One of the dark images shows a man tied to the ground while several uniformed officers urinate on his face. In another video, a guy dressed in black rapes a man with a long red stick while the abused, tied to a bed and naked, screams in pain. In a third, a guard holds an inmate pinned to the ground. “Who are you?”, He asks in Russian, trampling his back with his boot. “Nobody, a tramp!” The prisoner groans. The harsh images, released by a human rights organization and allegedly recorded in a prison hospital in Russia’s Saratov region (on the Volga) as material to later blackmail inmates, have shaken Russia. The videos, which are just part of a dense archive compiled by activists, reflect the terrible reality of the Russian prison system, where abuses and cases of torture are not isolated episodes but a systemic problem, warn civil rights organizations.
Following the leak of the videos, the authorities have opened seven criminal cases for widespread abuse of prisoners, abuse of power and sexual assault. The Federal Prison Service has fired the director of the Saratov prison hospital and several officials; It has also opened its own investigation into torture, allegedly filmed not only in Saratov, but also in other regions such as Vladimir or Irkutsk since 2018. Even the Kremlin has promised to ensure that there is a serious investigation into the case.
At the same time, however, the NGO that has leaked the videos, Gulagu.net, specialized in prisoners’ rights, is on the target of the authorities. Also the man who managed to collect the recordings from inside the prison – now he is out -: a Belarusian computer scientist who was serving a sentence for a drug case in one of the indicated prisons and who, within the tasks assigned as part of his compulsory work Within the penal colony, he did the computer maintenance of the center and had access to the data network and the Prisons intranet. His name is Sergei Savelyev, he is 31 years old, and he has fled to France, where in recent days he has applied for asylum. The Russian Interior Ministry has put him on its search and arrest list, although without specifying what crime he is charged with.
Reports and scandals about abuses in the dense prison network occur periodically in Russia. And, from time to time, a case is opened that ends in layoffs or a conviction. Few and mild. But the file held by Gulagu.net, which is preparing its delivery to the UN and which coincides with previous leaks, is one of the largest so far, according to specialists. And it adds to the mounting evidence of abuses in prisons in Russia. Torture cases in prisons, says Tanya Lokshina of the NGO Human Rights Watch, are “an epidemic” in Russia. What has emerged are not isolated episodes but a sample of a much larger problem, he remarks.
Director of Gulagu.net, Vladimir Osechkin, assures that they have more than a thousand files from at least eight Russian regions, recorded in about twenty pre-trial detention centers and male penal colonies. “The material proves that serious crimes are committed against the prisoners,” he reports by telephone from France, where he went into exile with his family a few years ago for fear of being prosecuted for his work. “It provides direct evidence that Russian prison staff often use violence, beat prisoners and find formal excuses to justify abuse to break the will of inmates and repress them,” says Osechkin. In July, the website of Gulagu.net it was blocked in Russia.
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The closed and opaque nature of the Russian prison system and penal colonies fuels the problem, says Inna Bazhibina, coordinator of the specialized organization Russia in Prison, who believes that medical and other services within prisons should be civil to ensure for the transparency and monitoring of the centers. “Now, as often happens, it happens that no one from the designated center knows anything,” says Bazhibina, who has spent years scrutinizing penal colonies and “unfortunately” was not surprised to see the latest leaked videos.
Russia, proportionally the country with the most prisoners in Europe (some 483,000 people are serving sentences in the country of 145 million inhabitants), bases its prison system on penal colonies, where inmates must work; like the prison where the prominent Russian opponent, Alexei Navalni, has been in since last February. A pattern that began in Tsarist times but developed from the forced labor camps of the Soviet Gulag that has become a mammoth structure, and also a powerful financial machine for the Federal Prison Service, as the colonies have contracts for the work of its prisoners with state organizations.
The case of torture in prison is now heated by the latest leaks, but Bazhibina believes that after official investigations the matter will be shelved. “Other cases have shown us that the people responsible for the abuse know that they will not be punished,” he laments. In 2018, following the leak of images of torture in the Yaroslavl prison (northeast of Moscow) that caused a wave of national and international outrage, the authorities pledged to carry out thorough inspections of all centers. However, the prison bosses were ultimately acquitted and most of the 11 officials prosecuted have been released on parole.
In the case of files held by Gulagu.net, the images come from the penitentiary institutions themselves. They are the guards, with their cameras attached to the uniform or with video cameras, who record, or inmates who collaborate with them and who film them with devices provided by the uniformed officers. It is these prisoners on many occasions who subject other inmates to mistreatment and rape, following the indications of the guards of the penal colony, the experts explain.
“And it is no longer just about the torture itself, but also that the officials blackmail abused prisoners by divulging that information,” says Osechkin. “In the Russian prison culture there is a very clear hierarchy. And someone who has been raped or who has peed in the face falls to the bottom of the ladder. Spending five or six years in that ‘lowered’ state is hell “, explains the founder of Gulagu.net. The purpose of blackmail is diverse: from recruiting the prisoner to collaborate by monitoring others or in other tasks, to economic extortion.
Sergei Savelyev says that as soon as he arrived in the Saratov penal colony, he was beaten up tremendously. “They do it to break your will, to show you who’s boss,” says the computer scientist, sentenced in 2013 to nine years in prison. When he was assigned a job to review the prison’s technological and surveillance systems, he discovered that the recordings of the body cameras of the guards sometimes showed violent abuse of the prisoners, by the uniformed men themselves or by those collaborating inmates. Later he discovered more videos on the system. Two years ago he started collecting images and earlier this year he sent them to Gulagu.net. He says he couldn’t sleep soundly without doing something. “Now they will try to silence me in some way,” he says from France. “And I do not exclude that they are going to use methods that are outside the legal framework.”
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