Siberian Education

JUVENILE PRISON

One evening I was returning home with Mel; the weather was hot: it was late August. We were coming from the Centre district, and we had almost reached Low River when from a little garden about twenty metres away from us three boys aged about sixteen came out, rolling drunk, with empty bottles in their hands.

From the many curses that they uttered we immediately realized that there was going to be a fight.

Mel said in a sad and very calm voice:

‘Holy Christ, these bastards were all we needed… Kolima, if they make a single move towards us I’m going to kill them, I swear to you…’ He put his hand in his pocket and slowly pulled out his knife. He propped it against his hip, pressed the button to open the blade and hid the knife behind his back. I did the same, but hid the hand holding the knife in front of me, under my T-shirt, pretending to tighten my belt.

‘I hope for their own sakes they’re intelligent. Who needs trouble at this time of night…’ I said as we walked on.

Suddenly, when we had gone past them, one of the three threw an empty bottle at Mel’s back. I heard an unnatural noise, like that of a snowball against a wall. Then immediately afterwards another more natural noise: that of a bottle smashing as it hits the ground.

In a second, before I could even react, Mel was already punching one of them, and the other two were surrounding him, trying to hit him with their bottles. I jumped on the first one I could reach and stabbed him in the side. Another smashed a bottle on the ground and cut my face with the piece that was left in his hand. I got really angry and gave him a series of stabs in the leg. At that moment, behind my back I heard the sound of the cocking lever of a Kalashnikov, and immediately afterwards a burst of gunfire. I dropped to the ground, instinctively. A voice shouted:

‘Throw your weapons well away from you! Hands up, legs apart, face down! You’re under arrest!’

I felt as if I’d fallen into a bottomless pit.

‘No, it can’t be. Anything in the world, but not this.’

Pending further inquiries, which in the event took exactly two weeks, they locked me up in a cell in Tiraspol police station. The three guys who had attacked us withdrew their accusations, after my father sent the right people round to their houses.

Mel got out after a week, because he hadn’t used his knife.

I had used mine, though – it was found on the spot – and although the victims weren’t pressing charges, all the legal system needed was the reports of the policemen who’d arrested us, and my fingerprints on the weapon.

The trial was as quick as lightning: the prosecutor asked for three years’ confinement in a high security juvenile prison. The defending counsel – who was a lawyer paid by the state, but nonetheless did his job well, partly because, as I later learned, he had received a certain amount of money from my family – insisted on the peculiarities of the case: the lack of any complaint from the victims, my good behaviour during my first sentence, which I had served at home, and above all the impossibility of proving that the weapon belonged to me. I might have found it on the spot, or even taken it from one of the victims, who indeed in their second statement had declared themselves to be the ‘aggressors’. In the end the judge, a plump old woman, announced in a funereal voice:

‘One year’s detention in the strict-regime colony for juveniles, with the possibility of a request for early release after five months’ detention in the event of good behaviour.’

I wasn’t in the least frightened or surprised. I remember feeling as if I were going on a camping trip somewhere, to rest up for a while and then return home. Indeed I felt like I was about to do something I had been waiting for all my life, something great and important.

And so I was taken to prison, to a place called Kamenka – ‘The Place of Stone’, a big jail with various blocks and sections. It was an old construction dating from the time of the tsar, built on three floors. Each floor had fifty rooms, all the same size, each seventy metres square. In each room there were two windows, or rather holes, which had neither frames nor glass, but only a sheet of iron soldered on from the outside, with little holes in it to let the air through.

They escorted me to a room on the third floor. The iron doors opened in front of me and the warder said:

‘Move! Go in without fear, come out without crying…’

I took one step and the doors closed behind me with a loud noise. I looked in there and couldn’t believe my eyes.

The room was crammed with wooden bunks on three levels, set alongside each other, with very little space in between – just enough to get through. The boys were sitting on the bunks, walking around naked and sweaty, in an air full of the stink of latrines and cigarette smoke and some other disgusting odour, the smell of a dirty, damp cloth which after a while begins to rot.

Only half of the room was visible: a metre and a half from the floor the air became increasingly dense, and from there right up to the ceiling there was a thick cloud of steam.

I stood there trying to work out what I should do. I knew the prison rules very well: I knew I mustn’t move a single step inside that room until the Authorities of the cell said I could, but I looked around and couldn’t see anyone who was interested in my arrival. What’s more, my clothes seemed to me increasingly heavy, because of the humidity in the room. Then I felt something fall on my head; I brushed at it with my hand, but immediately other objects fell on my shoulders. So I moved quickly, to shake them off.

‘Don’t worry, it’s only cockroaches… There are lots of them in front of the door, but they don’t go into the room, because we put poison under the bunks…’

I looked towards the voice that was speaking to me and saw a very thin boy in dirty, wet underpants, with a shaven head, a gap in his front teeth, and glasses. I couldn’t manage to say anything to him; I felt as if I was completely cut off from the rest of the world.

‘I’m Dwarf – I’m the shnyr here. Who are you looking for? Tell me and I’ll find him.’ He came a bit closer and started looking at the tattoo on my right arm. Shnyr in criminal slang means ‘the one who darts about’: this figure exists in all Russian prisons, he’s someone who is not regarded as an honest criminal, but is the slave of the whole cell and takes messages from one criminal to another.

‘Are there any Siberians here?’ I asked him coldly, to make it clear to him from the outset that he must keep his distance from me.

‘Yes, there certainly are: Filat “White” from Magadan, Kerya “Yakut” from Urengoy…

‘All right,’ I interrupted him brusquely. ‘Go to them quickly and tell them a brother has arrived. Nikolay “Kolima” from Bender…’

He immediately vanished behind the maze of beds. I heard him saying, as he went from one bunk to the other:

‘A new arrival, he’s Siberian… Another Siberian’s arrived, another one… A Siberian from Bender has just arrived…’

In no time at all the whole cell had been informed.

A few minutes later Dwarf popped out from behind the beds. He leaned against the wall, looking back at the area from which he had just emerged. Eight boys came out from there and stood in front of me. The one in the middle did the talking; he had two tattoos on his hands. I read them and quickly learned that he came from a gang of robbers and belonged to an old family of Siberian Urkas.

‘Well, are you Siberian?’ he asked me in a relaxed tone.

‘Nikolay “Kolima”, from Bender,’ I replied.

‘Really? You’re actually from Transnistria…’ His tone had changed, becoming a little more animated.

‘From Bender, Low River.’

‘I’m Filat White, from Magadan. Come this way, I’ll introduce you to the rest of the family…’

Contrary to my expectations, the juvenile prison where I had been sent bore no resemblance to the serious prisons I had always heard about and which I had been prepared for since childhood. Here there was no criminal law; everything was chaotic and completely unlike any existing model of prison community.

The harsh living conditions and the lack of freedom, at such a delicate stage in the growth of any human being, complicated everything. The boys were very angry, like animals: they were evil, sadistic and deceitful, with a strong desire to sow destruction and raze to the ground anything that reminded them of the free world. Nothing was safe in that place; violence and madness burned like flames in the minds and souls of the inmates.

Each cell held a hundred and fifty boys. The conditions were awful. There weren’t enough beds for everyone, so you had to take turns at sleeping. There was only one bathroom, at the end of the cell, and it stank so much that even if you just went near it you felt like vomiting. The ventilation was non-existent; the only source of air was the holes in the sheets of iron covering the two windows.

It was hard to breathe in there, so a lot of weak boys, who had cardiac or respiratory diseases, couldn’t take it for long: they fell ill; often they fainted and sometimes never came to. A few weeks after my arrival, a boy who had a serious lung condition started spitting blood. Poor kid, he asked for something to drink, but the others dumped him in a corner and wouldn’t go near him for fear of catching tuberculosis. After he had spent a night on the ground, lying in the pool of blood that had formed from his continual spitting, we asked the administration to move him to the hospital.

The light was always on, night and day. Three feeble lamps lit the space inside a kind of sarcophagus made of iron and thick glass, screwed to the wall.

The tap was always running; the water came out as white as milk, and hot – almost boiling – in winter and in summer.

The beds were three-level bunks, and very narrow. All that was left of the mattresses was the covering; the filling had been worn down, so you slept on the hard surface, on the wood. Since it was always infernally hot, nobody used the blankets: we put them under our heads, because the pillows were as thin as the mattresses, with nothing inside them. I preferred to sleep without a pillow and instead put the blanket under the mattress, so as not to break my bones on the wood.

There was no timetable to follow; we were left to ourselves for twenty-four hours a day. Three times a day they brought us some food – in the morning a mug of tea which looked like dirty water, with a faint trace of something which might have been tea in a previous existence. On top of the mug they put a piece of bread with a knob of white butter which had been thinned in the kitchen by the cooks, who stole the provisions, as though they were the criminals, not us.

Since the third floor, where I was, was that of the ‘special purpose’ block reserved for the most dangerous juveniles, we didn’t deserve the honour of having spoons or other metal objects at breakfast. We spread the butter on our bread with our fingers. We dipped the buttered bread in the mug of tea and ate it like a dunked biscuit. Afterwards we drank the tea with the grease floating in it; it was very tasty and nourishing.

Three boys would stand by the little window in the door: they would take the food from the guards’ hands and pass it to the others. Taking anything from the cops was considered ‘dishonest’; those who did it were sacrificing themselves for everyone, and in exchange for the favour nobody touched them – they were allowed to live in peace.

For lunch we had a very light soup, with half-cooked vegetables floating in the dishes like starships in space. The luckiest boys found a piece of potato or a fishbone, or the bone of some animal. That was the first course. For the main course they gave us a dish of kasha: that’s the Russian name for cracked wheat boiled and mixed with a little butter. Usually they put in it pieces of something which looked like meat but tasted like the soles of shoes. We also got a piece of bread and the usual knob of butter, and to eat this exquisite fare they even gave us a spoon. To drink we again had tea, identical to that of the morning, but not nearly as warm. The spoons were counted, however, and if at the end – after the quarter of an hour allotted for lunch – there was a single one missing, the squad from the ‘educational’ unit would come into the cell and beat us all up, without bothering to make many inquiries. At that point the spoon would be given back, or rather thrown towards the door by someone who preferred to remain anonymous, because otherwise his cellmates would have tortured him and, as we say in such cases, ‘made even his shadow bleed’.

For supper there was kasha again, a mug of tea with bread and butter, and once again spoons, but this time we were only given ten minutes for eating.

A lot of trouble arose from food. Little groups of bastards, united by their common love of violence and torture, terrorized all the boys who were on their own and didn’t belong to any family. They would systematically beat them up and torture them, and make them pay a kind of ‘tax’, forcing them to give up most of their portions.

If you wanted to survive and have a quiet life in juvenile prison, you had to join the families. A family was made up of a group of people who had some common characteristic, often their nationality. Each family had its internal rules, and boys happily obeyed them in an effort to simplify their lives. In a typical family you would share everything. Anyone who received a parcel from home would give some of his stuff to the others. In this way everyone was constantly getting something from outside, which was very important psychologically: it helped to stop you becoming demoralized.

The members of one family protected each other, and ate and organized all their daily affairs together.

Each family also imposed some particular rules, some obligations that had to be met. For example, in our Siberian family it was forbidden to participate in gambling or any similar activity together with people from other families. And if anyone did anything to a Siberian, the whole family would jump on him, even if he were on his own, beat him up and force him to ‘soap his skis’ – that is, to ask the guards for an immediate transfer to another cell. He also had to justify his request by saying that he feared being killed. It was a gesture which everybody else looked upon as dishonest, and so when he was transferred that poor wretch would be very badly treated and despised by everyone.

Once a member of our family, a twelve-year-old boy called Aleksy and nicknamed ‘Canine Tooth’, had some problems with one of the sympathizers of Black Seed, who are known as Vorishki, or ‘Little Thieves’, because in Black Seed Vor, or ‘Thief’, is the name of the highest Authority. In prison the Little Thieves imitated the members of Black Seed in everything they did: they played cards and cheated while doing it, they bet on all kinds of things, and they had homosexual relations, often raping the weaker boys and then terrorizing them, using them as slaves.

Anyway, Canine Tooth went to the toilet with another Siberian (in prison people always move about together, so that if anything happens to a brother of yours he is not on his own), and, as the regulations stipulate, he informed everyone in the cell that he was about to go and relieve himself. It is customary to let people know, because many believe that if someone goes to the toilet you mustn’t eat or drink at the same time, otherwise the food and water will become dirty, and any person who touches that food will become zakontacheny, which in criminal slang means contaminated or tainted: a class of despised and maltreated people, who stand on the lowest level of the criminal hierarchy, from where they will never be able to rise again for the rest of their lives.

When Canine Tooth made his announcement, one of the Little Thieves, a sadistic fool by the name of Pyotr, piped up that Canine Tooth had better repeat what he’d said, because he hadn’t heard it clearly.

This was a clear provocation, to which Canine Tooth retorted equally rudely, suggesting that Pyotr should wash his ears more carefully, if he had trouble in hearing things.

After which Canine Tooth went to the toilet, relieved himself and returned to the area of the Siberian family.

After dinner fifteen Little Thieves came to see us, demanding that we give Canine Tooth up to them, because he was due a punishment for offending an honest criminal. Since our idea of honesty was very different from theirs, none of us would have dreamed of leaving a brother of ours in their hands. Without saying a word in reply, we jumped on them and gave them a sound thrashing. The biggest of us, Kerya, nicknamed ‘Yakut’, who was a pure native Siberian and had Indian features, tore off a piece of one of their ears with his teeth, and chewed and swallowed it in full view of everyone.

We forced eighteen people to ask for a transfer all at once, and from cell to cell, all over the prison, people began to tell this story, saying we were cannibals. After a month, a boy who had been transferred from the first floor to our cell told us in terror that it was rumoured downstairs that the Siberians on the third floor had eaten a boy alive, and that nothing had been left of him.

We Siberians had made friends with the Armenian family. We had known the Armenians from way back; there was a good relationship between our communities and we resembled each other in many ways. We had made a pact with them: if there was ever any serious trouble we would support each other. In this way the power of our communities had increased.

We celebrated our birthdays and other special days together; sometimes we even shared our parcels from home. If anyone needed something urgently, such as medicine, or ink for tattoos, we would help each other without hesitation.

We were good friends with the Armenians, and also with the Belarusians, who were good people, and with the boys who came from the Don, from the Cossack community: they were rather militaristic but good-hearted, and all were very brave.

We had problems with the Ukrainians, though: some of them were nationalistic and hated Russians, and for some strange reason even those who didn’t share those sentiments ended up supporting them. And our relationship with the Ukrainians deteriorated markedly after a Siberian from another cell killed one of them. A real hatred grew up between our communities.

We kept well away from the people from Georgia; they were all supporters of Black Seed. Each of them was desperate to become an Authority, invented countless ways of making others respect him, and conducted a kind of criminal electoral campaign to win votes. The Georgians I met in that jail knew nothing about true friendship or brotherhood; they lived together while hating each other and trying to cheat everyone else and make them their slaves, by exploiting the criminal laws and changing them to suit their own purposes. Only by doing this did they have any hope of becoming chiefs, and of gaining the respect of the adult criminals of the Black Seed caste.

The supporters of Black Seed exercised a reign of terror over the mass of inmates whom they called ‘heels’. Heels were ordinary prisoners, boys who had no connection with any criminal community, and who had ended up in jail purely through bad luck; many were the sons of alcoholics and had been convicted of vagrancy, a little respected article of the law. These poor souls were so exhausted and ignorant that everyone pitied them. The supporters of Black Seed, the Little Thieves, exploited them as slaves and mistreated them; they tortured them for sadistic pleasure and sexually abused them.

According to the Siberian tradition, homosexuality is a very serious infectious disease, because it destroys the human soul; so we grew up with a total hatred of homosexuals. This disease, which among our people has no precise name and is simply called ‘the sickness of the flesh’, is transmitted through the gaze, so a Siberian criminal will never look a homosexual in the eye. In the adult prisons, in places where the majority of inmates are of the Orthodox Siberian faith, homosexuals are forced to commit suicide, because they can’t share the same spaces with the others. As the Siberian proverb says: ‘The sick of the flesh do not sleep beneath the icons.’

I never fully understood the question of hatred for homosexuals, but since I was brought up in this way, I followed the herd. Over the years I have had many homosexual friends, people with whom I have worked and done business, and I have had a good relationship with many of them; I found them congenial, I liked them as people. And yet I have never been able to break the habit of calling someone a queer or a pansy if I want to insult them, even though immediately afterwards I regret it and feel ashamed. It’s Siberian education speaking for me.

The Little Thieves despised passive homosexuals, even though most of them were active homosexuals. In the cells where there were no strong families and most of the boys were left completely to themselves, the Little Thieves gang-raped them, forcing them to participate in real orgies. They maltreated, insulted and provoked them continually, calling them all sorts of offensive names and forcing them to live in inhuman conditions.

Some of the guards often raped the boys, too; this usually happened in the showers. You were allowed to take a shower once a week if you were in the ordinary regime, whereas in the special regime, where I was, you could only do so once a month. We used to improvise with plastic bottles, rigging up a shower over the toilet, since we always had plenty of hot water. When we went to the shower block it was like a military operation: we all walked close together; if there were any weak or sick boys among us we put them in the middle and always kept an eye on them; we moved like a platoon of soldiers.

The reason for this was that there were often violent brawls in the showers, sometimes for no special reason, and just because someone was feeling irritable. It only took someone stealing your place under the water for all hell to break loose. The guards never intervened; they let the youngsters work off their anger and stood there watching; sometimes they bet on the boys, as if they were fighting dogs.

One day, after a fight in the showers between us and the Georgians, I was running after a guy who had just snatched from me a towel embroidered by my mother. Suddenly my enemy stopped, and motioned to me not to make a noise. His attitude made me curious; I suspected a trap. I stopped running and approached him slowly, fists clenched, ready to hit him, but he pointed towards a cubicle from which a strange noise was coming, as if someone was slowly rubbing some iron object against the tiled wall. We guessed something nasty was happening. I felt uneasy; I wasn’t sure I wanted to see what was going on behind that partition.

Together with that boy, whom only a moment earlier I had wanted to beat to a pulp, I moved from one cubicle to another, hiding, drawing ever closer to the place the noise was coming from. I felt sick at the scene that appeared before our eyes: a large middle-aged warder with his trousers down, his head up and his eyes closed, was buggering a small thin boy, who was crying softly and not even attempting to escape the grip of his rapist, who was holding him still, with one hand on his neck and the other on his side.

The noise we had heard was that of the bunch of keys that hung from the belt of the paedophile’s lowered trousers: the keys scraped against the floor with every movement he made.

We were there for no more than a second, because as soon as we realized what was going on we fled in silence. As we approached the running showers where our friends were already washing, I signed to the Georgian to keep quiet and he replied with a nod.

The guards weren’t all alike. Some had a bit of humanity in them and didn’t treat us badly – that is, by not beating us up, not humiliating us and not abusing us, they were already helping us a lot. Others, however, forced some boys to prostitute themselves.

There was one disgusting old screw: he had been a guard in an adult prison all his life, and after studying child psychology had asked for a transfer to a juvenile institution. He wielded a lot of power in our prison. Although he was only a warder, he rivalled the director, because he had links with people who organized a new activity which had arrived from abroad along with democracy, as a form of free life. These people made paedophile films and forced the boys to prostitute themselves, having sex with foreigners, people who arrived from Europe and the USA, people who had pots of money and hence, in the new democratic system, immense power.

Many boys were picked up at a particular time of day from the cells and came back the next day with bags full of food and all kinds of stuff, such as glossy magazines, colouring pencils and other things which nobody in jail could dream of possessing. Their cellmates were forbidden to touch them or mistreat them; they were untouchable, nobody dared to raise a finger against them, because everyone knew those boys were the old warder’s whores. They called him ‘Crocodile Zhena’, after a character in a Soviet cartoon. The whores they called by women’s names. Their bunk was usually down at the end, near the door, and they stayed there all the time.

Nobody talked to them, they were completely isolated, we all pretended they didn’t exist. We Siberians, in particular, thought they were infectious, so we avoided even more than the others any form of contact even with their possessions, or with anyone who had come into contact with them or their possessions.

Once a sixteen-year-old boy called ‘Fish’, one of the Little Thieves, decided he wanted to rape a whore, a fourteen-year-old boy whom everyone called ‘Marina’. Marina was regularly picked up from his cell, but one morning he had come back with whip-marks on his arms, and with his neck red as if someone had been throttling him. But he didn’t seem upset; he was happy: he ate fruit and read comic books. To cut a long story short, Fish went over to him and asked him for a piece of fruit. Marina gave him a piece, Fish sat down with him on the bunk, they got talking and eventually he persuaded him to give him a blow-job in front of the whole cell.

We Siberians were in a precarious situation at the time: we had just been in a fight and we had to keep quiet for a while, otherwise – from what the disciplinary unit guys had said – they would split us up and send us to different cells, where we had a serious chance of ending up in the shit. So, while Fish was plunging his genitals into Marina’s mouth in front of his whole escort and other idiots who had gone to enjoy the show, we sat on our bunks fuming with rage because we couldn’t even afford to give him a thrashing.

We could hear the Little Thieves’ shouts of encouragement:

‘Go on, pansy, eat it all!’

‘That’s the way, Fish, make him swallow the fish!’

‘Open that mouth wider and I’ll stick mine in too!’

We soon realized that a lot of people wanted the same treatment from Marina. Marina’s weak voice could be heard whispering in an obviously feminine tone which was disgusting to hear:

‘No, boys, I did it to him because I like him, but that’s enough…’

But there was no stopping the crowd now.

‘What are you talking about? Open your little mouth, darling! There’s a good girl, go on like that, or I’ll break that pansy nose of yours!’

‘Yeah, that’s the way, suck it hard! Then it’s our turn!’

You could hear the moans, and now and then the cries, of those who were reaching an orgasm. Marina coughed and spat. Others shouted at him cruelly:

‘No spitting, you queer! You’ve got to swallow, or I’ll smash your face in!’

That poor devil, Marina. He sounded pitiful; he was crying, and in a thin voice, like that of a seriously ill man who hasn’t got the strength to breathe, he begged:

‘Please, I can’t do any more, let me be! I’ll suck you all off later, but let me rest, please…’

‘Later’s no good, you queer! If you’re tired, lie down on the bunk, but face down!’ Fish wouldn’t let up.

One of our group was about to go and give him a beating, but we stopped him; we couldn’t afford to get into trouble again. We were forced to witness that disgusting scene. None of us looked, but we could hear it all perfectly well; we were only a few metres away from the scene of the rape. We heard them throw Marina onto the bunk, while someone said in an obviously proud voice:

‘Let me through! I’m going to be the first to fuck him in the arse!’

A moment later Marina gave a kind of cry, but then started sighing, just like a girl making love. The bunks moved; the movement passed from one bunk to another and reached ours like a gentle knocking; it made us wild with rage, that swaying; if only we could have, we’d have torn them to pieces, every one of them.

A voice said:

‘Come on, boys, let’s take turns at sticking it in his mouth, too, or he’ll relax too much, the queer!’ And everyone laughed and joked, and Marina again started begging, and promising to suck them all off later, and do anything else, if only they’d leave him in peace for a while. But no one was listening to him. Again there were moans, again the cries of boys coming in his mouth, again Marina coughing and spitting, coughing and spitting.

Then someone gave him the first slaps in the face, and he started screaming. They squeezed their hands round his neck and continued to rape him. Now and then they slackened their grip and he started coughing and spitting again, and also trying to say something, but he couldn’t, because he had a fit of coughing. Everyone was whooping with joy; they were pleased. Fish said to the others:

‘Well? How do you like my girl? She’s mine! Tonight she’s free to you, but from tomorrow you’ll have to pay me! Otherwise you’ll have to just wank yourselves off!’

This madness had begun at about nine in the evening, and it went on all night. The guards didn’t come even once to see what was going on. The rapists took turns: they would go away for a rest and then start all over again. They joked among themselves:

‘Hey, boys, are you sure he’s still alive?’

‘Well, the important thing is he’s still warm…’

‘He’s alive – just look at him sucking away!’

By about six in the morning the party was over.

Everyone was laughing and joking; Marina was lying on his bed, motionless; now and then you would hear him sob and whisper something in his girlish voice.

Three days later he was picked up again by the guards.

But first Fish had a good talk with him, to make sure he wouldn’t report him to the disciplinary unit.

‘Marina, if you talk I’ll kill you with my own hands… Keep quiet and behave yourself and no one will touch you again; no one will come and see you except me. Me or anyone who pays me. Understand? Without me, they’d fuck you in every hole, like the other night!’

Fish thought he’d been convincing, and as soon as Marina had left the cell he started arranging with his friends who would be the first to screw him when he got back.

A few hours later six men from the disciplinary unit arrived, with Crocodile Zhena himself. They called out by their surnames all the boys who had taken part in the rape. Panic spread among the Little Thieves. Someone said:

‘I didn’t do anything! I was there, but I didn’t do anything.’

We watched the scene with interest.

When the warder had finished reading out the names on the list, the disgusting voice of Crocodile Zhena rang out:

‘Well, are we all here? March, in single file!’

So we saw them leave the cell. For two days we heard nothing. Expectation hung in the air; nobody mentioned it, but many were worried about what might have happened.

During the night of the third day, when we were all asleep, the doors opened and the Little Thieves came in. The guards forbade us to get up and, sticking our heads out from the bunks, we tried to see what state they were in. When the doors closed, the groans started. Some of them cried, others talked out loud, saying senseless things.

I noticed that the first thing many of them did was to take a towel and go to wet it under the tap. Then I saw two of them pass between the bunks: they were holding the wet towel under their pants, against their backsides. Some of them started to quarrel about the toilet:

‘Let me through, let me through! I can’t wait any longer, I’m bleeding…’

Our boys laughed:

‘Look at the fucking queers run!’

‘They wanted to fuck him in the arse, didn’t they? Well, if you give it you’ve got to take it…’

‘Yeah! What kind of queer would you be otherwise? A semi-queer?’

‘Hey, look at that one! They certainly gave him a good buggering!’

‘He deserved it, the bastard, the fucking pansy…’

Our Filat White got up from his bed and shouted out:

‘You’re all contaminated! Go and sleep in the corner by the door! It disgusts us to have you anywhere near us!’

None of the Little Thieves dared to talk back, they were scared; they must have really been through it. They picked up their things and obediently moved into the corner by the door.

‘Hey, look at that, a migration of queers!’ said another of our group. And we all laughed.

The next day, putting together the rumours that were going round and the scraps of conversation between the Little Thieves, we reconstructed the whole story. Crocodile Zhena had taken them down to the first floor, to the room that was used for meetings with relatives: a large bedroom, with a number of beds, where visiting parents could stay for a day and a night with their children. There they’d been raped for two and a half days by Crocodile Zhena’s friends, who had also filmed the whole thing with a videocamera. It was said that they had rammed a bottle into Fish, and consequently lacerated his anus, and those of a few others, till it bled.

From that moment Fish became a kind of shadow; he moved around the room silently and always looked at the floor. He went to the toilet at night, and by day tried never to leave his bunk.

The Little Thieves mainly took advantage of boys who were defenceless and frightened. Usually they took them, by threats or force, into their ‘black corner’, a block of bunks on which they lived, and there performed the most sophisticated and terrible tortures in front of the others.

They raped someone almost every day; afterwards they would beat the boy up and make him dance on the floor stark naked, with a paper tube stuck up his anus. First they would set fire to the tube, then they would tell the poor bastard to dance. That ritual even had a name: ‘calling a little devil out of hell’. Every torture had a name, almost always a humorous one.

‘The battle with the rabbit’, for example, went like this: the poor bastard in question was stood in front of a wall on which there was a drawing of a rabbit wearing boxing gloves, and he had to hit it as hard as he could. They would all shout ‘Go on! Harder!’ at the tops of their voices. The victim would hit the wall and in a few minutes his hands would be a bloody mess. Then the others would force him to hit the wall with his head and his legs, threatening him:

‘Go on, you pansy, what are you scared of? It’s only a stupid rabbit! Hit it harder – with your leg, with your head! Hit it, or we’ll rip your arse open like a rag!’

And the poor devil would be exhausted, then they’d force him to throw his whole body at the rabbit, but usually he would collapse before then, and pass out from the pain. Then they would leave him there on the floor, saying:

‘You’re a wuss, a sissy! You’re useless! You let a rabbit beat you up, do you realize that? When you come to, we’ll make you into a pretty little girl!’

That was how the Little Thieves sowed fear and chaos among the inmates.

Another torture was ‘the flight of Gagarin’: the victim was forced to throw himself off the highest bunk holding his feet with his hands, forming a kind of ball with his body. Sometimes they would wrap a towel round his head to ‘protect’ him at the moment of impact, but nevertheless this torture would end with broken bones, and the hapless victim would go straight to hospital.

Then there was ‘the Ghost’: they would force someone to go round with a blanket over his head for a couple of days. Anyone could go up to him and hit him at any moment, and he had to reply every time:

‘I can’t feel a thing, because I’m a ghost.’

Usually they hit him with something hard, preferably the tea kettle, with a bag of sugar inside it to make it even heavier. Once in a cell near ours they killed a boy by hitting him too hard on the head. The next day, during the recreation hour, they boasted about it in the courtyard; I heard them with my own ears say, laughing:

‘The ghost was too weak.’

The staff let all acts of violence between juveniles pass as accidents. There were an incredible number of boys who ‘fell out of their bunks in their sleep’; many of them died, some were left permanently disabled.

Nobody dared to tell the truth.

We Siberians were opposed to any manifestation of sexual perversion, bullying and unmotivated violence, so whenever one of us saw that the Little Thieves were about to torture someone, we would start a serious fight, which sometimes ended very badly.

In our cell the Little Thief who dominated all the weaker ones was a really sadistic bastard nicknamed ‘Bulgarian’. He was the son of a Black Seed criminal and the younger brother of a Blatnoy. Bulgarian was quite a thin little boy, more or less like me, except that I did gym and was quite active, whereas he smoked and was always loafing around, so he looked like a little mummy. His skin was a very strange colour, like that of patients suffering from hepatitis, so we Siberians called him ‘Yellow’, not ‘Bulgarian’.

When Bulgarian arrived in our cell the Little Thieves started telling stories about him, to build up the legend. For a week his name was always at the centre of every conversation – Bulgarian here and Bulgarian there – and everything in the world was either him or in some way connected with his legendary figure. We Siberians said to each other:

‘Another bastard, for sure. Let’s just hope he’s not a troublemaker…’

Two weeks after his arrival, Bulgarian managed to pick a quarrel with the Armenians, calling them ‘Black Arses’ (that’s what the Russian nationalists often called anyone who came from the Caucasus and had a darker skin); he shouted that he would use his connections in the criminal world to have them all killed. He was a clown, a spoilt child, who had clearly never seen anything apart from the view from his father’s knees, which he had never got down from until he went to prison.

The Armenians told us about the incident, and we assured them of all our support in the event of a fight, guaranteeing the support of the Siberian community outside the prison as well. We knew that sooner or later the situation between us and the Little Thieves would lead to a war; we were just waiting for the right moment and, above all, an opportunity. They would have to make a mistake, because if we wanted to go through with it and have the backing of our elders, we would have to give them a serious reason which was approved by the Siberian criminal law. This too made us different from them. The Little Thieves could pick on anyone who didn’t belong to their community, infringe the rules of behaviour or do other far more serious things, and they were always supported by the people of Black Seed: confident of their protection, they stopped at nothing. We, by contrast, had a very strict law: any mistake that was made, any insult to a person considered honest by our community, had to be punished. No one, neither a relative nor a friend, would dream of protecting someone who had broken the law.

So we were just waiting for Bulgarian and his gang of bumboys (as we called them, because of their propensity for homosexual rape) to show their ugly faces and stir up some trouble, which we would then use as a pretext for mincing them up like raw meat. But those bastards exceeded all our expectations.

One day our family was gathered around the ‘oak’ (that’s what they call the table bricked into the floor which is found in every cell). According to an agreement, the families, or ‘brigades’ (as the groups of those who modelled themselves on Black Seed were known) were allowed to gather around the oak for a certain length of time. In every cell it was different, but usually you stood at the oak to eat, at mealtimes. The stronger ones stood around the table first; they would eat, chat and then leave the table free for others who were weaker than them but stronger than those who came after them. Most of the inmates didn’t even stand at the table, but would eat on their bunks, otherwise they wouldn’t have had time to eat their meal. Eating at the oak was a kind of privilege; it emphasized the power of the group you belonged to. In our cell we were the first to eat at the oak, together with the Armenians and the Belarusians. In all there wasn’t room for more than forty people at the table, but we managed to squeeze sixty of us in. We did this to show the others that our alliance in the cell was superior to everyone else. The Little Thieves who were in the same cell as us couldn’t stomach this, because they felt they were in second place but couldn’t do anything about it; what’s more, the Little Thieves in the other cells were always ribbing them about it. But to attack us would have been like committing suicide, so one day they found an excuse for not eating at the oak any more: they started to say that the table was tainted, that someone had washed it with the floor cloth and that therefore, according to their rules, they couldn’t even touch it with a finger now. It was a lie, a story they’d thought up so as not to lose their dignity entirely.

So that day we were having our lunch; the Armenians had brought to the oak a piece of cheese which one of them had just received in his parcel from home. After cutting it up into little cubes we were all eating it with relish: it was a taste that came from freedom, a delicious flavour, which reminded us of home, of the life we were all waiting to live again.

Suddenly we heard a shout; I was facing the door, so I didn’t really grasp what was going on, but a group of my Siberian brothers near the bunks got up, announcing angrily:

‘Honest people! While we’re eating what the Lord has sent us to keep us alive, those bastards are uncorking someone!’

To ‘uncork’ meant to rape. What was happening was a very serious matter. Serious in itself, certainly, but there was more to it than that: although we were often forced to turn a blind eye to the homosexual acts of the Little Thieves, this time it was quite impossible. Having sexual relations while, in the same space, in the cell – which in the criminal language is called ‘home’ – people are eating, or reading the Bible, or praying, is a flagrant violation of the criminal law.

We got up and ran towards the Little Thieves’ black corner. They were holding down one of the usual poor wretches on a bunk, and, wrapping a towel round his neck – so tightly his face had gone all red, and he was croaking for air – they were screaming at him that if he didn’t keep still and take it up the arse while he was alive, he would do it when he was dead.

Filat White grabbed one of them by the neck – Filat was a very strong boy but one without heart, as they say in Italian, or with an evil heart, as they say in Siberia (and it’s not exactly the same thing): in short, he had no pity for his enemies – and started pounding him with his fists, and his fists were like cannon balls. After a few seconds the guy lost consciousness and his face turned into a raw steak. Both of Filat’s hands were covered in blood.

From the Little Thieves’ bunks there came a torrent of abuse and threats of revenge, with which they are usually very liberal.

Filat went up to the one who had been about to rape the boy and still had his underpants down. Everyone was half-naked and dripping with sweat in that hellish heat; we Siberians were in our underpants too, but ready to tear those bastards to pieces.

Filat grabbed the rapist by the arm and started hammering him against the corner of the bunk. The guy starting yelling:

‘I’m Bulgarian! You’ve laid hands on me! All of you here are my witnesses! This guy’s a dead man, he’s a dead man! Tell my brother! He’ll kill his whole family!’

He squealed like a drunken country cop’s rusty whistle. Nobody took his words seriously.

Filat stopped banging him against the bunk and released his grip, and the boy staggered and fell on the floor. Then he pulled himself together, got to his feet and said:

‘Your name, you bastard, tell me your name, and this very evening my brother will rip your mother’s guts out…’ At the word ‘mother’ Filat unleashed an incredibly hard punch. I heard a strange noise, as if someone, somewhere, a long way off, had split a plank of wood. But it wasn’t wood: it was Bulgarian’s nose, and now he lay flat on the ground, senseless.

Filat looked at him for a moment, then gave him a kick in the face, then another, and another, and yet another. Each time, Bulgarian’s head jumped so far off his shoulders that it seemed not to be attached to his spine; it was as if his skull and the rest of his skeleton were separate: his neck seemed no more than a thin thread, made of rubber.

Filat said to them all:

‘Isn’t wanking enough for you any more? Don’t you want to wait to get out so you can make love to girls? Do you prefer arses? Have you all turned into bumboys?’

At his last word a ripple of surprise ran along the bunks: to insult a whole group of people is very wrong; according to the criminal law it’s an error. But Filat had been clever: he had expressed his insult in the form of a question, and according to our law, in such situations, especially if the name of your mother has been insulted, a slight hint of an insult to a whole group is quite acceptable.

Without another word, Filat put one foot on Bulgarian’s genitals, which were sadly shrunken on his inert body, and started crushing them with all his strength. Then he leaped on Bulgarian like a madman, and hurling a fearful yell into the air jumped up and down on his stomach until we all heard a terrible crack. I didn’t know much about anatomy, but this much was clear to me – he’d broken his pelvis.

The Little Thieves sat there speechless, terrified. Filat said to all of them:

‘Now I’ll give you one minute to soap your skis. After that, if any of you remains in this house he’ll get the same medicine as…’

Before he had even finished the sentence, the Little Thieves had jumped down from their bunks and rushed to the doors, shouting and pummelling on the iron:

‘Guards! Help! They’re killing us! Transfer! Immediately! We request a transfer!’

A few moments later the doors opened and the guards of the disciplinary squad came in, armed with truncheons. They carried away the two injured boys, dragging them along like sacks of rubbish, leaving a long trail of blood behind them. Then they started ejecting the Little Thieves.

The following week a letter arrived from outside. It said Bulgarian had died in hospital, and his brother had tried asking the Siberians for justice but they had turned him down flat, so he had started threatening vengeance, at which point they had killed him by knocking him down with a car. He had tried to run away from his murderers, but hadn’t succeeded. To remove any doubt a Siberian belt had been left next to the corpse.

And so the war had ended. Nobody sought revenge any more, and everyone kept quiet and behaved themselves. Some other Little Thieves arrived in our cell a few months later, but they didn’t make any more mistakes.

For nine months I was in that place, in that cell, in the Siberian family. After nine months they released me for good conduct, three months early. Before leaving I said goodbye to the boys; we wished each other good luck, as tradition requires.

After I left, for a long time I kept dreaming about the prison, the boys, that life. Often I would wake up with a strange sense that I was still there. When I realized I was at home I was happy, certainly, but I also felt a mysterious nostalgia, sometimes a regret that remained in my heart for a long time. The thought of no longer having any of my Siberian friends around me was an unpleasant one. Gradually, though, I resumed my life, and the faces of those boys became ever more distant.

Many of them I never heard of again. Years later, in Moscow, one day I met Kerya Yakut, who told me a few things about some of them, but he too no longer moved in those circles; he was working as a private bodyguard to a rich businessman now, and had no intention of returning to the criminal life.

He seemed to be in good form. We talked a little, reminiscing about the times of our Siberian family, and then we parted. Neither of us asked for the other’s address; we were part of that past which is not remembered with pleasure.