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

FOURTEEN

Dima is staring at the locked door of his cell, thinking, okay, there’s this door, it’s solid steel, twenty centimetres thick, the key to open it is the size of a shoe and I don’t have it. Now, I don’t want it to be closed. I want to get out of here. Sure. But if I keep banging my head against that door, that door is not going to open. But I will have a bloody head. So I’ll still have a closed door and a bloody head, as opposed to having a closed door and no blood. Okay, so that means it’s better not to bang my head against the door. And it’s the same with the situation I’m in, the piracy charge, the fifteen years, the fear, the panic. It doesn’t help me. And it doesn’t help to beg for freedom. It changes nothing, so I’m just going to let it go. I’m going to get my head down and do my time, in the knowledge that people on the outside are doing all they can to get me out of here and there’s absolutely nothing I can do to help them.

Ne Ver’ Ne Boysya Ne Prosi.

Don’t Trust Don’t Fear Don’t Beg.

For some of the activists, their cellmates are invaluable tutors in the techniques vital to psychologically survive the ordeal of incarceration. The Russians sit them down on their bunks and explain how to avoid antagonising the guards, how to stay on the right side of the bosses in the kotlovaya cells, how to communicate with their friends, how to fill the days and the long nights, how to hold on to their sanity.

Frank is sitting on his bunk with his head in his hands. His thoughts have been going round and round, faster and faster, and sometimes there’s no way to stop them. He’s thinking about his kids back home. If it’s fifteen years he may be a grandfather before he gets out. His girl is sixteen, his son is thirteen. He could even die in here, then he’ll never see his kids again. That could happen. That could actually happen. And if that happens…

‘Frank, no. Turma racing. Bad bad.’

He looks up. It’s Yuri, the quieter of his two cellmates. Because he’s younger than Boris, Yuri is deferential to him. He rarely starts conversations but now he’s looking at Frank and speaking softly.

‘Turma racing. Bad, Frank. Bad.’

Frank shakes his head. ‘What?’

‘Turma racing.’

‘What’s turma racing?’

‘This. Prison. This is turma. Russian word for prison. Racing. Your head. Round and round. Bad, Frank. Bad. Must stop. Not good.’

And Frank nods. Yes, Yuri’s right. This is one of those moments when you’re lying there and the vortex of panic is starting to spin, sucking you in, pulling you down to a dark place. You thought this thing ten seconds ago and now you’re thinking it again and it feels even more frightening.

Turma racing.

In a cell down the corridor Dima can feel a tight fist of fear in his stomach. It’s been there since that first interrogation at the Investigative Committee, and in his darkest moments he can feel it clenching tight. Sometimes it gets too hard to bear, when he’s been thinking too much about that locked door that won’t be opening anytime soon, or when he’s been looking at the sky through the bars, thinking, will I ever see the sky without those bars? Will I ever see a sky that’s not in squares?

In those moments he goes uyti v tryapki. It means ‘into the rags’. When the prisoners want to turn off the external world, when they need to turn away from their lives, when they want to turn their backs on everything, then they smother their bodies with all their loose clothes, their towel, everything they have. And under that pile of their earthly possessions they face the wall on their bunk and go uyti v tryapk. That’s what they call it, and Dima goes there often.

Joy and depression flood the cells in turn, but their arrival can rarely be predicted. When Dima finds out there’s a well-stocked library here, he’s ecstatic, this is great, he can be here for years, he’ll read books during the day and at night he’ll be on the road. Fuck this, man. I can do this! Then he turns on the TV and sees Medvedev, the Prime Minister of Russia, and he’s saying, ‘Well, pirates or not, these are very serious criminals. They’re threatening the very livelihood of Russia.’ And suddenly Dima is in freefall, it really is going to be fifteen years, and for the next hour he’s turma racing.

For Denis Sinyakov, the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn serve as a vital crutch, giving him strength behind bars. The woman in charge of the library has read Solzhenitsyn herself and brings the great man’s books to Denis’s cell. His cellmate turns one of them over in his hands, perplexed.

‘You’re reading books about prison in prison?’

‘Where better to read them?’

Denis saw Solzhenitsyn many times when he was alive, he photographed him, he covered his funeral. For Denis it’s fascinating to read how he survived the gulag, and now Denis is comparing the conditions and the rules across the decades. And he sees that nothing much has changed.

Roman’s first cellmate told him, ‘At first you will count every minute here. Later you will count every hour. In three or four weeks you’ll be counting the days. Then you’ll count the weeks.’ And it’s true. Roman made a calendar and in the beginning he crossed out the days like Robinson Crusoe. At first he waited until the end of each day, and made a great ceremony of crossing it out. But now he finds he forgets.

Phil is in the gulyat box, staring at the sky. He’s had a bad day, turma racing, and he scratches the words fuck them all on the wall. Afterwards he regrets it, he knows he needs to hang on to who he is. The next day he’s back and sees one of his friends has rubbed out the first word and written the word love instead. And Phil thinks, yeah, that’s the right attitude. That’s how to survive this place.

The Greenpeace women, held alone on the second floor, have only their spoons, that pipe and each other. They’re telling themselves it can’t be fifteen years. Surely not. But then they see how they’re being portrayed on TV, and their minds race towards the edge. They take up their spoons and tap to each other, working out how old they’ll be when they’re released if they get the full fifteen years. Alex will be forty-two. She taps on the pipe.

Camila taps back, her message reverberating along the pipe.

Alex taps out a reply.