Navalny in the prison camp: “Corridor full of blood and excrement” – What awaits the Kremlin critic

• Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was removed from prison in Moscow.
• The Russian opposition politician is brought to a “colony with general conditions”.
• Former inmates of such a prison camp reported cruel torture.

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Moscow – The reception at the prison camp is often brutal. “For the first hour and a half they beat me in the ‘room for educational work’, allegedly I had neglected to register in a fire protection book. They beat me with wooden carpenter’s hammers, back then they didn’t use rubber truncheons. ”Newcomers were beaten to see if they wanted to withstand the pressure or if they gave in immediately.

The bus driver and former entrepreneur Ruslan Wachapow served five and a half years in the “Improvement Colony IK No. 1” in Yaroslavl, a penal camp “with general detention conditions”. Also the opposition Alexei Nawalny was evacuated from a Moscow underground detention center on Thursday, to a “colony with general conditions”. Not sure what to expect behind her barbed wire. “The beatings in Yaroslavl are by no means the worst thing that happens in Russian prisons,” says Igor Kaljapin, chairman of the legal protection group “Committee against Torture”. “And unfortunately not an isolated case.”

Navalny has to go to the Russian prison camp: “Corridor afterwards full of blood and excrement”

Ruslan doesn’t know how many times he was beaten. Twice a year, a special police unit moved in to beat up anyone on the prison management’s list. “Once, 2013, the corridor afterwards was full of blood and excrement.“

From 692 Russian penal institutions are only eight prisons, the rest of the camps; the prisoners do not live in cells, but in large wooden or brick barracks. Its population has halved since 2000 to around 480,000. Experts attribute this to, among other things, reduced crime rates, alternative punishments for young people or minor offenses.

Navalny: Russia’s penal camps as places of retaliation

Still apply Russia’s penal camp as places of retribution. Karzer threatens open shirt buttons and blows for complaints. At the same time, the guards sell the prisoners strictly forbidden cell phones for 25 euros, only to confiscate them and sell them again.

The everyday life of the prisoners looks very different. In some places the inmates push themselves to work because otherwise they are threatened with hours of drills on the main square; elsewhere, professional criminals in particular kill time reading or playing football.

“Whether there is a beating in a camp depends on what is going on in the head of the director,” says human rights activist Kaljapin. Especially in camps with a strict regime, the thugs are so-called “activists”, prisoners with often long sentences who work together with the law enforcement officers. According to official information, there were 1,881 complaints in 2018 alone Torture in Russian prisons. Only 3.2 percent were prosecuted.

What Navalny expects in the Russian penal camp

“It’s about humiliating people, breaking them,” explains the writer Maxim Gromow, who sat for three years. “Guard dogs are constantly baring you, you have to take off your hat in front of every officer, not to mention beating.” After his release, he struggled for years for his self-esteem. “I know that I’m sick,” says Ruslan Wachapov about his psyche. “And my joints, the left shoulder, the left hip, the knee are bruised.”

It is easier for popular political prisoners; the bone breakers usually leave them alone. They are visited by human rights activists and kept up to date about the world. Alexei Nawalny should enjoy similar benefits. But in the end his survival depends on the arbitrariness of those who hold him captive. (Stefan Scholl)

After the Navalny ruling, there were mass protests in Russia and over 1,100 people were arrested.

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