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

TWENTY-FIVE

Frank is emptying hoarded Valium tablets into the palm of his hand, wondering how the hell he’ll smuggle them into Kresty. The guards have just come round saying the move is happening tonight. He has to pack.

After thinking for a while he starts feeding the pills into the lining of his jacket.

‘No, no, no,’ says Yuri. ‘Bad, Frank, bad. They search. You go to kartser in Kresty. No no, put here.’

And Yuri points at a little flap in Frank’s trousers – a tiny pocket inside another pocket just above his knee.

‘Here. Better.’

Across the prison the activists are packing their bags, saying goodbye to their cellmates and writing final letters to friends and family, unsure if they’ll be able to communicate from St Petersburg, hoping Mr Babinski can get their messages to their loved ones despite Popov’s crackdown.

It’s 4 a.m. The guard is waiting at the open door. Time for Frank to say goodbye. He turns around and shakes his cellmates’ hands.

‘Boris, Yuri, thank you.’

‘Goodbye my friend Frank.’

‘Good luck in Kresty. We like very much having you here.’

Frank pumps their hands then he thinks, no, this isn’t enough. He goes to hug Boris but the Russian jumps back with a look of panic on his face.

‘Oh, stop being so damn homophobic!’ Frank throws his arms around Boris. Slowly the Russian raises his hands and pats Frank on the back. ‘Thank you,’ says Frank. ‘Thank you for welcoming me to your home. I’ll never forget how you treated me here. Never.’

Then Frank hugs Yuri. ‘Thank you for what you did for me. You taught me so much. I was very lucky to be put in with you.’

‘Thank you my friend,’ says Yuri, whose face is buried in Frank’s shoulder. ‘We will miss you.’

The activists are taken out floor by floor. For the last time they cross the yard. The lights of SIZO-1 are blazing around them. The doroga is cooking, the prison is living, it’s the same scene they faced when they arrived here seven weeks ago. Dima stops and turns around and faces the windows. He lifts a fist into the air and shouts a single word.

‘AUE!’

AUE. Pronounced ah-oo-yeah. It’s an abbreviation, it stands for Arestanskoe Urkaganskoe Edinstvo. Translation: Arrestees Criminal Union, the society of the incarcerated, a banned exclamation to identify yourself with the thieves in their struggle against the stars. A call to non-submission.

‘AUE! Vitaly, AUE! My cellmate, farewell, may you see freedom soon!’

And from the windows comes a wall of noise.

‘AUE!’

‘Go pirates!’

‘Your freedom must come!’

‘AUE!’

The Arctic 30 are leaving SIZO-1 with the solidarity of the prisoner community ringing in their ears. In single file the crew walk towards a waiting avtozak, their bags slung over their shoulders, their breath lit by spotlights as it freezes on the cold night air. They glance back to take a final look at Murmansk isolation prison.

Some of the crew take a moment to think about the cellmates they’re leaving behind, men who in many ways they’ve come to like and respect. Ivan, Boris, Yuri, Vitaly. Some of them are imprisoned because they’ve done bad things to good people, but in SIZO-1 they did what they could to help strangers survive.

The activists are slipping from Popov’s grasp, but what awaits them in St Petersburg? Can Kresty be as bad as their cellmates claim? And are they being taken to a place that will be their home for the next seven years of their lives?

Next to the bus stands an officer in a sharp camouflage uniform. ‘I am in charge until we hand you over in St Petersburg,’ he announces. ‘There are rules and I expect you to obey them. My men expect nothing less than your absolute co-operation. Our journey is by Stolypin. I cannot tell you how long it will take. As long as you recognise our absolute authority, you will be treated well. I see no reason why this should be unpleasant for any of us. Okay, let’s go.’

They’re loaded onto the bus, it pulls away and they drive through the gates. Behind them the shouts and screams from the windows die out and all they can hear is the crunch of tyres on grit as they leave SIZO-1.

The Stolypin is comprised of old-fashioned carriages hooked onto the back of a passenger train. The corridor goes down one side of the carriage, with cells along the other. There are no windows in the cells, just shelves, like benches, two rows of four in each. Only the top ones have enough headroom. The windows on the corridor are frosted glass with little gaps that the activists can see through. At one point they glimpse birch trees with snow on the ground, then they pass some buildings and they see the lights of a town.

It’s like Doctor Zhivago, Frank thinks. Everyone banged up on the train, and this carriage is pretty much from the same era. Maybe Julie Christie’s going to turn up.

They can touch each other, they can speak to each other without shouting, without a guard interrupting. For some of them, it’s a revelation.

The forty-year-old Argentine sailor Hernan Orsi pulls out a sheet of paper and a pen. ‘Okay,’ he shouts out, ‘here’s your chance to say who you want to play you in the movie of this shit. Me, I’m getting played by Benicio Del Toro. Colin, you’re Jeremy Irons.’

‘Jeremy fucking Irons? Are you kidding me?’

‘Andrey, you’re Gérard Depardieu.’

‘No no,’ someone crises out. ‘Andrey is Dustin Hoffman.’

‘Okay, Dustin Hoffman.’

It takes an hour for the train to agree on a full cast list – Frank is Jason Statham, Alex is Jennifer Connelly, Camila is Jennifer Garner, Sini is Naomi Watts, Phil is Jude Law, Kieron is Orlando Bloom and Dima is Jean Reno, the kindly assassin from the movie Léon. Pete is Jon Voight – ‘What? Again?’ – and Denis is ‘Sickboy in Trainspotting’ (aka Jonny Lee Miller, who was once married to Voight’s daughter Angelina Jolie, making Pete a sort of celebrity father-in-law to Denis).

The women are in cages together. They play games all day, they don’t want to sleep because they don’t know when they’ll be this close again. They hold hands and talk – about their lives back home, boyfriends and families. Camila has photographs with her, of her parents and her brothers and sisters. She shows them to the others, then she reads out a letter her father sent her, translating the words as she goes.

‘Dear Bochi,’ she says. ‘That’s what he calls me. Bochi. It means bold. He says I was bold when I was born. Okay, so… Dear Bochi, The things you are fighting for are worth the risk. You cannot imagine how proud your mother and I are, seeing how you’ve grown up with the values, the solidarity and the humility we tried to raise you with. When people ask me how I’m doing, I tell them I’ve seen the most beautiful flower in the world, and she is mine.’

Alex and Sini stare at Camila then throw their arms around her.

In Amsterdam Faiza’s mother Mimount is trying to process the move, fearing the worst. ‘I wondered why they were being transferred to St Petersburg. I was sceptical, I was doubtful of the Russians’ intentions, and there was absolutely no information on why this was happening. I was scared it might be bad news. I was afraid, afraid that they were being taken to a permanent detention centre. I feared for my daughter. I wanted to take her place because I feared for her.’

It’s Anthony’s birthday, and for a present Frank has given him a Valium tablet. It takes the top of his head off. He sleeps for sixteen hours straight. When he wakes up he tells Frank it was one of the best birthday presents he’s ever had.

This Stolypin has a toilet, and visiting it is a joy for some of them. They get to see all of their friends, the people they never spoke to in prison. As they walk down the long thin corridor in front of a guard, hands poke through the bars, so they touch them as they walk, like a rock star running down the front row at a concert.

But for some of the thirty, the journey is a chance to air frustration, even anger, at Greenpeace. Some of the activists think they’re only in jail because of a monumental internal mistake. They’re hurting and they have something to say. It’s the first time they’ve all been in such close proximity since coming off the Sunrise and there’s tension between Frank and two others. They’re pointing the finger at him and Dima.

Frank was the co-ordinator of the protest, Dima was the lead campaigner on the ship. Ultimately the action was their responsibility. Now Frank is in a compartment with two guys who want to know why the piracy charge wasn’t predicted. The argument goes back and forth. Nobody’s shouting, but this is heavy.

‘You dumped us in this shit, Frank. You need to face up to what you did. You were responsible for the action, you were in charge, this is your fault. You and Dima, you’re to blame. Bringing a bunch of activists to Russia, messing with the FSB. What did you think was gonna happen?’

‘What do you mean I brought us to Russia? We weren’t in Russia, it was international waters. Everyone knew the score.’

‘Nobody knew. That’s the point, isn’t it? Nobody knew because nobody stopped to think how heavy it could get. And that was your job.’

It’s a line that’s been running in the global media – that Greenpeace should have known an action on a Russian oil platform would be met with a legal hammer. Four weeks ago Dominic Lawson – the son of Lord Nigel Lawson, the UK’s most prominent climate change sceptic – took a full page in the Daily Mail, the world’s most read newspaper, to eviscerate the organisation.[109]

In a film for the hugely influential Sunday Times newspaper entitled ‘Should we blame Greenpeace?’[110] the commentator Rod Liddle said:

Liddle then interviewed the former Russian presidential adviser Alexander Nekrassov.

‘Do you have any sympathy for the Greenpeace people?’ he asked.

‘I think the Greenpeace people made one crucial mistake,’ Nekrassov replied. ‘They should have realised the gravity of the situation. They should have warned all the people involved that this is not an easy thing, it carries a lot of danger here. I feel sorry for the people who went there without knowing what they were in for.’

Similar stories have appeared in newspapers and on television around the world. It’s a line that Dima heard on state-run TV in his cell at SIZO-1. And he’s picked up some hostility from a few of the other activists, a sense that because he’s Russian he should have known how the regime would react.

But from where Dima is sitting, this is the third time he’s been arrested in the same waters, going back to 1990. A year before the Sunrise was stormed, he was one of the people who protested at the same rig. Putin was president back then and they weren’t touched by the authorities. Dima wasn’t alone thinking Russia had a fairly sane and rational government. Granted, there were voices saying Putin was mad, but they were far from the mainstream, closer to a lunatic fringe. At worst Dima expected the crew would be detained for a few days aboard the ship after the action. And even in jail he stands by that expectation, given what he knew then.

In Frank’s compartment the argument is still raging.

‘Come on, Frank. When we had a legal briefing about what the charges could be, I’m not sure piracy was even mentioned.’

‘It fucking was.’

‘Well, even if it was, it was never said to us like it was a serious risk.’

‘Because it wasn’t. Because we weren’t going to commit piracy. You can’t commit piracy on that platform, it’s attached to the seabed, it’s not a ship. Jesus, guys, I know we’re in the shit here. I know we’re all hurting, but please, give me a break with this blame game.’

‘Well, if it wasn’t a serious risk then what are we all doing here?’

The row peters out to silence, but the tension hangs unresolved as the train rattles through the night.

Alex’s cousin has sent her a Russian–English translation booklet and it has a section devoted to romance. She pulls it out on the prison train. It has the Russian translation for phrases including I would die without your love and I like it when you touch me here and I want you. Alex, Sini and Camila shout out these lines at the guards then collapse in laughter. But the guards don’t smile. They stare ahead with concrete expressions.

Twenty-four hours have passed. The head of the guards tells them they’re close now. For some it’s a moment of huge relief. So they’re not being taken to a transit prison. This isn’t the Stolypin journey of their nightmares. Then the realisation dawns that they’re hours away from being split up. Alex and Sini shout out, ‘We love you’ and, ‘Wherever you go, stay strong!’

The train pulls into St Petersburg and the carriages fall silent. The guards take them out, one cell at a time. They have to jump across the track from the train to the open doors of an avtozak. Sini and Alex are pushed into a compartment together. Alex zips up her purple ski jacket and reaches out for Sini’s hand. They squeeze as tightly as they can.

The men are loaded into different vans. The drivers turn the engines. The women are heading for SIZO-5, some of the men for SIZO-4. But most of them are driven to St Petersburg SIZO-1.

Kresty.

It’s a crumbling stack of red brick and barred windows on the banks of the river Neva and would look like a derelict Victorian mill or an asylum if not for the distinctive onion domes of the Alexander Nevsky cathedral that rise from the middle of the complex. Kresty means ‘crosses’. The nineteenth-century architect who designed the prison had it built in the shape of two crucifixes, so the prisoners could better repent of their sins.[111]

The prison housed the enemies of tsarism, then after Lenin’s seizure of power Kresty housed enemies of the new communist government. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn wrote: ‘During the whole year [1918] it would certainly seem that more than a thousand were shot in Kresty alone’ – of whom six were peasants guilty of clipping excess hay from a communal farm to feed their cows.

During the long decades of Soviet rule Kresty held both criminals and political dissidents from what was then called Leningrad, Russia’s most liberal city. Anna Akhmatova, one of Russia’s greatest poets, would wait for hours outside the prison walls in the hope of delivering a package to her son, the historian Lev Gumilev.[112] Akhmatova captured the anguish of the relatives of Kresty’s inmates in her famous poem, ‘Requiem’.

In the preface to the poem, she describes how she was prompted to put her experience into words after spending seventeen months outside the prison gates. She saw ‘a woman with blue lips. She had, of course, never heard of me; but she suddenly came out of that trance so common to us all and whispered in my ear (everybody spoke in whispers there): “Can you describe this?” And I said, “Yes, I can.”’

Escape from Kresty is almost impossible, but many have tried. In 1946 a prisoner named Volkov removed bricks from the wall of his cell, one by one, and put them in his chamber pot, which he emptied outside. Eventually he created a hole to the street, and one night he made his break. Having secured his freedom he went immediately to the public baths, where he was recognised by a surprised but diligent off-duty guard. It is said that Volkov was returned to Kresty humiliated but clean.[113]

In 1984 two prisoners forged KGB identification papers from cardboard and red thread. They scoured magazines for pictures of uniformed officers who resembled them, cut out those photos and stuck them to the card. Their counterfeiting skills were so advanced that nobody at the gates of Kresty thought twice about letting them stroll out into the street to embrace freedom.[114]

The Soviet Union was dissolved on 26 December 1991, but Kresty remained. Four years later, under the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, a monument was erected on the opposite bank of the River Neva, commemorating the victims of political repression. A year after that another monument was installed in Kresty itself, this time to the poet Anna Akhmatova. But recognition of past crimes did little to improve conditions there. By the end of the millennium Kresty housed ten thousand prisoners – three times its capacity – and was suffering a virulent outbreak of tuberculosis.[115]

As the avtozak pulls into the grounds of the famous prison the men see barbed wire and the decrepit, dominating cathedral that rises up from the middle of the jail, built in the same style and with the same bricks as the incarceration blocks. At the top of a white dome are two crosses. One is a typical Russian Orthodox cross, the other a more familiar T shape. From a certain angle the two crosses, overlaid, take on a very particular profile, and Dima remembers that it’s this shape that is the design of the prison tattoo that professional criminals have inked around their fingers across Russia – the U of the Russian Orthodox cross, over a T.

Gathered in the reception area are fourteen of the Arctic 30, including Pete, Frank, Phil, Roman and Dima. The rest of the men have been taken to St Petersburg SIZO-4, an isolation unit across town. The eight women are being taken to the all-female SIZO-5.

The activists at Kresty are processed, then led to their new cells. Dima steps through the door and puts down his pink bag. The door slams behind him. The smell of fresh paint fills his nostrils. A man gets up from his bunk and introduces himself as Vasily. He’s in his mid-thirties, well-built, very tall, wearing expensive sports gear.

‘Welcome.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Please, sit down.’

‘Thanks.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘Sure.’

Vasily bends down in the corner of the cell and produces an object that makes Dima visibly flinch. ‘Wow, that’s a big motherfucker of a tea boiler.’

‘Thank you.’

‘In Murmansk we had these little sort of coils that you put inside the glass. But that looks like a ten-watt massive fucking tea-boiling pot. Are you even allowed that in here?’

The man shrugs, ‘Of course not.’

Then, while the water is boiling, Vasily says, ‘Dima, we do not eat prison food here in my cell.’

‘No?’

‘No, we do not.’

He opens up the fridge – ‘We have a fridge in our cell?’ – and pulls out a French baguette, cuts off a slice, spreads a knob of butter over it, produces a jar of red caviar, spreads a spoonful onto the bread, closes the sandwich with a flourish and holds it out. And Dima thinks, no, we’re not in Murmansk any more.

Vasily tells Dima his story. He rented out a house to some students who grew nine marijuana plants, and the investigators say he knew all about it. He’s been in Kresty a little over a year, waiting for his trial on narcotics charges. But Dima knows enough about Russia to suspect that’s not what Vasily is really in for. The clothes, the food, the fridge, the attitude. This guy’s a bandit. Rich. Influential. Sorted. A post-Soviet killer-type bandit.

‘The cells were all painted two weeks ago,’ says Vasily. ‘Refitted entirely for you. Kresty has the doroga but you aren’t allowed to be part of it. The guards told us, “If you want to stay in these lovely cells with the Greenpeace people, behave.”’

Then he shows Dima an order book for the prison shop. It has five pages of food to choose from.

‘You order on one day and get it the next day. It works. For people like me anyway. And you too, Dima. You too.’

In a cell down the corridor Frank is sitting on his bunk and looking out through the window. He can see the onion domes of the cathedral through the bars. He imagines Trotsky being marched down the corridors. Many people died here, Frank knows that. Many political prisoners. He can feel the weight of history. The weight of hopelessness. Frank was brought up a Catholic and has a fondness for ornate churches. This cathedral in the middle of the prison looks beautiful, but utterly incongruous in its setting. He writes a note to the governor requesting a tour of the church and hands it to a guard.

Pete Willcox is sitting on the edge of his new bed, writing in his diary.

Across town, in a hallway at SIZO-5, the women are lined up in front of cell doors. The guard standing next to Sini slides a key into the lock and the door swings open. Sini takes a nervous step forward. The door closes. Two women look up from their bunks. Sini tries to smile. She holds out a hand but the women ignore it.

They’re both Russian, middle-aged. They look away. Sini sees a spare bunk, crosses the cell, sits down and stares at the floor.

Along the hallway Alex is in her new cell with three other prisoners. One of them is an old woman, tired and sad, short and plump with long white hair. Alex is sitting on her bed watching her. A key turns in the lock, the woman jumps up frantically, makes her bed then stands stiffly in front of it, waiting for inspection. The guard pokes his head around the corner then disappears. Twenty minutes later there’s a sound from the corridor, Alex stands up, the woman pushes her out of the way to get to her bed and straighten the sheet.

The woman sits on her bed. Alex sits down next to her. She has a dictionary and by pointing at words she can make herself understood. She asks the woman how she ended up here, and nervously, by pointing at words herself, the woman explains that she’s seventy-four years old. She says an intruder broke into her house, he kicked and punched her but she ran to the kitchen and pulled a knife from a drawer and stabbed him in the shoulder.

She’s looking at seven years. Her name is Marina.

Meanwhile Sini is lying on her bunk, watching her new cellmates. One of the women is floating around the cell, her eyes vacant like there’s nothing behind them. Sini stands up and walks to the window. The woman follows her, talking to herself in staccato Russian. She pokes Sini, shakes her head, wags a finger. Sini waves her away and sits back on her bed. But when she stands up again the woman shuffles behind her, shaking her head with disapproval and muttering to herself through tight dry lips. Sini unzips her bag and starts laying her meagre possessions on her bed, the woman rushes across the cell with a panicked expression, shaking her head wildly. Sini shoos her away. She lies on her bunk, pulls the sheet up over her head and holds herself tight. She can sense the woman standing over her. She can hear her breathing.

She’s taken to gulyat and shouts over the wall. ‘Camila! Alex! Faiza!’ But there’s no answer, so she shouts again. A guard opens the door of her box.

‘I don’t know why you’re shouting,’ he says. ‘There’s nobody there.’