Maria “Masha” Alyokhina is a Russian political activist. She is a member of the anti-Putinist[ punk rock group Pussy Riot.
NPR — This week, lawyers for jailed American basketball star Brittney Griner revealed she is currently on her way to a Russian penal colony to begin serving out her nine-year sentence on drug smuggling charges.
Which prison, exactly, is unknown. Neither is Griner’s current location. Prisoner transfers often take several weeks, and only then are Russian authorities required to reveal a convict’s whereabouts, Griner’s legal team says.
Nearly half a million Russians are currently incarcerated— the highest number on the European continent, according to 2022 figures.
Yet those who have spent time in the system say Griner can expect an experience that is more aligned with the Soviet Union’s past than most Americans’ current ideas of criminal justice.
“This is a legal slavery system. There’s nothing about correction or improvement of people’s behavior.”
“If jail is possible to imagine, then a penal colony, you can only imagine reading dissidents’ books,” says Maria Alyokhina, who spent nearly two years in a colony following a protest performance in a Moscow church as a member of the renowned feminist punk collective Pussy Riot.
Alyokhina suggests reading Soviet writers like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who indelibly captured the grim cruelty of the Soviet camps in his work The Gulag Archipelago.
There’s also Alyokhina’s own memoir Riot Days, which is also now a traveling live performance of her experiences in a prison colony in the Ural mountains.
“Of course it has a bit better conditions than [the] original gulag system from the 1950s,” says Alyokhina, reached by NPR on tour in the United Kingdom. “But the sense is the same. It is a labor camp.”
Aloykhina says while most Americans imagine prison cells with bars, Griner can expect to live in “the zone” — a set of barracks with 80 to 100 women sleeping to a room and few, if any, amenities.
“For 100 women, there are like three toilets and no hot water. Bathing is a once-a-week occurrence.”
Most importantly, she says, in Russian prison colonies, all prisoners must perform forced labor … READ MORE.
Life of lesbians in Russian prisons
Marianne Hofman | MAY 30, 2018 | Eyes on Barents
Women agree to have sex in exchange for cigarettes
In this report, we meet with four former prisoners who tell us about their experiences — what it’s like to love in prison.
Natalia
Natalia got her freedom in September 2010, she has a total prison experience of more than 15 years. She has herself lost the count of the number of years in detention.
She got the first terms for pickpocketing, then she was given twenty years for drugs. And when she was released, she burst with energy, a power that she previously used to track down money and drugs. The energy persisted, and she felt a need to spend it on something good. Now, Natalia is a LGBT activist who has become famous for her YouTube video made following the controversial video made by cadets at the Russian Aviation College. Natalia’s video scored more than half a million views.
— Did your first homosexual experience happen in prison?
I believe that I was lucky, because I had sexual relations with a woman before the first term. And I understood everything about myself. In fact, perhaps, nothing might have happened under those bestial conditions. Not that it would not have continued, but I would not have had the experience.
Because everything is visible, including sex. In the colony, beds are placed very close to each other, in two tiers. There are about 150 people in one section. But it’s not bad, it’s good, in fact, when a lot of people have some sort of autonomy. When twenty people are in the same room, you are always in full view … READ MORE.
