Everyone was taken aback. I pulled myself together, just in time to hear the chairman of the court say to the camp commander, ‘Cancel the defendant’s punishment! And as for the witness, if you punish him, I will personally lay charges against you.’10
That’s how things went on from that time forward: I would be given a punishment; I would be put in the cooler; I would complain to the court and the court would cancel the punishment. In between times, I worked and got to know my fellow prisoners. We had illiterate shepherds from ‘nearby’ villages (meaning only 300–400km away) and miners from the uranium pits; we had ordinary, law-abiding citizens and we had big bosses from the criminal world. We had normal people and we had complete villains, young men who had been sentenced to ten years as minors for serial murder and were serving out the end of their sentence in an adult camp, without understanding that their next murder would mean life imprisonment. There simply were no constraints on these men.
It was a strange mixture, with all of us kept in a single pot, corralled by the prison authorities or by the leaders of the criminal gangs that ruled the roost in the camps. We all shared a common understanding of how we should deal with each other, of the limits of acceptable personal behaviour, and an acute awareness of interdependence. A truly antisocial personality in the camp was a rarity, and they were quickly dealt with by the administration or by the other prisoners. The methods varied from confinement in a specially created ‘ghetto’ to full ‘serious bodily harm’.
My position was a bit of an anomaly. For the first year, prison society couldn’t fit me into any of the usual categories. The criteria for these are clear: if you collaborate with the camp authorities, you are a ‘red’; if you stand up for yourself and suffer for it, you are ‘black’; if you work and you bow the knee to the criminal kingpins, you are a ‘peasant’; if you refuse to work, make people pay attention to your views and defend the idea of individual freedoms from the yoke of the state, you are an ‘authority’. As for me, I worked and I interacted with the authorities; but I also spent considerably more time in the cooler than anyone and I certainly wasn’t a ‘squealer’; I conversed with the career criminals who ran camp life, but I never kowtowed to them in any way.
At the end of my stay in Chita, I had an interesting conversation with one of them. He was one of the more respected gang bosses in the criminal hierarchy and he had just been told he was being transported to the fearsome Blagoveshchensk camp, where people of his kind are taken to be broken. He knew what lay ahead and awaited it with open eyes, defending his individualistic world view, which I would describe as close to nineteenth-century-style anarchism. This was a very deep person, a man of strong will and convictions, despite not yet being 30 years old. He told me that in ordinary life, he and I would certainly have been enemies since my goals were the opposite of his, but now we were both battling against an unjust and oppressive state, simply using different methods to do so. I would say that his assessment pretty much summed up people’s attitude towards me in the camp: I was an outsider, but one deserving respect.
In the hut where I was assigned a place, there were anywhere from 70 to 150 people at different times. Most didn’t stay long – around three to six months before they were transferred. If someone came up to me openly and didn’t get punished, I knew he was a ‘spy’ for the administration who wrote reports for the Security Section; anyone else would get sent to isolation. That was the way the camp administration thought they could ‘keep me under control’, by deciding who I could speak to and who would be allowed to be in my social circle.
In April 2006, two-and-a-half years into my sentence, I was woken in the night by the blow of a knife striking my head. I jumped up with blood flowing on to my mattress in time to see the man running away. He had wanted to stick the knife into my eye, but in the dark he missed and just slashed my face. He soon was transferred closer to the city of Chita where his family lived.
The prisoners who did the administration’s bidding and came to spy on me were flawed people who had problems, real or imagined, with the rest of the inmates – and that meant they could be easily manipulated. One of these ‘agents’ was very afraid of another prisoner who was menacing him with terrible threats, including bodily harm. The authorities used this to blackmail him. The prisoner figured that the only way to get himself transferred to another camp was to try to stab me.
