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.
I have always found it hard to express my emotions. I was brought up with the belief that it’s unseemly for a man to be sentimental. To poke fun – yes; sometimes even very sarcastically, including at myself, and especially at the powers that be. But never to show real, genuine emotions. I show emotions when I interact with my children; perhaps I’m a little more sentimental with my family and friends. But I almost never experience strong emotions outside of that circle. Neither the prosecutors nor Putin nor Sechin trouble my deepest emotions. They’re like a rain shower in autumn: an unpleasant natural phenomenon, nothing more.
Some people say I’m a bit of a robot, and there may be some truth in that. My threshold for strong emotional engagement is high. For me to get angry, something really extreme has to happen. But, on the other hand, I am easily offended by cases of manifest injustice, even in small things. The initial hearing in our first trial at Moscow’s Basmanny Court was a shock for me. People simply didn’t listen. I wanted to say, ‘Wait a minute, where’s your evidence for that? Haven’t you dreamed it all up? Why does your word count more than mine? Why should I have to go to prison because of your paranoia?’ But no one cares about your questions. The law in Putin’s Russia consists of meaningless pieces of paper.
That upsets me. Sometimes, you feel as if you have been kidnapped by aliens. They aren’t the enemy, they aren’t fascists; they’re just extra-terrestrials who happen to look like us, but having nothing whatsoever in common with human beings. You just have to accept that there’s no way you can talk to them about anything. And that’s how you calm yourself down. I started seeing prison, the courts and the investigators as some sort of natural phenomenon that could be studied with an objective eye, but to which it’s pointless to respond emotionally.
What was harder to deal with was the unknown. Not what’s happening to you personally, but what’s going on at home, with your family and friends. Sometimes days or even weeks go by before you receive responses to questions you desperately want to have answered. There are plenty of hidden phones in prison, and for many they’re a lifeline, but not everyone has access to them. I never did.
The authorities use psychological ploys. Your own destiny is kept secret from you, even in its tiniest details, which is a form of psychological torture. Why you’ve been summoned … where they’re taking you – no one will tell you. ‘Take your things’, ‘Don’t take your things’, ‘Bring your papers’, ‘Leave your papers behind’, ‘Put your coat on’, ‘Don’t put your coat on’; all that deliberately keeps you guessing. If a document arrives concerning your case, they keep it back from you; you are only given it when the investigator comes to question you or your own lawyer brings it to you on a visit. The purpose is clear – so you don’t have time to prepare or consult.
The endless, humiliating searches get you down at first, but you slowly become used to them. They happen up to six times a day and of course it’s bad. But the bar of human dignity has been lowered. If you don’t want to sink under the weight of it all, you have to make yourself fight in your heart for every little thing. You need to push yourself: regular exercise, cleanliness, daily work, politeness in dealing with every person. It may all seem obvious, but it isn’t obvious when the authorities try, year in, year out, to break you through hopelessness and the prospect of oblivion, and the repellent prison practices that wear you down.
Prison makes conversation more important than it is on the outside. Conversation on all manner of topics. There is a premium attached to people who can speak about the law. Very few prisoners have their own lawyers, and the state-appointed ones aren’t worth much, so a prisoner who knows the law and doesn’t mind sharing his knowledge is much in demand. I did this myself. The ‘professional’ consultations I used to provide weren’t very complicated; they didn’t need to be. The majority of Russian judges know the criminal code, criminal procedure and a few Supreme Court rulings. But even this much they don’t know very well. It means it’s easy to predict their mistakes. Spotting flaws in a prisoner’s verdict can give him reasonable grounds for an appeal and make him very grateful. I would say that in two cases out of three you can find something in any sentence that you can latch on to so they can demand a review. Many cases give you a nasty feeling when you read them, while others make you wonder if the people making the judgements are living in another reality. It doesn’t take long to figure out what is truth and what is lies. For the majority of professional judges, it’s not a secret either; it’s just not in their interest to say anything about it.
In prison, you have to put all of this into perspective. And you have to stay calm. Prison allows for introspection and a deeper analysis of external reality. The pace of life slows down. It’s a curious paradox – every day drags on slowly, but weeks, months and years fly by. One thing I learned in prison that I did not have before is patience. When I was free, an hour seemed a long time; but in prison, it’s a moment. Prison lets you go deeper into your thoughts. The quality of concentration is absolute. My ten years inside were a chance to think, to read and to learn. I thought about myself and my family, my life and my beliefs; I thought about Russia and what my country stands for. I read Solzhenitsyn, but I didn’t take any great inspiration from him – I felt these were the writings not of a fighter, but of an opportunist. I would never condemn someone whose aim is survival and who writes about surviving as an achievement. I simply didn’t find it inspiring. Vasily Grossman and Varlam Shalamov, on the other hand, I found full of integrity, if also very harsh. You read them and you know that these are people whose example you want to follow; they make you want to keep on fighting.