Don't Trust, Don't Fear, Don't Beg: The Extraordinary Story of the Arctic 30

EIGHT

A guard and a female interpreter are stood over Alex Harris. She gets to her feet. The guard peers over Alex’s shoulder and looks around the cell then says something. The woman translates, asking Alex if she has any questions.

‘I just want to know, when can I speak to my family?’

Guard and translator converse.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Please. When can I speak to my family?’

More words are exchanged, the woman turns back to Alex.

‘You have to put an application in to the investigators.’

‘I have to do what?’

‘Yes, a written formal application.’

‘To make a phone call?’

‘Yes.’

‘But… but surely that’s a basic human right, to make a phone call. I’ve just been locked up and…’

‘I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do.’

‘Okay, so I have to write this application. How long does it take?’

A long and involved consultation between translator and guard ends only when he shrugs his shoulders and fiddles with his belt buckle. The woman says, ‘A few weeks, maybe a month.’ And with that, the guard coughs, steps backwards, reaches out and pulls the door closed.

Two thousand four hundred miles away, Cliff Harris and his wife Lin are staring at the television. Every hour the news channel runs pictures of vans leaving the Investigative Committee headquarters, and they know their daughter is in one of them. The family is in a state of shock. They don’t know how Alex will possibly cope with the ordeal she’s undergoing. ‘You have to start from the fact that Alex has always been a very sensitive, caring child,’ says Cliff.

But Alex isn’t feeling very caring right now, instead she’s burning with indignation, chewing her lip with anger and staring at the door, ready to jump down the throat of the next person who opens it. Hours pass before it swings open again and two guards stand before her.

‘I want my telephone call,’ she shouts at them.

‘Gulyat.’

‘What? What the fuck does that mean? I want my…’ She sits up and makes a phone shape with her thumb and little finger and holds it to her head. ‘I want to call my family.’

‘Gulyat.’ One of the guards makes his fingers do a little walk. ‘Exercise.’

Alex’s heart jumps. At last, this is where she’ll see her friends. She assumes it’s going to be a big yard like in the movies, with prisoners in orange overalls playing basketball. It’s going to be good to see the others again, to hold them and share stories about this place.

She pulls on her purple ski jacket. The guards lead her down hallways, through doors, down a staircase and outside into the open air. They’re walking her towards a concrete building with a long line of doors. When they get there they open one and push her inside. With a scraping sound the door closes and a key turns in the lock.

It’s dark. She’s in a box. It’s two metres by three metres. She looks up. The roof is made of chicken wire and crumbling asbestos tiles, and through the mesh she can see a guard cradling a rifle, looking down at her from a bridge. The floor is covered in spit and cigarette butts. She kicks out, spins around and hugs herself. Then she buries her face in her ski jacket.

In all her life, she has never felt so alone.

Alex Harris studied marketing at university and always assumed she would end up at an advertising agency. On her placement year she worked at Bosch power tools. After graduating she saved up money in Abu Dhabi – ‘not my kind of place’ – and hit South America. And that was where she fell in love with nature. She was in the Amazon, on a canoe, it was idyllic, birds flying above her in the dense jungle canopy. Then she saw the oil pipelines. And she thought, why are they there? Why the hell are they pumping oil through the Amazon jungle? That’s crazy.

After that she went to the Galápagos Islands. She dived with sharks and swam with seals and turtles. When the Deepwater Horizon oil platform blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, she was in Australia. She watched the TV footage of oiled coastlines and felt real, visceral anger. She wanted to do something. She bombarded her parents and friends with petitions. Then she signed up to volunteer at Greenpeace.

Two years later she boarded the Sunrise and sailed for the Prirazlomnaya as a full-time campaigner. And now she’s locked in a stinking box in a prison in the Russian Arctic.

‘Is anybody there?’

She jolts and looks up. It’s a familiar voice coming over the wall from the box next door.

‘Cami? Is that you?’

‘Alex!’

‘Camila! Are you okay?’

‘I’m okay, are you okay?’

‘Not really.’

‘What’s your cell like?’

‘Oh my God, it’s horrible.’

‘I’m scared, Alex.’

‘The guards are arseholes.’

‘Did you eat the breakfast?’

‘Are you kidding me. It smelt of cold sick.’

‘We’re gonna starve in this place.’

‘Are you next to me?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Which cell are you in?’

‘Two-sixteen.’

‘I’m in two-fifteen! We’re next to each other!’

‘Maybe we can talk.’

And right there, on that first morning in SIZO-1, they devise a code. They agree to tap spoons on the pipe that connects their cells. One tap is ‘A’, two taps ‘B’, three for ‘C’, twenty-six taps for ‘Z’. Five taps mean you want to speak, three means okay, go ahead. And an hour later, when they’re back in their cells, they have their first coded conversation. Then at 10 p.m., when the stamping starts again, when she hears the screams of the other prisoners, Alex taps to Camila and gets a tap back. And that’s how they reassure each other. That’s how they know they’ll survive the second night.

The women have heard nothing of the doroga – the road. They have no cellmates to initiate them into the rituals of this place. Meanwhile the men exchange dozens of emails with each other. Kieron discovers he can get a message to almost any cell in the prison. But mostly he exchanges letters with Phil. They discuss rumours they’re hearing from the others, how some of the activists are saying this will be over in a few days or a few weeks. But even then Kieron’s thinking, no, I can’t cope with this, I can’t do a few weeks in here.

The hours stretch out in a monotonous routine that takes just a single weekend to become familiar. Porridge arrives at six. You eat it then go back to sleep. At eight the guards come into your cell, you put your arms in the air and they frisk you. Then the guards take you out of the cell and stand you in the corridor with your hands against the wall. A guard wipes his palms down your trousers while another guard searches your cell. When the search is over you’re pushed back into your cell and the rest of the morning is yours until the guard comes back and says ‘Gulyat’ and you say ‘Da’. Then you put your coat on and off you go to the exercise box.

Phil walks there in his boots without laces, shuffling beside a guard, with the camera card under his heel. Then he comes back and spends the afternoon lying on his bunk or staring through the window at the basketball court below. All weekend he sees just one person down there. It’s a child. A young boy. The guards say it’s the son of one of the women prisoners. He’s out there, bouncing a ball, alone.

In the town of Irvington on the outskirts of New York City, 73-year-old Pavel Litvinov is sitting at the desk in his study, scrolling through Facebook, when he sees a status update saying his son has been jailed. It’s nearly forty years since Pavel left Moscow on a train to Vienna with his wife and children, expelled by the KGB. And now Dima is back in Russia, and in prison.

Pavel’s life in America has been comfortable. He thought the dramas of his youth under the Soviet system were behind him. After his expulsion in 1973 he took a job as a physics and mathematics teacher at a prep school, eventually retiring seven years ago. And he still looks like a teacher. He has a bald pate, wears check shirts and a cloth cap and speaks English with a strong Russian accent, despite living more than half his life in the USA.

Now Facebook is telling him that Dima just appeared before the Leninsky Court in Murmansk. The case was postponed from Thursday but today it was quickly dispatched. The judge told Dima he would be jailed for at least two months while an investigation into piracy continues.

‘And I was devastated. I was just so scared and so upset. I already knew Dima was there on the ship but I didn’t know the details, I didn’t know how far he’d got. I was in deep fear and depression. When Dima was jailed my reaction was almost irrational. I gradually pulled myself together, but initially my reaction was fear. I felt I’d taken Dima and his sister out of that country and it would never touch them again in a scary way. So it was just terrible. I called Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, then I called my local congressman. I was probably more scared than anything, because I thought that at this time the Russian regime was going back to the Soviet ways, and Dima is going to be in a position where this rollercoaster will come down and crush him.’

Pavel doesn’t know it, but last night a documentary was broadcast on the Russian national television station NTV, which is owned by Gazprom. Called Under the Green Roof, it made a series of outrageous claims against Greenpeace. The same station previously broadcast a controversial programme smearing the Pussy Riot protesters. Now Pavel’s son is getting the same treatment.

The documentary claimed Greenpeace is a tool of the American government, that the organisation has been bribed by Western oil companies to ignore their polluting activities, that Greenpeace stayed silent during the Deepwater Horizon disaster and never criticises Exxon – the American oil giant. The programme claimed Greenpeace forged footage of seals and kangaroos being abused, and is banned in Canada because it’s labelled an extremist organisation. The documentary ended with the claim that Greenpeace is controlled by international financiers and banking clans.

After Dima’s court appearance comes Sini Saarela – the Finnish climber who scaled the Prirazlomnaya. She stands in the cage and addresses the judge. ‘I am an honest person,’ she says. ‘I am always ready to take responsibility for what I have done. I am not a pirate. Drilling for oil in ice is a tremendous threat to the environment in Russia and across the Arctic.’ But the judge is unmoved. She gets two months. Next comes Frank, then five others. They’re all told they’re going to jail.

The activists are loaded into an avtozak transport van outside the courthouse. It’s late, they can just about make out the bleak Soviet architecture as they’re driven through the city. They hear gates opening, people screaming and shouting in Russian. The van stops and waits. It moves again. Then it stops and the doors are flung open.

‘Go! Get out get out get out! Welcome to your new home! A step to the left is considered an escape attempt, a step to the right is considered an escape attempt. Move, get out get out get out!’

Dima throws his huge pink bag over his shoulder, steps out and looks up. And this is so incredibly familiar to him. He knows this. He knows this order. A step to the right or a step to the left is considered an escape attempt. He’s read this in so many books; he’s read this so many times in Solzhenitsyn and the other prison camp novels he was brought up on. This feels natural. Like fate. Unavoidable. At some point he had to be in prison in the country of his birth. There’s a Russian saying – ot turmy da ot sumy ne zarekaysya. ‘Don’t swear you’ll never go to prison.’ But Dima knows too much about places like this, there’s too much in his blood. He was always going to end up here.

‘Welcome to your new home.’

Yes, thinks Dima. I’m coming home.