As for me, the authorities spotted their opportunity: this was the perfect pretext to put me in permanent solitary confinement. They made a camp announcement that Khodorkovsky was in fear for his life and had asked to be transferred to ‘a safe place’. Of course, solitary is the opposite of a safe place; it is the direct road to the cemetery, both literally and figuratively. I knew I couldn’t afford to let it happen so I decided to go down fighting.
I went on a ‘dry’ hunger strike – no food, no liquids – the second time I had done so. The first had been in the Matrosskaya Tishina prison in Moscow, after Platon Lebedev had been taken to the punishment cells and told he would never get out alive. I had fasted for six days before Platon was released and by then I was on the brink. When you go ‘dry’, your blood thickens and your blood pressure shoots up. Mine reached 180 and the doctors said the next thing on the horizon would be blood clots and a stroke. But the advantage is that this forces the authorities to make quick decisions. You’re at risk of dying as early as the third day and almost no one survives more than ten, while the usual ‘wet’ hunger strike gets dangerous only after 30–60 days.
This time, I found it particularly tough going. Evidently, my health wasn’t that good any more. By the fourth day, I couldn’t walk and I was fainting. When the doctor came, he informed me that the camp commander had accepted my demand. I was transferred to the infirmary, where I spent several days trying to put my body right.
When Putin brought new charges against me in February 2006 and I was recalled to prison, the head of the camp operations department personally carried all my belongings to the transport. He even brought a mattress and a blanket. We parted on companionable terms. His last words were, ‘Just don’t come back!’
The overall changes to the gulag system since the days of Stalin are enormous. For a start, no one is deliberately starved any more. There were and are still instances of people dying from lack of food; in the early 2000s, there were even entire de facto ‘hunger camps’, but these are the result of conflicts on the ground, mismanagement or corrupt officials stealing supplies, rather than official government policy.
Prisoners are not worked to death through slave labour any more. Sometimes there’s even the opposite problem of camps with no work at all. In these places, prisoners become stupefied, like animals, and lose all their social skills (if they had them in the first place). Nowadays, no one is punished for not working, but attempts at escaping are punished very harshly.
The camp bosses can no longer kill a prisoner out of hand, as they used to in the past. Beating and torture can and does happen, but killing is prohibited. Doing so would require a massive amount of paperwork. This ban on killing, of course, gets broken just like any other ban, but the situation is very different from when camp officials had the unfettered right to kill their prisoners.
The living conditions are hard, but they are no longer murderous. For example, in winter they try to stop the temperature inside the barracks dropping below zero and they supply water, albeit cold, so prisoners can wash themselves and their clothes. It is ‘trifles’ such as these that make the difference between life and death.
But other things in the gulag have remained very much the same. In the camps, a prisoner is not a person; he is an animal, even though his value to his owner has increased significantly since the Stalin years. You can’t kill him, but you can, and should, beat him. You can’t starve him, but neither do you have to worry about the quality of his food. Neither do you need to worry about ethical considerations in the way you treat a prisoner: you can and should lie, deceive, play prisoners off one against the other and routinely show contempt. As always, there are exceptions. There are officials who wouldn’t allow themselves to bully prisoners and there are prisoners who wouldn’t allow themselves to be bullied. But it was like that in the old gulag, too. Back then, a prisoner’s life was at stake, while now it’s ‘merely’ his health and his chances of early release.
