Tyrant Stalin create an opressed Russia that still in XXI Century after Christ by the same ways of the past: power over Persons without control with violation of Human Freedom, without respect for Human Life. An example of what exists in many countries of this primitive Earth ... How is possible that politics and religion still linked with pseudo representants of God acts and words as anthithesys of Jesus Christ messages? God bless all victims of tyranny!
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova as member of a music group that criticize the Russian leader Putin in a Moscow´s Cathedral
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova in court (2012) in photo by Aleshkovsky Mitya/ Aleshkovsky Mitya/ITAR-TASS Photo/Corbis. She become a political prisioner
«Nadezhda Tolokonnikova in a single confinement cell at Penal Colony No 14 in Mordavia» Photo: Ilya Shablinsky/AFP/Getty Images
Letter of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova published by The Guardian in 23 September 2013 (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/sep/23/pussy-riot-hunger-strike-nadezhda-tolokonnikova):
«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 —who 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.»
FREEDOM FOR PERSONS THAT RESPECT FREEDOM. LIBERTY STILL SAD WITH THIS PRIMITE WORLD!
«The Liberty Monument at Moses Circle, Ticonderoga, New York» photo by Mwanner (Wikipedia) Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en)
