‘I tried to ensure those years weren’t lost’

How a Russian inmate sued Moscow, told off Yevgeny Prigozhin, and popularized Meduza in his prison

In 2014, Yekaterinburg native Alexander Paranuk was arrested on what he says were fabricated drug charges. He spent most of the next decade in prison. But that didn’t stop him from becoming a writer, producing his own prison news program, getting into a verbal tussle with Yevgeny Prigozhin, and disseminating more than a few Meduza articles among his fellow inmates. Meduza special correspondent Lilia Yapparova spoke to Paranuk about his time in prison and how 10 years behind bars changed his views about Russia.

Update: On May 1, the day after this article’s release, Alexander Paranuk told Meduza that he was being sent to a “punishment cell.” The authorities’ official reason for placing him there, he said, is that he allegedly left his compulsory labor facility to pick up a doctor’s appointment ticket from his wife. On April 30, he said that the prison authorities had reacted “harshly” to the publication of Meduza’s interview with him.

In a past life, Alexander Paranuk sold hot dogs for a living. “We had three locations in Yekaterinburg,” he tells Meduza. “I also did some logistics work on the side, transporting goods along with some Moscow guys.” But in 2014, he says, he had a dispute with some business partners, leading them to seek revenge against him. “They paid some cops they knew to get me out of the business,” he says.

After detaining Alexander outside of his home, the police drove him to Yekaterinburg’s Koltsovo Airport, where they’d prepared a box containing a kilogram of powder. “Later, in court, they said that I’d been holding it in my hands when they detained me. But they refused to test it for DNA or fingerprints,” Alexander recounts.

After a trial that he describes as a “shitshow,” Alexander was sentenced to a total of 14 years in prison on drug charges. Two weeks later, one of the main investigators in his case was killed in a car crash. In the ensuing years, nearly all of the officers involved in his case died.

“It’s like [the movie] Final Destination: there’s some kind of higher justice,” he says. “I console myself with that thought.”

‘A satanic ritual mixed with a children’s game’

After his sentencing, Paranuk spent two years and nine months in pre-trial detention. He made the most of his long stay: after someone slipped him and his cellmates instructions for filing a suit with the European Court of Human Rights, he decided to do it.

You know how prisoners use string to pass each other notes and food through the window? One time somebody sent us some tea wrapped in paper with instructions for applying to the ECHR. […] I started collecting written evidence from my cellmates about how we were living in poor conditions and how the prison administration would just throw away all of our complaints.

In 2017, when he was finally transferred to the prison where he would serve the bulk his sentence, Alexander was notified that the Russian government owed him 10,500 euros for keeping him in conditions of “prolonged torture.”

“The warden told me at the time that I had ‘betrayed the motherland,’” Alexander says. “I told him that he had betrayed it himself by going to work at the Federal Penitentiary Service. I mean, I was around to see the classic Putinist prisons — where they would beat you and threaten to rape you as soon as you arrived.”

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When he arrived at the Sverdlovsk region’s Correctional Colony No. 10, Alexander and the other new prisoners had to undergo an orientation in the prison’s “probation ward.” In addition to vowing to turn in any fellow inmates they witnessed misbehaving, the men had to watch multiple sleep-inducing video lectures. “But if you started dozing off, you’d get hit immediately — and not by the guards, who were seemingly nowhere to be found, but by other inmates — kapos [prisoner functionaries],” he says.

When the newbies were finally brought to their long-term barracks, Alexander says, the “kapos” launched into a “bacchanalia” of violence while playing loud dubstep music:

About seven [of them] just started hitting us, beating us, abusing us. I was immediately hit in the back, and then they told me to squat. I crouched between the beds, and they forgot about me. I just stood there and looked at the chaos around me: one person being pulled by his leg, another being forced to run on his hands. Someone crying, someone else screaming. It was like a Satanic ritual, mixed with a children’s game.

At that moment, Alexander tells Meduza, he felt a wave of relief: unlike in his previous prison, this one had “good speakers” and music that he didn’t mind. “I ultimately found something monastic [in the abuse] — as if I was choosing it myself as a kind of asceticism, rather than it being imposed on me,” he explains.

For his prison job, he was sent to the facility’s TV studio, which produced news reports to be shown to the inmates once a week. “The rest of the time, they showed [the sports channel] Match TV, [the state news channel] Russia 24, and [housekeeping channel] Domashny.”

“I hosted the news [for the prison’s inmates]. I filmed it myself and taught myself to edit it. I also released a newspaper,” he explains. “There were a bunch of computers in the TV studio, and everybody else worked not on news but on stuff for the prison: programming, setting up servers, and keeping track of things. There was a censor who watched movies to ensure they didn’t have any nudity before they were shown to inmates.”

Alexander’s news reports weren’t formally censored, but he was careful about what he said. “One time, nearly half of the inmates went onto the parade ground, demanding the prison staff stop beating them,” he recalls. “It wasn’t a revolt, just a peaceful protest. […] But I didn’t mention it in the news report. That’s why I like Meduza: you guys don’t play dumb like that.”

He also worked as a computer assistant for his squad supervisor. “I tried to teach him that he didn’t need to hit the backspace key 50 times [to delete text] — he could just highlight it and start typing,” he says. The supervisor told him to “save all these tricks for later.”

Alexander quickly took over all of the supervisor’s computer work. “Meanwhile, I would use the office printer to print myself articles and books,” he says. After he read the books, he would sell them to other inmates, then use the money to buy more paper and ink.

[Among other things,] I downloaded and read articles from Meduza. I would read them quietly and then pass them on to others. […] I’m a bit of a hooligan at heart: if I have the chance to disseminate media from a banned organization or a book from the stupid fucking Federal List of Extremist Materials, then why not? I gave it to trustworthy people who I knew wouldn’t snitch. Nobody turned me in, thank God.

Alexander says all of his fellow prisoners were interested in the news and many would ask him to share the materials he’d printed from Meduza. “But there was one prototypical ‘Russian patriot’ who would often turn on [the state news channel] Russia 24,” he says. “When I tried to slip him something to read, he would flip out: ‘That’s printed with American money!’”

In addition to news articles, Alexander and his fellow inmates read numerous self-help books as well as KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko’s Blowing Up Russia: Terror from Within. Alexander himself also read all of the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and nearly everything by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He soon started writing stories and poems of his own.

“I once saw guards take all the poems a person had written over the course of several years and throw them away,” he says. “So I started sending [mine] to my mom, so that I could be sure they would be preserved. Mom put them on the Internet, and now I even have some fans. I tried to make sure those years weren’t lost.”

‘Russia’s just a bigger prison’

When Russia launched its full-scale war against Ukraine in 2022, many prisoners were jubilant, Alexander says. “They celebrated, saying, ‘Now we’ll capture Ukraine’ and that it would be a ‘small, victorious war.’ There are always people who just repeat everything they hear on TV,” he says.

Not long after, Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin visited the prison to recruit new fighters for his paramilitary units. According to Alexander, the mercenary leader told the inmates that their “country could use their criminal talents” and that it was “good that they were killers.” “Prigozhin knew which buttons to push,” Alexander says. “It stirred something in people.”

When Prigozhin asked if there were any questions after his speech, Alexander piped up. “You’re suggesting that we go under gunfire based solely on your word, without any documents, and to trust that you’ll let us leave after a year?” he asked. “After we’ve been conned by everybody imaginable, including judges and investigators?”

Prigozhin said that was exactly what he was suggesting they do. according to Alexander. “Then thanks and I wish you the best,” Alexander responded. “I’m not interested.”

“When a bunch of inmates flocked to the private military company at once, it taught me how this kind of marketing works,” Alexander tells Meduza. “They start this process in our childhood, telling us that it’s ‘an honor to die for the Motherland.’” Altogether, more than 100 people from the prison joined Wagner Group.

Despite so many inmates going to the front, Alexander says, the war in Ukraine hardly had any impact on life in the prison itself. “In Russia, nobody gives a shit about anything,” he tells Meduza. “Drones are crashing in Moscow, Belgorod’s being destroyed, and everyone just wants to avert their eyes. It’s the same way in prison. Although there have been a few more arguments about whether Putin is good or lousy.”

The Crocus City Hall terrorist attack, too, barely made it on to the prisoners’ radar, Alexander says: “People here no longer have such a thing as sympathy.” Opposition politician Alexey Navalny’s death in prison was met with a similar non-reaction: “[Several prisoners said,] ‘So what? It was obvious they were going to kill him,’” Alexander recalls.

Disillusionment

After nine years behind bars, the remainder of Alexander’s sentence was commuted to compulsory labor for good behavior. On February 9, 2023, he was released from prison and allowed to travel independently to the town of Kamyshlov. While he’s still required to live in a dormitory and complete his work requirements, he’s allowed to move freely throughout his new town.

Despite the new freedoms, however, Alexander says he felt more optimistic when he was in prison. “I used to find it easy to accept that I’d been sentenced to 14 years,” he says. “When they were beating us in the camp, I could convince myself I was a monk following a [self-flagellation] regimen. [But when I was released,] I started feeling so rotten that I wanted to kill myself.”

For the previous decade, Alexander explains, he’d had hope that “everything around me was the way it was because I was in a prison.” He thought that when he was released, he would be able to “breathe again, just like I once had.” But when he walked around Yekaterinburg for the first time, he says, he felt like he’d “just been sent to a lower-security prison: a camera on every corner, searches in the metro.”

“Russia in its current state is just a bigger prison,” Alexander tells Meduza. “And if its warden isn’t stopped and jailed, he’ll get more and more brazen. Remember how I said they were beating us to dubstep music and I started to feel good? That was a defense mechanism — like all of Russia right now. ‘We’ll get through it somehow. I just don’t want to look at it.’”

Interview by Lilia Yapparova. English-language summary by Sam Breazeale.