Putin v Punk Pussy

THREE years ago Nadia Tolokonnikova donned a balaclava and, with two partners in the Pussy Riot band, cavorted near the altar of Moscow’s biggest cathedral, screeching out a “punk prayer” in protest against the imminent re-election of Vladimir Putin as president. For her pains she was sentenced to two years in a penal colony. Though still an ardent opponent of Russia’s leader, Ms Tolokonnikova has narrowed the focus of her dissent to the conditions of prisoners in the country’s far-flung archipelago of jails. It is a worthy cause.

At the last count there were 657,000 Russians behind bars, one of the world’s highest ratios of prisoners to population. “Our current, vile law-enforcement system”, she says, “still grinds people to a pulp and spits them out into their graves.” The frequency of deaths in custody amounts to a “Russian Ebola”. Tuberculosis is the commonest killer, she says, followed by HIV-AIDS, which may affect 75,000 prisoners. The offences for which Russians are most often imprisoned, she says, concern drugs.

When she was first incarcerated in Penal Colony 14 in Mordovia, a Stalin-era camp about 500km (310 miles) south-east of Moscow, prisoners routinely had to work for 16 hours a day. Ms Tolokonnikova shared a dormitory and three functioning (and seatless) toilets with 100-150 women. They were each allowed one shower a week. The food was barely edible. Corrupt prison administrators, she says, would steal part of the money allocated for food. “You might get a pig’s ear or tail, drowning in cooking oil.”

There was no television and no radio apart from the camp tannoy, and no time to read. Family visits were restricted to one every two months. Few prisoners could afford telephone calls; most women had one a month. Bullying, especially by old lags favoured by the warders as discipline-enforcers, was routine.

Thanks in part to a hunger strike and the publicity generated by Ms Tolokonnikova’s imprisonment, the regime in Penal Colony 14 improved a bit during her time. The workload was shortened generally to eight hours a day. But conditions in Russian prisons are still, says the singer, appalling.

These days she has an unlikely supporter in Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once reckoned to be Russia’s richest man thanks to being the main owner of Yukos, then the country’s biggest oil company. A political foe of Mr Putin, he was put in prison in 2003 for alleged fraud after what was widely considered to have been a politically motivated trial, until freed by the president in December 2013; Ms Tolokonnikova was released around the same time. Now resident in Switzerland, Mr Khodorkovsky helps finance an outfit she founded called Zona Prava, which promotes the rights of prisoners and their families. Ms Tolokonnikova also calls for fairer trials, noting that in magistrates’ courts fewer than 1% of defendants are acquitted.

Mr Khodorkovsky's organisation is helping to create a map to locate all the places of detention, said to number around 1,000, scattered across Russia. He was imprisoned for much of his time behind bars near Chita, more than 7,000km east of Moscow. Ms Tolokonnikova spent a month being shuttled around the prison system (unbeknown to her family and child, who was four when she was sentenced) before ending up in Krasnoyarsk, 3,400km to the east.

Judith Pallot, an expert on Russian prisons at Oxford University, says there have been marginal improvements since Russia ratified the European Convention on Human Rights in 1998, such as ensuring more space for prisoners. But severe structural problems remain, mainly due to the “Gulag inheritance” and its brutal subculture affecting prisoners and jailers alike. “Russian prison colonies are supremely dangerous and unhealthy places,” says Ms Pallot. “What is needed is root-and-branch restructuring of the prison estate, management practices, the introduction of serious alternatives to incarceration and a fair, uncorrupt criminal justice system, from the police all the way through to prison governors, officers and guards.”

Meeting Ms Tolokonnikova in Moscow today, it is hard to imagine her as a broken and bedraggled prisoner. Sipping red wine in a fashionable coffee bar not far from the Kremlin, dressed in hotpants and a red-checkered blouse, she is sprightly and chic, her dyed blonde hair with a blue streak tucked neatly under a yellow alice band.

Though dedicated to ending Mr Putin’s reign and vociferous in her condemnation of his policy towards Ukraine, she can hardly be labelled a Western stooge. Indeed, she is happy to be called a punk and even an anarchist. All the same, she is plainly conscious that the publicity she gets in the West may well be her best protection. “I am a punk who reads The Economist,” she says.