I also took pleasure in practical things. Household chores are not a problem for me. Until I was 30, I did my own housework and washed my laundry, even when there was no hot water. Prison isn’t home, but these skills help; and your relatives support you by sending you things that are allowed. The biggest problem is that you’re not allowed to have a computer, so there’s a lack of access to information. Not only up-to-the-minute information, but useful information in general. There’s a limit on how many books you can take into prison, so having a lawyer coming in from time to time is invaluable.
Another skill that helped me in jail was the ability to concentrate on a task and block out unnecessary thoughts. For the full working day, eight hours or more, I made myself think in a disciplined manner about concrete, practical problems that I could actually do something about, and not to dwell on those I was powerless to tackle. I used to take short breaks and relax by thinking about something pleasant. And at the end of my working day, I switched off my brain by thinking positively about my family and friends. I liked to remember and daydream about seeing them again.
In some ways, prison is like a magnifying glass for observing social processes that are going on outside. When living standards fell sharply in Russia after 1998, prisoners were literally eating grass. Cases of dysentery were reputedly in the thousands. In my time in prison, I was struck by the number of illiterate young people I met, 20-year-olds completely unable to read or write. Then I was a witness to the shift in the population of Moscow’s notorious Matrosskaya Tishina prison, when the usual deviants and street criminals were replaced en masse by people whose property had been stolen from them by raiders in uniform. I saw these people forced to sign documents giving up the right to their property and come out with or without sentences. And I saw crooked law enforcement officers who were sent to prison when conflicts broke out between agencies. In jail, despite all the limitations, much of what happens outside is plain to see.
Being in prison is akin to acquiring a sensory disability, where one failing sense is compensated for by the others becoming sharper. In place of absent external stimuli comes a greater sensitivity to the remaining ones, the hidden clues that betray people’s real intentions. Those who have been in prison for a long time react more sharply to events and are much more sensitive to those around them. Prisoners released after a long spell inside say that, for the first few months, they can read people like an open book, until this acquired ‘super-sensitivity’ begins to fade. I experienced it myself.
Prison also distorts ethical standards, especially in young minds. While in normal life 95 per cent of people consider lying to be something that is bad, and cruelty to be abnormal, in prison this is not the case. You mustn’t lie to ‘your’ people and you mustn’t steal from them, but otherwise cruelty is the norm. Such rules apply not only in the criminal community; collaborators with the administration and the administration itself operate by the same standards. The camp is a big village, where everyone knows everything about everybody. Nothing can be hidden: the camp authorities divide and rule, setting you up, beating you in the punishment cell, buying services – and it’s all done openly. Drug dealing is the only thing that takes place surreptitiously, even though everyone knows about the drugs and who uses what. In the camps, for example, there are bricks of hashish and marijuana, which nearly everyone smoked in season. It has a strange, sweet smoke, which is very particular. When I first arrived, I couldn’t understand why people were behaving as if they were drunk.
Prison changed me. I reassessed my understanding of the importance of relationships with my family and loved ones. My understanding of the world evolved, too. I think it’s noticeable in the articles I wrote while inside. Prison magnifies emotions, including outbreaks of anger or despair that periodically erupt. The question then becomes: can I control myself? And for me, luckily, the answer was yes. I felt despair and anger, but I kept a lid on it. That’s how I am in most aspects of life. I found it helped to pour things on to paper, rather than on to those around me.
