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It's a world familiar to Maria Alyokhina, a member of feminist
art ensemble Pussy Riot who spent nearly two years as an inmate
for her part in a 2012 punk protest in a Moscow cathedral
against President Vladimir Putin.
The first thing to understand, Alyokhina said in an interview,
is that a penal colony is no ordinary prison.
"This is not a building with cells. This looks like a strange
village, like a Gulag labour camp," she said, referring to the
vast penal network established by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin
to isolate and crush inmates.
"It actually is a labour camp because by law all the prisoners
should work. The quite cynical thing about this work is that
prisoners usually sew police uniforms and uniforms for the
Russian army, almost without salary."
The colony was divided between a factory area where the
prisoners made garments and gloves and a "living zone" where
Alyokhina said 80 women lived in one room with just three
toilets and no hot water.
Griner, a two-time Olympic gold medallist, could soon be
transferred to a colony in the absence of a further appeal or an
agreement between Washington and Moscow to swap her for a
Russian arms dealer jailed in the United States - a possibility
that was floated months ago but has yet to materialise.
HARSH RULES
In a Pussy Riot show that has toured the world and is now
playing in Britain, Alyokhina relives the memories of her time
as an inmate - snowy prison yards, plank-like beds, long spells
in solitary confinement and punishment for minor infringements
such as an unbuttoned coat or poorly attached nametag.
She was constantly being videoed by prison guards "because I am
a 'famous provocateur'," she added.
Russia's prison service did not reply to a request for comment
for this article.
A more recent penal colony detainee, Yelena, described a similar
regime to that experienced by Alyokhina a decade ago.
Yelena, 34, served eight years in a Siberian colony after being
convicted for possession of drugs. She said she was paid about
1,000 roubles ($16) a month for toiling 10-12 hours a day in a
sewing workshop.
"Girls with a strong, athletic build are often given much
heavier jobs. For example, they load sacks of flour for a prison
bakery or unload mountains of coal," she said.
Prisoners could face punishment for inexplicable "offences" such
as placing a wristwatch on a bedside table. The ultimate
sanction was solitary confinement, known as "the Vatican".
"Just as the Vatican is a state within a state, solitary
confinement is a prison within a prison," Yelena said.
A gynaecologist paid a monthly visit to her colony, where more
than 800 women were imprisoned.
"You do the math, what are the chances of being the one to get
through to a doctor? Practically zero," she said.
LANGUAGE BARRIER
For a foreigner with little or no Russian, it's harder to
navigate the system and deal with the isolation.
The brother of Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine serving 16
years in a Russian penal colony on espionage charges that he
denies, said he is granted a 15-minute phone call each day to
his parents, cannot call other family members or friends, and
has no access to email or the internet.
David Whelan said his brother must work at least eight hours a
day, six days a week, on menial tasks like making buttonholes,
which has caused him repetitive strain injury.
Inmates sleep in barrack-like buildings and access to many
necessities, including medicine, depends on paying bribes to
prison guards, he said. Conditions can depend heavily on the
whims of guards, the warden or elder inmates.
Paul seems to use his military training "to get through just day
to day, to figure out what battles to fight and which battles
not to fight", David Whelan said.
"His phone calls even to our parents are recorded. His letters
were all translated before they went out. So you know that
everything you do is being watched and you really have no sense
of individuality."
Alyokhina said receiving cards and letters from the outside
world offered a rare ray of hope, and she urged people to
support Griner that way.
She said they should use a machine translation and send the text
in both English and Russian to get it more easily past the
prison censor.
"Do not leave someone alone with this system," she said. "It's
totally inhuman, it's a Gulag, and when you feel yourself alone
there, it's much easier to give up."
(Reporting by Mark Trevelyan in London, Filipp Lebedev in
Tbilisi and Simon Lewis in Washington; additional reporting by
Caleb Davis and Humeyra Pamuk; Editing by Gareth Jones)
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