My Fellow Prisoners

Guilty without Guilt: Volodya

It looks very likely that over the next few years we will find ourselves living in a bureaucratic-police state, with absolute power in the hands of a corrupt bureaucracy. A bureaucracy that’s indifferent to our fate and utterly brazen. Here I want to tell the story of two people who have ended up in its clutches.

The cell door opens with its usual clank and standing on the threshold is a rather short, plump man with surprisingly long, slightly curly hair.

‘Hello everyone,’ he says and, limping heavily, makes his way over to a free bunk.

The young guy occupying the lower bunk sighs deeply, and gets up to switch places.

‘It’s okay, don’t worry,’ the small man says, clambering up using his stiff leg and unpacking his things like someone who’s done this many times before.

Like all newcomers, he’s left in peace for a few minutes to get his bearings, and then the cautious enquiries begin, and they continue over tea. It transpires that the guy – let’s call him Volodya – has been in various prisons over the past few years, for the most commonplace offences.

Volodya turns out to be easy to get on with, one of those people who, in the business world especially, are adept at networking. Business intermediaries. In fact, that’s exactly what he did before he ended up in prison.

Four years earlier, ‘using his specific banking knowledge’ (to quote his case file), he withdrew half a million dollars from the account of a member of a security agency, reckoning that, as the money was clearly dodgy, the guy wouldn’t go to court.

But he had miscalculated. The bank reimbursed its client every last kopeck, and filed a suit. Volodya went down.

Truth to tell, this part of the story didn’t bother him that much. He’d taken his chance, had blown it, and had been convicted without evidence – but not for nothing. Yes, his sentence was a bit heavy (eight years), but what could you do about that?

Having been sent to the prison colony, he started making plans for the future. After a couple more years he became eligible for parole. It was at this point, as Volodya related, that an order came through for him to be transferred to Moscow.

‘I racked my brains and finally came to the conclusion that they were planning to stitch me up with someone else’s bank fraud.’

What actually happened went far beyond his worst imaginings. The investigator declared that two years earlier he, Volodya, had beaten another detainee to death in prison.

My cellmates and I looked at each other, and then at little, lame Volodya, with a certain disbelief. Well used to this reaction, he pulled out his case file. Despite the fact that my own trial was ongoing, I couldn’t resist reading it in its entirety. It was the story of yet another human tragedy – as terrifying as the Magnitsky case and just as commonplace in Russian prisons.

The file told the tale of a 45-year-old man who had ended up in prison because of a bottle of wine. An ordinary guy, he’d had a drink, wanted some more, didn’t have any money, so walked into a supermarket and in an act of drunken stupidity grabbed a bottle from the shelf. Unfortunately this happened to be an expensive wine that had accidentally ended up on an open shelf. He was stopped at the till, the police were called and as the bottle cost more than 2,500 roubles he was sent to remand prison.

In prison his old ulcer flared up again and he was moved to the prison clinic where he spent a couple of weeks. After that he was transferred to another remand centre, again to its hospital facility. It was there, a week later, that they discovered that he’d broken nineteen ribs. And a week after that he died from injuries to his spleen.

So the cost of one stupid bottle of wine turned out to be a human life.

But where does Volodya come into this?

He was admitted to the same hospital as the man who died. But the hospital of the first prison!

A prison hospital (for those fortunate enough not to know) is essentially the same prison with the same cells, and, if you are recuperating in one cell, you might only find out what’s going on in the other cells through prison correspondence.

The deceased man and our new cellmate never met – on this all the doctors and supervisors agreed unanimously. But this is by no means the biggest absurdity. The report stated that Volodya broke nineteen of the man’s ribs with two punches. Anyone who has ever done any boxing or karate will tell you that this is impossible. It is quite possible, however, to break the ribs of a sick prisoner lying helplessly on the floor by stamping on them with heavy special-forces jackboots.

It’s also impossible to transfer someone who’s taken such a beating from one remand centre to another, moreover from one hospital to another, without anybody noticing anything. But then, as it turned out, it’s entirely possible to ascribe the incident to another remand centre and thereby muddle everything up completely.

The case hung around for almost two years until circumstances aligned: a request not to release a man, and an old unsolved investigation…

After that it was just down to technicalities. You only need a couple of seasoned lags, one of whom had shared a cell with the guy who was killed, while the other had been in the neighbouring cell – and you explain their options in the simplest terms (either they pin it on the relevant person, or else…).

And so of course one of them ‘saw’ it happen, the other ‘heard’ it. And there you have it, bang to rights. Off to court!

The judge doesn’t ‘trust’ the evidence of the doctors or the supervisors, or the log-book entries detailing transfers from cell to cell. Nor does he give any credibility to the doctors’ notes and testimony that the deceased was transferred to the second prison without the injuries from a savage beating. But he believes sure enough the people who ‘saw’ and ‘heard’ it. They were specially brought in from a prison colony. So that’s it. Guilty.

Over the past few days Volodya had been in a dire state. The investigators were trying to persuade him to confess, saying he wouldn’t get much added to his sentence. But if he didn’t, he’d get the full works.

He asked my advice. I confirmed that they weren’t bluffing. But, beyond that, it was a matter for his conscience. And so Volodya refused to confess to the crime. He said to me: ‘I wouldn’t be able to look into the eyes of my friends, my family.’

My trial ended soon afterwards, so I only heard about the outcome of his case when I was already in Karelia. It was as predicted.

You might think that nothing like this could ever happen to you. After all, you don’t go around stealing from supermarkets or siphoning money out of the accounts of police bureaucrats. But then, as our country’s history goes to show, many have thought just the same, until it so happens that their highly desirable apartment has caught the eye of their neighbour-informer.

When people can be kicked to death, when courts are prepared to cover up crimes and convict the innocent, decent conduct is not the most convincing defence.