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

ELEVEN

At SIZO-1 the policy is to hold prisoners accused of the most serious crimes in the same cells. Because piracy carries ten years minimum, most of the activists are held with Russians accused of killing or maiming their victims.

Frank’s cellmates are Boris and Yuri. Boris is squat and strong with dark skin, maybe central Asian heritage. He’s accused of stabbing two men to death. Frank asks him what happened but Boris won’t talk about it. He’ll only tell Frank that his father had both legs chopped off on a trainline when he was a kid, as if this is somehow a mitigating factor.

Yuri is skinny with an unhealthy pallor, but something in his eyes suggests he’s a smart kid. He’s in for a series of notorious robberies. The prosecutors say his signature weapon was the Taser, used mainly on conscript soldiers. Young men, gullible and new in town. And he went up to them – this is what the investigators claim – and patted them on the back then zapped them in the neck. He zapped them, they went crumpling to the ground like a ragdoll, then he rinsed them. The prosecutors say he targeted troops going back to their barracks, Tasered them on their doorsteps, then dragged them through the door and robbed their rooms.

Dima is in with Vitaly and Alexei. Vitaly is thirty-one and was an alcoholic on the outside. He lived with a woman in her fifties and existed on the fringes of society, without a passport or identity papers. They argued, he hit her. Because his arm was in a cast, he fractured her skull. He was arrested, she didn’t press charges but because he had no ID card he was kept inside. He’s been here five months and doesn’t expect to get out anytime soon. Alexei, meanwhile, is in for armed robbery. He broke into the house of an associate – someone who owed him money – and beat the guy, then threatened him with a knife before scooping up a box of computer equipment.

Colin Russell’s cellmate is a double murderer. He’s a young guy, maybe twenty-one, sprung like a tight coil. He paces up and down the cell, stops, examines his muscles, does press-ups and sit-ups. He gets plastic bags and puts jugs of water in them, and lifts them in front of the mirror. Sometimes he punches the wall.

Colin – the 59-year-old Australian radio operator – asks the kid to sit on his bunk for a moment. The Russian stares quizzically at Colin then sits down. They try to talk. The guy doesn’t speak much English but Colin manages to ask him why he’s here. The guy says his best friend and his girlfriend were found in the front seat of his car, stabbed to death. But it was somebody else who did it.

Andrey Allakhverdov – the ship’s chief press officer – has a TV in his cell, and every evening he watches coverage of his case on the state-controlled broadcast channels. It’s a tsunami of shit being heaped on the heads of him and his friends. ‘Do you see what they’re saying about us?’ he says to his cellmate. ‘Can you believe this?’ The news reports reiterate the claims made on NTV that the activists are agents for a foreign power, possibly employed by Western oil companies to sabotage Gazprom’s drilling programme. And Andrey’s cellmate – who is charged under twelve clauses of the criminal code, including hooliganism – says, ‘What do you expect? They’re all state channels, just don’t pay attention, it’s okay.’

The Welshman Anthony Perrett is in with Sergei and Oleg. The prosecutors say Sergei mugged a stranger, ran away, got caught by a security guard, stabbed the guard and ran away again. He was married soon afterwards but two months later his wife left him, and now he’s depressed. Oleg is from Ukraine. He was a chef on the outside, he makes beautiful salads, prepares them on a chopping board fashioned from an unfolded Tetra Pak and uses spices to season them with beautiful, rich flavour.

Anthony is thirty-two years old, a tree surgeon and director of a renewable energy company. Back home in Newport, he would tell people he was attacking climate change ‘in the same way Wile E. Coyote tries to catch The Road Runner’. Before sailing for the Arctic he was working on developing a wood gasifier to run his forestry truck off a charcoal kiln, and a 3D-printed river turbine to generate remote electricity.

He’s also a talented artist and loses hours sketching the view through the window. Oleg asks Anthony to draw something for him. He wants a giant bumblebee carrying a message. And Anthony says, ‘Yeah, sure, okay.’ He sits down and makes the sketch, and when Oleg sees it his face lights up. He adds a message, and that night he sends it to his girlfriend on the road.

‘Who is she?’ asks Anthony.

‘My girlfriend? She’s a hag, a crack whore, no teeth, but this does not matter because I will never meet her. I send her presents. She sends me little perfumed cigarettes.’

Anthony nods. And he’s thinking, sure, I get that. Aesthetics are a luxury of freedom.

It’s nearly 10 p.m. at SIZO-1, just before the lights go out, and Frank is sitting on the edge of his bunk, watching his cellmates Yuri and Boris construct the road.

Right now they’re making the ropes. There are two different types of rope, but this one, the one they’re making now, is a string made from the plastic bags that the prison bread comes in.

‘Boris, what’s that one called?’

The Russian looks up. ‘This? We call this the kontrolka. This we need to make cells link together. Here, I show you.’

In one hand Boris is holding an empty paracetamol tube, and in the fingers of his other hand he’s holding a broken razor. He slices off the end of the tube. Now it’s a hollow plastic cylinder. He pulls a plastic bag through the tube, draws a pencil from his top pocket and ties the bag around it. He grips the tube in his hand, Yuri pulls the bag and Boris turns the pencil. He turns it and turns it so the bag twists. Yuri pulls the bag, shuffling backwards. It stretches and twists and stretches as Boris turns the pencil, using it as a spindle. Now the bag is a long frayed length of orange plastic, like trash on a beach, but twisting waves are running up the line as Boris turns the pencil, the plastic is thinning, it’s getting darker in colour, getting denser and longer. It takes a few minutes, but forming before Frank’s eyes is a strong deep orange string.

When they’re done, the Russians start ripping strips from a bed sheet. They tie them together then attach the thin rope – the kontrolka – to the sheets.

‘Boris, don’t the guards punish you for ripping the sheets?’

‘Our sheets get smaller. They don’t care.’

‘The big rope, what do you call it?’

Boris lifts the torn strip. ‘This?’

‘Yeah.’

‘This is the kon.’

‘Kon?’

‘It means… what you say? Like a horse. It means… stallion.’

Frank nods and looks down at Yuri. The other Russian is on the floor of the cell, rolling up a sheet of newspaper. Every few days a paper is delivered to the cells but it’s a state organ, absolutely pointless, no real news. Now Yuri is kneeling over a full page, rolling it tightly into a tube. He rolls it on the floor then stands up and rolls it on the wall. He rolls it and rolls it, taps the end and rolls it again until he has a stick about a metre long. Then he pushes a bent nail into the end.

He tears strips from another plastic bag, and he wraps those strips around the newspaper stick and melts the plastic with a match so it’s sealed. It’s as stiff as a truncheon now. Frank thinks you could do some damage with it. Then Yuri takes the thin rope – the string made out of plastic bags – and he attaches it to a bag with a bar of soap inside and hangs that bag off the bent nail.

Yuri hands the contraption to Boris, who walks over to the window. He slides the stick through the bars and leans forward as far as he can go. Frank jumps off his bed and stands behind him, peering over his shoulder.

Boris shouts out and a guy in the cell next door shouts back. That guy puts out his own stick. Frank can just about see the tip with a hook on the end hovering in the dull light. Then Boris flicks his wrist and the bag of soap arches through the air, carrying a trail of string. The guy with the other stick tries to catch it with his hook but misses. Boris pulls in his stick, reattaches the bag and tries again. And on the fourth attempt the guy next door catches it and shouts, ‘Doma doma!’

He pulls the string through until he’s got hold of the thicker rope – the torn sheet. Now their cells are connected.

For twenty minutes Boris does this in every direction, feeding ropes to the left, right, up and down. And everybody’s doing the same across the wall, shouting, ‘Doma doma!’ – ‘It’s home it’s home!’ – when they catch a string with the pole. When the ropes are in position they attach a sock to each line and soon the socks are going back and forth, up and down. An internet made of ropes.

Now the prisoners are banging on the floor and the ceiling. Frank worked out the thumping on the first night. Two bangs means, ‘You’ve got mail.’ Bang bang bang means, ‘I have mail for you.’

To stay up until morning, Boris and Yuri brew a drink they call chifir, which they sip as long as the doroga is running. They take fifty grammes of tea, boil it up in a mug, take the tea out, add another fifty grammes of tea and boil it again. Then they add more fresh tea and boil it again – and again and again – until it’s thick, like a soup. For some of the prisoners, chifir is not strong enough, they prefer to drink a concoction they call kon – again, it means ‘stallion’. It’s the same as chifir but with ten spoons of coffee powder added, and a splash of condensed milk.

Frank lies back on his bunk and watches the road come alive, counting the number of messages coming through his cell. Tonight is quiet, maybe a hundred notes. But on a busy night there are three or four hundred, and on those nights Boris and Yuri are absolutely buzzing because they have to drink themselves into a stupor with the chifir.

The road is against regulations. All pre-trial investigative detainment should mean total isolation. ‘But the road is our revenge,’ says Boris. ‘All the things we do, the illegal things, they give us self-respect. We resist the rules. And there is solidarity in resistance.’

Roman is at gulyat – exercise hour – with his young cellmate. The kid shouts over the wall, explaining to somebody unseen that one of the Greenpeace prisoners is in with him. A commanding Russian voice comes back. ‘Listen to me, and listen attentively. When you return to your cell, tell the guard this. Tell him I have instructed that you must break out. Be clear to use those exact words. Do not say anything more, do not ask him again, just wait. Do you understand?’

‘I understand.’

When the gulyat is over, Roman and the kid return to their cell. The kid pulls a lever that drops a flag in the corridor. A guard opens the hatch.

‘What do you want?’

‘The kotlovaya has instructed that I must break out.’

The guard says nothing, the hatch slams closed. Then in the early evening the door swings open and the kid is told to pack his things and leave. He shakes Roman’s hand, wishes him luck and disappears.

And that is that. An act of compassion by the kotlovaya, to protect Roman Dolgov from the taint of being a woollen guy.

On the second floor of Murmansk SIZO-1 the eight women from the Sunrise crew are being held alone. There is nobody to tell them about the road, they have no cellmates to explain this place. They don’t know why the prisoners spend all night banging and thumping and screaming.

When Alex sees a rope dangling outside her cell with a bag hanging from the end, she jumps with surprise. She gets up from her bunk, wraps herself in her purple ski jacket and cautiously, silently, she approaches the window. The bag is small, the size of a fist, and it’s swinging gently back and forth. She comes closer, stands up on her toes and looks into it. And she sees it’s full of white powder.

Whoa! Cocaine. Okay, don’t touch it. Do. Not. Touch. It. She backs away from the window. Okay, I’ve got these absolute nutters banging on the ceiling above me. They’re obviously all fucking high on coke. And they’re dealing. They’re trying to sell me drugs, maybe half a kilogramme of cocaine. Be careful now. You’ve got to play this right.

She edges forward, bends down, tries to look up to see where the rope is coming from. And all the time the bag is silently swinging in a narrow arch in front of her window. Then suddenly the rope twitches, the bag is pulled up and the coke disappears.

Alex retreats to her bunk. The screams and shouts and bangs and crashes are exploding all around her, from above and below. She stares at the ceiling, her heart racing. If she’d had a cellmate she would have known that one of the Russian prisoners on the third floor was offering her some sugar for her tea.

Solitary confinement makes the hours feel like days and the days feel like weeks. The women maintain their sanity by constantly tapping to each other, using the code they agreed on that first gulyat. Camila, Sini, Faiza and Alex tap for hours. Each conversation takes an age to conduct, with a single sentence taking five or ten minutes to tap out. In an era of instant communication these exchanges take on a poetic quality, where every word has great meaning.

They greet each other at 6 a.m. as the porridge comes, and again at 8 a.m. when the prison falls silent and they grab what sleep they can. Then from 11 a.m. they’re tapping constantly.

The women tap to each other all day. And when they’re not tapping, they’re dancing to the music channel on their TV sets. There’s an evening show called Bridge in Time – a compilation of timeless tunes from the sixties onwards. The women throw themselves around their cells, drumming on the radiator pipe and thumping the walls to the Beatles, the Stones, Led Zeppelin and Michael Jackson. Anything to feel a connection with other human beings.

The highlight of the day is the gulyat. Every time it gives them a surge of energy to actually talk to each other. They have to shout over the wall, but that hour can be joyful. They pull themselves from their fear and depression by sharing any good news they’ve heard. They’ve been told that people across the world are standing up for them. Their lawyers and the consuls from the embassies have told them their fate is a global news story. And when they share all this they feel something electric in the air. It’s pride, and it flows over the walls.

Even now, facing perhaps fifteen years in this place, they tell each other they don’t regret the protest. They know their friends on the outside are fighting for them. They know they did the right thing. ‘And if we did the right thing,’ Camila shouts out, ‘then what can go wrong?’

She’s twenty-one years old, the oldest of six children, and apart from holidays in Uruguay and a trip to the USA, this is her first time abroad. Camila is classically attractive with olive skin and long brown hair – an archetype of Latin America. On her first day in this place the guards confiscated the silver ring she wore in her nose. She grew up watching National Geographic documentaries on Argentine television, spending hours in front of the screen staring at the images of animals, savannah and rainforest. For years before joining the Sunrise she would lie awake wondering when she’d see for herself the creatures and lands featured in those programmes.

A year ago she was working in a fashion outlet, selling clothes to rich women. She hated that. Later she worked as a receptionist at an English language institute. Then suddenly the call came in from Greenpeace. They needed climbers for a direct action protest in the Arctic. Camila told her boss she was leaving. ‘Sorry, there’s something I need to do. One of those once-in-a-lifetime things. I quit.’