Pussy Riot's Nadezhda Tolokonnikova: Why I have gone
on hunger strike
In an open letter, the imprisoned
Pussy Riot member explains why the brutal conditions at Penal Colony No 14 have
led her to undertake a hunger strike in protest
Beginning Monday, 23 September, I am going on hunger strike. This is an
extreme method, but I am convinced that it is my only way out of my current
situation.
The penal colony administration refuses to hear me. But I, in turn, refuse
to back down from my demands. I will not remain silent, resigned to watch as my
fellow prisoners collapse under the strain of slavery-like conditions. I demand
that the colony administration respect
human rights; I demand that
the
Mordovia camp function in accordance with the law. I demand that we be
treated like human beings, not slaves.
It has been a year since I arrived at Penal Colony No 14 in the Mordovian
village of Parts. As the prisoner saying goes: "Those who never did time
in Mordovia never did time at all." I started hearing about Mordovian
prison colonies while I was still being held at Pre-Trial Detention Centre No 6
in Moscow. They have the highest levels of security, the longest workdays, and
the most flagrant rights violation. When they send you off to Mordovia, it is
as though you're headed to the scaffold. Until the very last moment, they keep
hoping: "Perhaps they won't send you to Mordovia after all? Maybe it will
blow over?" Nothing blew over, and in the autumn of 2012, I arrived at the
camp on the banks of the Partsa River.
Mordovia greeted me with the words of the deputy chief of the penal colony,
Lieutenant Colonel Kupriyanov, who is the de facto head administrator of our
colony. "You should know that when it comes to politics, I am a
Stalinist." Colonel Kulagin, the other head administrator — the colony is
run in tandem — called me in for a conversation on my first day here with the
objective to force me to confess my guilt. "A misfortune has befallen you.
Isn't that so? You've been sentenced to two years in the colony. People usually
change their minds when bad things happen to them. If you want to be paroled as
soon as possible, you have to confess your guilt. If you don't, you won't get
parole." I told him right away that I would only work the 8 hours a day
required by the
labour
code. "The code is one thing — what really matters is fulfilling your
quota. If you don't, you work overtime. You should know that we have broken
stronger wills than yours!" was Kulagin's response.
My brigade in the sewing shop works 16 to 17 hours a day. From 7.30am to
12.30am. At best, we get four hours of sleep a night. We have a day off once
every month and a half. We work almost every Sunday. Prisoners submit petitions
to work on weekends "out of [their] own desire". In actuality, there
is, of course, no desire to speak of. These petitions are written on the orders
of the administration and under pressure from the prisoners that help enforce
it.
No one dares to disobey these orders and not submit such petitions regarding
entering the work zone on Sunday, which means working until 1 am. Once, a
50-year-old woman asked to go back to the residential zone at 8pm instead of
12.30am so she could go to bed at 10 pm and get eight hours of sleep just once
a week. She was feeling ill; she had high blood pressure. In response, they
held a unit meeting in order to take the woman down, insult and humiliate her,
branding her a parasite. "What, do you think you're the only one who wants
more sleep? You need to work harder, you cow!" When someone from the
brigade doesn't come to work on doctor's orders, they're bullied as well.
"I worked when I had a fever of 40C and it was fine. What are you thinking
—w ho is going to pick up the slack for you?"
My residential unit in the camp greeted me with the words of a fellow
prisoner finishing off her nine-year term. "The pigs are scared to touch
you themselves. They want to do it with the hands of the inmates." In the
colony, the inmates in charge of the brigades as well as their senior members
are the ones tasked with depriving fellow inmates' rights, terrorising them,
and turning them into speechless slaves — all on the orders of the administration.
For the maintenance of discipline and obedience, there is a widely
implemented system of unofficial punishments. Prisoners are forced to
"stay in the lokalka [a fenced-off passageway between two areas in the
camp] until lights out" (the prisoner is forbidden to go into the barracks
— whether it be autumnl or winter. In the second brigade, consisting of the
disabled and elderly, there was a woman who ended up getting such bad frostbite
after a day in the lokalka they had to amputate her fingers and one of her
feet); "lose hygiene privileges" (the prisoner is forbidden to wash
themselves or use the bathroom); "lose commissary and tea-room
privileges" (the prisoner is forbidden to eat their own food, or drink
beverages). It's both funny and frightening when a 40-year-old woman tells you:
"Looks like we're being punished today! I wonder whether we're going to be
punished tomorrow, too." She can't leave the sewing workshop to pee or get
a piece of candy from her purse. It's forbidden.
Thinking only of sleep and a sip of tea, the harassed and dirty prisoner
becomes obedient putty in the hands of the administration, which sees us solely
as free slave labor. Thus, in June 2013, my salary was 29 (29!) rubles [57p]
for the month. Our brigade sews 150 police uniforms per day. Where does the
money they get for them go?
The camp has been allocated funding to buy completely new equipment a number
of times. However, the administration has limited itself to repainting the
sewing machines with the hands of its labourers. We sew using physically and
morally exhausted machinery. According to the labour code, when equipment does
not correspond with current industry standards, quotas must be lowered in
relation to typical trade conventions. But the quotas only rise, and suddenly
and miraculously at that. "If you let them see that you can deliver 100
uniforms, they'll raise the minimum to 120!" say veteran machine-runners.
And you can't fail to deliver, either, or else your whole unit will be
punished, the entire brigade. The punishment will be, for instance, that all of
you will be forced to stand in the quad for hours. Without permission to use
the bathroom. Without permission to take a sip of water.
Two weeks ago, the production quotas for all colony brigades was arbitrarily
increased by 50 units. If previously the minimum had been 100 uniforms per day,
now it is 150. According to the labour code, workers must be notified of a
change in the production quota no less than two months before it is enforced.
At PC-14, we just woke up one day to find we had a new quota because the idea
happened to have popped into the heads of the administrators of our
"sweatshop" (that's what the prisoners call the colony). The number
of people in the brigade decreases (they are released or transferred), but the
quota grows. As a result, those left behind have to work harder and harder. The
mechanics say that they don't have the parts necessary to repair the machinery
and that they will not be getting them. "There are no parts! When will they
come? Are you kidding? This is
Russia. Why even ask that
question?" During my first few months in the work zone, I practically
became a mechanic. I taught myself out of necessity. I threw myself at my
machine, screwdriver in hand, desperate to fix it. Your hands are pierced with
needle-marks and covered in scratches, your blood is all over the work table,
but still, you keep sewing. You are a part of the assembly line, and you have
to complete your task as well as the experienced sewers. Meanwhile, the damn
machine keeps breaking down. Because you're new and there's a deficit, you end
up with the worst equipment — the weakest motor on the line. And now it's
broken down again, and once again, you run to find the mechanic, who is
impossible to find. They yell at you, they berate you for slowing down
production. There are no sewing classes at the colony, either. Newbies are
unceremoniously sat down in front of their machines and given their
assignments.
"If you weren't Tolokonnikova, you would have had the shit kicked out
of you a long time ago," say fellow prisoners with close ties to the
administration. It's true: others are beaten up. For not being able to keep up.
They hit them in the kidneys, in the face. Prisoners themselves deliver these
beatings and not a single one of them is done without the approval and full
knowledge of the administration. A year ago, before I came here, a gypsy woman
in the third unit was beaten to death (the third is the pressure unit where
they put prisoners that need to undergo daily beatings). She died in the
medical unit of PC-14. The administration was able to cover it up: the official
cause of death was a stroke. In another unit, new seamstresses who couldn't
keep up were undressed and forced to sew naked. No one dares complain to the
administration because all they will do is smile and send the prisoner back
into the unit, where the "snitch" will be beaten on the orders of that
same administration. For the colony administration, controlled hazing is a
convenient method for forcing prisoners into total submission to their systemic
abuse of human rights.
A threatening, anxious atmosphere pervades the work zone. Eternally
sleep-deprived, overwhelmed by the endless race to fulfill inhumanly large
quotas, prisoners are always on the verge of breaking down, screaming at each
other, fighting over the smallest things. Just recently, a young woman got
stabbed in the head with a pair of scissors because she didn't turn in a pair
of pants on time. Another tried to cut her own stomach open with a hacksaw.
They stopped her.
Those who found themselves in PC-14 in 2010, the year of smoke and fire,
said that while the wildfires were approaching the colony walls, prisoners
continued to go to the work zone and fulfill their quotas. Due to the smoke,
you couldn't see two metres in front of you, but, covering their faces in wet
handkerchiefs, they all went to work nonetheless. Because of the emergency
conditions, prisoners weren't taken to the cafeteria for meals. Several women
told me that they were so horribly hungry they started writing diaries in order
to document the horror of what was happening to them. When the fires were
finally put out, camp security thoroughly rooted these diaries out so that none
of them would make it to the outside.
The hygienic and residential conditions of the camp are calculated to make
the prisoner feel like a filthy animal without any rights. Although there are
"hygiene rooms" in the dormitories, there is also "general
hygiene room" with a corrective and punitive purpose. This room has a
capacity of five; however, all 800 colony prisoners are sent there to wash
themselves. We do not have to wash ourselves in the hygiene rooms in our
barracks — that would be too easy. In the "general hygiene room", in
the eternal press, women with little tubs attempt to wash their
"nursemaids" (as they call them in Mordovia) as fast as they can,
heaped onto one another. We are allowed to wash our hair once a week. However,
even this bathing day gets cancelled. A pump will break or the plumbing will be
stopped up. At times, my unit was unable to bathe for two to three weeks.
When the plumbing breaks down, urine splashes and clumps of faeces fly out
of the hygiene rooms. We've learned to unclog the pipes ourselves, but our
successes are short-lived — they soon get stopped up again. The colony does not
have a snake for cleaning out the pipes. We get to do laundry once a week. The
laundry is a small room with three faucets pouring weak streams of cold water.
It must also be a corrective measure to only give prisoners stale bread,
heavily watered-down milk, exclusively rusted millet and rotten potatoes. This
summer, they brought in sacks of slimy, black potatoes in bulk. Then they fed
them to us.
The living and working-condition violations at PC-14 are endless. However,
my main and most important grievance is bigger than any one of these. It is
that the colony administration prevents any complaints or claims regarding
conditions at PC-14 from leaving colony walls by the harshest means available.
The administration forces people to remain silent. It does not scorn stooping
to the very lowest and cruelest means to this end. All of the other problems
come from this one — the increased quotas, the 16-hour work day, and so on. The
administration feels untouchable; it heedlessly oppresses prisoners with
growing severity. I couldn't understand why everyone kept silent until I found
myself faced with the avalanche of obstacles that falls on the prisoner who
decides to speak out. Complaints simply do not leave the prison. The only
chance is to complain through a lawyer or relatives. The administration, petty
and vengeful, will meanwhile use all of its mechanisms for putting pressure on
the prisoner so she will see that her complaints will not help anyone, but only
make thing worse. They use collective punishment: you complain there's no hot
water, and they turn it off entirely.
In May 2013, my lawyer Dmitry Dinze filed a complaint about the conditions
at PC-14 with the prosecutor's office. The deputy head of the colony,
Lieutenant Colonel Kupriyanov, instantly made conditions at the camp
unbearable. There was search after search, a flood of reports on all of my acquaintances,
the seizure of warm clothes, and threats of seizure of warm footwear. At work,
they get revenge with complicated sewing assignments, increased quotas, and
fabricated malfunctions. The leaders of the unit next to mine, Lieutenant
Colonel Kupriyanov's right hands, openly requested that prisoners interfere
with my work output so that I could be sent to the punishment cell for
"damaging government property." They also ordered prisoners to
provoke a fight with me.
It is possible to tolerate anything as long as it only affects you. But the
method of collective punishment is bigger than that. It means that your unit,
or even the entire colony, is required to endure your punishment along with
you. This includes, worst of all, people you've come to care about. One of my
friends was denied parole, for which she had been awaiting seven years, working
hard to exceed her work quotas. She was reprimanded for drinking tea with me.
That day, Lieutenant Colonel Kupriyanov transferred her to another unit. Another
close acquaintance of mine, a very well-educated woman, was thrown into the
"stress unit" for daily beatings because she was reading and
discussing a Justice Department document with me, entitled: "Regulations
for the code of conduct at correctional facilities." They filed reports on
everyone who talked to me. It hurt me that people I cared about were forced to
suffer. Grinning, Lieutenant Colonel Kupriyanov told me then, "You
probably don't have any friends left!" He explained that everything was
happening because of Dinze's complaint.
Now I see that I should have gone on hunger strike in May when I was first
found myself in this situation. However, the tremendous pressure that the
administration had put on my fellow prisoners due to my actions led me to stop
the process of filing complaints about the conditions in the colony.
Three weeks ago, on 30 August, I asked Lieutenant Colonel Kupriyanov to
grant the prisoners in my work brigade eight hours of sleep. We were discussing
decreasing the workday from 16 to 12 hours. "Fine, starting Monday, the
brigade will only work for eight hours at a time," he replied. I knew this
was another trap because it is physically impossible to fulfill the increased
quota in 8 hours. Thus, the brigade will not have time and subsequently face
punishment. "If anyone finds out that you're the one behind this, you'll
never complain again," the Lieutenant Colonel continued. "After all,
there's nothing to complain about in the afterlife." Kupriyanov paused. "And
finally, never request things for other people. Only ask for things for
yourself. I've been working in the camps for many years, and those who come to
me asking for things for other people go directly from my office to the
punishment cell. You're the first person this won't happen to."
Over the course of the following weeks, life in my unit and work brigade
became impossible. Prisoners with close ties to the administration began egging
on the others to get revenge. "You're forbidden to have tea and food, from
taking bathroom breaks, and smoking for a week. Now you're always going to be
punished unless you start behaving differently with the newbies and especially
with Tolokonnikova. Treat them like the old-timers used to treat you. Were you
beaten? Of course you were. Did they rip your mouths? They did. Fuck them up.
You won't get punished."
Over and over, they attempt to get me to fight one of them, but what's the
point of fighting with people who aren't in charge of themselves, who are only
acting on the orders of the administration?
Mordovian prisoners are afraid of their own shadows. They are completely
terrified. If only yesterday they were well-disposed toward you and begging,
"Do something about the 16 hour work day!" after the administration
started going after me, they're afraid to even speak to me.
I turned to the administration with a proposal for dealing with the
conflict. I asked that they release me from the pressure manufactured by them
and enacted by the prisoners they control; that they abolish slave labour at
the colony by cutting the length of the workday and decreasing the quotas so
that they correspond with the law. The pressure has only increased. Therefore,
beginning 23 September, I am going on hunger strike and refusing to participate
in colony slave labor. I will do this until the administration starts obeying
the law and stops treating incarcerated women like cattle ejected from the
realm of justice for the purpose of stoking the production of the sewing
industry; until they start treating us like humans.
Translation: Bela Shayevich of n+1
magazine, which has covered the Pussy Riot case extensively