners are being tortured in Russia is nothing new. But the extent that is now becoming known exceeds everything imaginable, as Vladimir Ossetschkin from the human rights project Gulagu.net says. He repeatedly publishes pixelated and highly regarded images of the brute force in prison camps on social networks.
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In particular, the videos published in early October from the number one prison hospital in Saratov caused widespread horror. Savelyev worked there in video surveillance – and thus had access to the files. After his release, he handed them over to Ossetschkin, who had left Russia in 2015.
Ossetschkin named his organization after the camp system founded under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, which the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) once described in his work “Archipel Gulag”. The name Gulag is gone, but even Russian government politicians sometimes complain that the system is basically still going on.
Savelyev and Ossetschkin have found political asylum in Biarritz, the seaside resort in southwest France. You talk to the international media almost every day, you work with documentary filmmakers. Their goal is to make the largest exposure of violence in Russian prisons to date public.
Russia’s star presenter Xenia Sobchak just met Savelyev in France for an interview for her video channel. She calls him a “new type of hero” and places him in a row with whistleblowers who make state grievances public.
In view of the amount of data, she called her film a “100 gigabit bomb”. Abused prisoners who report a system of fear and looking away also have their say. More than two million people have viewed the film on Youtube so far.
In other countries such scandals would topple governments, says Sobchak. But not in Russia. It is true that the officials accused by Savelyev have been released from prison. So far, however, there have been no arrests. Instead, the judiciary issued an arrest warrant for Saveliev and put him out to be wanted. Russia’s media supervisory authority Roskomnadzor is also trying to have the videos blocked online, for example on YouTube.
Both know that Russia’s secret services have a long arm. The list of murdered Russian government critics is long. Ossetschkin accuses the penal system and the domestic secret service FSB of having created a system of oppression and humiliation. “Although everyone can see what is going on in the prison camps, there is no objective investigation,” he says. “Rather, it is clear that they want to destroy us.”
But there are other informants. The publications should continue. “The system always acts in the same way: those who tell the truth are persecuted,” says Saveliev, who sees himself as a “traitor” and “enemy of the state”. He has published names of the alleged perpetrators of the prison system. Often, however, the guards would not perpetrate the violence themselves, but fellow prisoners.
Human rights activists see several reasons for the torture
Prisoners resorted to violence against their fellow inmates in order to buy benefits such as milder sentences, early release or even alcohol. Recordings of torture were also used as a deterrent to extort money from prisoners. Sometimes criminals can also order punitive actions against their enemies in prison, it is said.
The violence is used not least to break offenders, to re-educate them or to extort a confession. Investigators who present guilty parties can hope for bonuses and promotion. In an open letter to Vladimir Putin, Ossetschkin recently asked whether the Kremlin chief knew that generals and officers were “leading him by the nose” and that they were doing nothing to counter the violence. Or whether the president himself knows – and “personally allows the torture”. There is no answer to that.
“The level of torture, corruption, inhumane treatment and murder surpasses anything. The world is now seeing these massive crimes, ”says Ossetschkin. Among other things, he calls for a harsher punishment for torture in the penal system in Russia and an end to the persecution of those who make grievances public.
The moderator Sobchak thinks that the whole system must be broken up and rebuilt from scratch. But the prominent human rights activist Olga Romanowa, who campaigns for the rights of prisoners, has no hope. Perhaps Savelyev’s revelations led to less torture for a short time. “But there are no illusions that something can be changed. The prison system itself is a violation of human rights in its condition. “ (dpa)
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