One man’s gruelling trip through Putin’s prison system

The IK-3 penal colony in Kharp, Russia; opposition leader Alexei Navalny died here – EPA

For centuries, the West has been captivated by the brutality of Russia’s frozen detention centres, and prison literature from Dostoyevsky to Solzhenitsyn has nursed the fascination. The system’s global significance, whether in the mass release of dangerous prisoners to serve on Ukraine’s battlefields, the increased imprisonment of dissenters and journalists, or the death of opposition leader Alexey Navalny in a remote Arctic prison colony last month, has only spurred interest further.

The publication in English of The Prisoner, a 2013 memoir by former inmate Vladimir Pereverzin, is thus well-timed. Prior to his 2004 arrest, Pereverzin was no radical or dissenter; he had little in common with Navalny, Vladimir Kara-Murza, or other opposition figures jailed or even killed under Vladimir Putin’s rule. He was a middle-level manager at Yukos, an oil and gas company owned by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oligarch who was once the richest man in Russia.

Khodorkovsky, however, fell afoul of Putin’s regime after campaigning for a freer society, and in 2003 he and his business partner Panton Lebedev were arrested. Pereverzin’s own arrest, the following year, seems to have been an attempt by Russian security services to persuade him to testify against his two former bosses. Having refused to do so, he was convicted of fraud, and sentenced to 12 years behind bars. (He ended up only serving seven of these before being released due to a change in the Criminal Code. He now lives in Germany.)

Much of The Prisoner, skilfully translated by Anna Gunin, focuses on the daily grind of Russian prison life. It’s repetitive, dull and for the most part undramatic – bar the occasional court appearance, cell search or talent contest – but Pereverzin adds colour through his depictions of the other prisoners.

These include Alexander Umantsev, an ethnic Russian from Chechnya, who “after witnessing first-hand how the Russian army had killed civilians and ripped open the bellies of pregnant woman, [had] embraced Islam and left to fight on the side of the Chechens”; and Yura, an HIV-positive drug addict and gangster convicted of attempted robbery and killing a policeman, whose brother and father were also imprisoned in different camps. This tapestry of characters come together to form a community in prison, sharing their food parcels and hosting birthday parties in cells.

The Prisoner, by Vladimir Pereverzin, is published by Ad Lib – NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP via Getty

Pereverzin assesses his cohabitors with a generally non-judgemental gaze, perhaps on account of the fact that Russia’s prosecution system has an acquittal rate of under 1 per cent, meaning that determining whether someone is innocent or guilty can be a difficult task. Pereverzin muses: “I’d hazard a guess that 30 per cent of all the prisoners are not guilty.”

His strength lies in this ability to humanise and his sense of humour – his Gogolian eye for the absurd. One example is his description of the judge who found him guilty of the bogus charges; later, she was herself de-robed, for unrelated reasons, and took her case to the European Court of Human Rights. “Strangely enough,” Pereverzin writes, “her case came up in the ECHR at the same time as my own against her sentencing me unlawfully to 11 years in a strict-regime colony.”

Often, The Prisoner feels as though it had been written far longer ago than Solzhenitsyn or Dostoyevsky’s prison books. The world Pereverzin describes is unpleasant, brutal and unjust, but the Russia where legislative changes could lead to the release of a political prisoner is long gone. It’s a little jarring, too, to read this memoir knowing how many of the inmates featured may now be fighting, or dead, in Ukraine. The Prisoner might have benefitted, as it appears in English over a decade later, from some contextualisation. Without this, it’s easy to read the book as a contemporary work – and to forget how different Russia is today.

Ada Wordsworth is co-director of KHARPP, a charity providing aid in Ukraine. The Prisoner, tr Anna Gunin, is published by Ad Lib at £9.99. To order your copy, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books

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