HARP, PLATO AND THE STATE

SPECIAL REPORT

They say that mammoths used to live here. Amid the riot of rainforests, as oil and gas are known to be the product of their humus for millions of years or so. However, Pyotr Kozhevnikov, a children's storyteller from Kharp and a connoisseur of...

They say that mammoths used to live here. Amid the riot of rainforests, as oil and gas are known to be the product of their humus for millions of years or so. However, Pyotr Kozhevnikov, a children's storyteller from Kharp and an expert on all kinds of flora and fauna here, claims that this is a lie, mammoths lived five hundred kilometers to the north, almost on the coast of the current ocean, from there the Nenets drag their bones, and fool everyone else. Nevertheless, a life-size statue of a mammoth stands on the banks of the Ob from Salekhard, just where the ferry leaves for Labytnangi. He walks for about twenty minutes straight across the current in black cold water. It costs ten rubles on foot or 170 rubles per passenger car - based on this, the inhabitants of Labytnang, who go to work in Salekhard, often leave the car at the crossing, save.

But now we are heading just in the opposite direction: from Salekhard airport, new and quite comfortable, through Labytnangi to Kharp. The driver Aleksey, who is not yet thirty, comes from there, his father worked somewhere in the colony, and there is nowhere else to work there. Aleksey himself moved to Labytnangi and works on the railway in three days, owns a foreign car, and if anyone needs to go to Kharp, you can negotiate with him. But only those who have someone sitting there, geologists have their own transport, may need to go to Harp, and it is now impossible to imagine other goals for such a trip.

On the way, it becomes clear that the forests here really disappeared millions of years ago, and now this area is called “forest tundra”: here and there, lonely, skinny Christmas trees stick out of the swamp. In the short summer it is full of mushrooms and berries, but a civilian in his right mind will not climb into the tundra. Large mosquitoes attack the traveler at the airport in Salekhard and everywhere else. Not like their brothers from the middle zone, they fly no higher than the second floor, stupidly and in a straight line, but their number, if there are no special means, makes resistance hopeless. They say it's something else, at the end of July a midge will hatch from the tundra, and then in a calm, where there is no wind, it will not be possible to talk: the mouth of midges is immediately full. For the prisoners of the two colonies in Kharp, constructions in the morning and evening become a horror, during which it is not allowed to wave your arms. In winter, at minus forty, you can give oak in ten minutes, and in summer mosquitoes and midges devour your face, neck and hands - here you don’t even need to invent any special torture.

In winter, the polar night still drives you into depression, when the sun does not appear from behind the horizon, and the cloudy light from the sky turns on for three hours. But the polar day, when the sun goes in a circle, hanging at an acute angle to the earth, threatens with insomnia. Because of the fence of the zone, only the pillars and slate roofs of the village are visible: the trees here, if they do not die, then do not grow so high. You can look over the thorns at the mountains of the Polar Urals, where in July there is snow in tongues. Of course, the zeks don't use the word "depression" here, just "longing", and they call this place Kharpami in their own way. In this language, it is more correct to say that Platon Lebedev "came through the stage to Kharpy."

Help "New"

Platon Lebedev has been in custody since July 2003. After the verdict in the Yukos case, handed down by the Meshchansky District Court, and the cassation session of the Moscow City Court, which lasted one day, in October 2005 Lebedev was sent by a separate special car to correctional colony No. 3 in the village of Kharp beyond the Arctic Circle, where he was delivered two days later.

In order to find a kid in Labytnangi who left the general regime in Kharp and could tell us about it, I went to the city newspaper and even turned to drunken companies near the cafe, but I never found the right person. The fact is that IK-3 has always functioned as a colony for especially dangerous recidivists; such, when they come out, they are the only ones seen here. A small section of the general regime was created here recently and to comply with the very law to which Lebedev’s defense refers (see below the dossier of lawyers) and Lebedev’s defense: for the first time, convicts (here they are thieves and drug addicts) must wind their sentences in a general regime not far from home. When creating a general regime detachment in IK-98/3, the authorities could not even imagine that such a “passenger” would be brought here from Moscow. They don’t need Lebedev here at all and promises nothing but a headache.

Going to Kharp with lawyer Yevgeny Baru, I imagined the program as meetings, firstly, with the head of the colony, and secondly, with the writer Pyotr Kozhevnikov. The “owner”, warned of my arrival in advance, seemed to be not averse to talking, the excitement at the top associated with the sudden arrival of Lebedev had long since subsided, and the population, accustomed to all the villains sitting here, from the very beginning did not show much interest in him. But after consultations with someone higher up, the boss flatly refused to meet. The more time we have left for a conversation with Peter Kozhevnikov.

He is not only the author of a dozen books published under the auspices of Tyumen and Salekhard, but also the only one, probably out of six thousand inhabitants of Kharp, who does not dream of escaping from here. With his wife and one-year-old son, he came here in 1975. At that time, apart from the zone, there was nothing here, and the zone was building a plant and a village. They surrounded the construction site with towers with barbed wire, the “striped” worked hard there, the other part of the population guarded them or was employed in the gradually emerging production. In particular, Petr was a driver in a truck, carrying something to and from the zone. All this was then called “Yamalneftegazzhelezobeton”: they made sleepers for gas pipelines, piles on which instead of foundations stand houses on permafrost, slabs for roads. All this was dragged along the rails to Labytnangi, from there along the rivers and winter roads on geological expeditions in the endless tundra of Yamal. And now, because of cement prices and railway tariffs, production has almost stopped, the colonies have closed like shells in themselves, it is not very clear who is there and what is there.

Meanwhile, Kozhevnikov had been a writer all his life, starting from school and the army, writing and publishing notes in newspapers, mainly about hunting and about animals, including for children and in verse. For example (this would also fit as an epigraph to our trip to Kharp): "The woodpecker is a polite bird, it always knocks on the beetles, but knock - don't knock, and life is dearer to beetles." The poems and stories of the driver from Kharp won all-Union competitions; under socialism, he went to various children's writing seminars, buzzed there against Politizdat. And Harp with his recidivists and cops was interested in the storyteller insofar as. He also went to the zone - he composed to himself at the steering wheel a "water" children's alphabet of fish, starting with "Shark". The head under Soviet rule, he says, was less busy, not like now, when you have to somehow manage to live in the north on eight thousand a month.

In the seventies and eighties, Kharp was considered the “All-Union BUR” (High Security Barrack), here they broke unyielding Georgian thieves and all kinds of “black suit”, they brought it here from all over the USSR. Among the prisoners came across various people, in the mass they were uninteresting to Kozhevnikov, he did not carry tea for them, but sometimes he dragged books to thieves if they asked. Once the prisoners wanted to give him two notebooks of poems and songs for the driver to print them. He explained to them the relationship in the literary environment, showing two reviews of fairy tales: in the first, the so-called external, they wrote to him what an uneducated mediocrity he was, and in the second, “internal”, sent to him by mistake, the same reviewer shared with the editors his impressions about Kozhevnikov's original talent. The convicts understood everything and said that the reviewer should be stabbed to death, but he is far away. On another occasion, Kozhevnikov was given tea by the owner of the Troika, Lieutenant Colonel Anatoly Kovganko, who invited him to work as an engineer: they also need dreamers there. The driver evasively refused, although he was afraid that his pass to Harp would be taken away from him, and then there would be nowhere to go with his wife and two children. However, Kovganko did not touch the storyteller.

When the eldest son grew up, served and graduated from something legal in Tyumen, for some time he even worked as a deputy head in the same "troika". The father did not condemn his son, because there was no other work to be found in Kharp, but they did not remember the affairs of the colony at home. You can talk about hunting or fishing. There is life, but here there is some kind of murk between the zone and the will. Now the sons have left, the eldest works as the head of hunting in Urengoy. The sons are proud of their father, who managed to live for thirty years in Kharp, where the zone is a city-forming enterprise, so that they don’t slip into the prisoners, and also don’t join the cops. Civilian.

This is a note to s / to Lebedev. It is instructive that such a person lives next to the fence, completely free even in Kharp, although, of course, a beggar. However, according to the reviews that I collected about Platon Leonidovich during the short preparation for the trip to Kharp, an image is drawn of a person who is not inclined to existential philosophy. In Zhukovka, he watched mostly action films, and in the colony he reads The Da Vinci Code and solved several hundred crossword puzzles. Lawyers note his non-standard approaches to jurisprudence, which he fell in love with while still in jail. He perceives the Code of Criminal Procedure as a program that should work as written. And for some reason she always fails. With the dexterity of a talented self-taught person, he finds unexpected moves inside this cleverly written program, but all the same, everything passes by. But Lebedev does not despair even in Kharp, he believes that he is now “missing a move” in this game, he hopes that it has not ended yet and there are chances to recoup. Well, God bless.

With Kozhevnikov, whom every resident of Kharp knows and who knows everyone here, it was not difficult for us, despite the information blockade of the leadership of IK-3, to collect information about life in the zone of the “convict” we are interested in (with an emphasis on “y”). There is no real work there, they make barbed wire, there is no delivery to the stall, because both the “striped” and the boys from Yamal have no money and it is unprofitable to carry anything to the stall. Economics - Lebedev is an economist! Children often go to him, bring food, but they take a lot back: you can only eat during a date, and nothing can be taken into the zone. While he was serving his sentence, Lebedev was punished for giving cookies to his neighbor in the barracks, spent six days in a punishment cell, but did not complain to the court about injustice, apparently, he had already figured out the Code of Criminal Procedure.

As Pyotr Kozhevnikov, a resident of Kharp, notes, Lebedev with his brains has nothing to do here at all, just as he himself does in Moscow. And this is probably the general opinion here, although the cops, of course, keep it to themselves. Of course, today Harp is not what it was a quarter of a century ago, when thieves were pressed here. But the temperature has not risen, the polar night has not become shorter, the mosquitoes are kinder, and all this affects the health of everyone in the same way as before, or worse.

Everyone who knew Lebedev before landing, outside of his financial activities, where he is simply a genius, notes his skill in cooking barbecue, and nothing more. If the head of IK-98/3 Zadorozhny had allowed us to meet, then the general topics for conversation, I think, would be exhausted quickly, because business is as alien to me as, say, reflection is to him. It was, of course, more interesting for me to talk with the storyteller Kozhevnikov. But that's not the point. But the point is who brought Platon Lebedev here and why.

Sooner or later it will be recognized that this is an official crime on the basis of someone's personal revenge, and there is no other way to explain this, no logic. The statements of the Federal Penitentiary Service about the lack of places in general regime colonies in the regions adjacent to Moscow just at the time of the emergency removal of Lebedev and Khodorkovsky by special wagons to Kharp and beyond Chita, respectively, hardly deserve discussion. And someone will have to answer for this, even if after the remaining years of his term, Lebedev (like Khodorkovsky) remains alive and does not become an invalid. One can argue about their guilt or innocence, but as far as the place of serving the sentence is concerned, the law is unambiguous: close to the place of residence, and this is one of the few achievements of “perestroika” that still retains the force of the law.

Maybe there are worse places in the world, although there are undoubtedly better ones. But why in Harp? If you ask this question here, then no one here knows the answer.

From the files of lawyers

The sending of Platon Lebedev to serve his sentence in Kharp, his lawyers appealed to the Russian courts and, after the refusal of the cassation instance in Russia, to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The complaints are based on arguments based both on Russian law and international human rights law.

In accordance with article 73 of the Criminal Executive Code of the Russian Federation, any person sentenced to imprisonment by a court must serve his sentence in the subject of the Federation where he lived and was convicted. The Federal Penitentiary Service substantiated the sending of P. Lebedev to a colony in the Arctic part of Siberia by the lack of places in the nearest correctional colonies of general regime. They stated that there were no “general regime colonies” in Moscow, while the colonies of other nearby subjects were “overcrowded”. Such a conclusion is clearly far-fetched. Regions close to Moscow are Moscow, Tver, Yaroslavl, Vladimir, Ryazan, Tula, Kaluga and Smolensk regions. For example, in a letter dated January 31, 2006, received by P. Lebedev's lawyers, E.V. Egorov confirmed the availability of two vacancies at the very time when P. Lebedev was sent to serve his sentence in the Arctic part of Siberia.

The Meshchansky District Court sentenced P. Lebedev to 9 years in prison to be served "in a correctional colony of general regime." Instead, he was sent to special regime penal colony No. OG 98/3.

P. Lebedev suffers from a number of severe chronic diseases, in particular hepatitis. According to the order of the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation No. 346/254 dated August 28, 2001, contraindications to serving a sentence in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug include “chronic active hepatitis”.

In addition, the complaint of P. Lebedev and his lawyers to the European Court of Human Rights is based on the provisions of international conventions, which speak of the inadmissibility of humiliating the dignity of a person by criminal punishment and creating unnecessary obstacles for him to maintain family ties.

Entertainment

Platon LEBEDEV:

I DRINK TEA WITHOUT EXCESSIVE COMPANY

This is the first interview given by Platon Lebedev in conditions of captivity. It was transmitted through lawyer Yevgeny Baru, who did not find corpus delicti in our harmless questions and equally everyday answers.

— How did you spend the winter in Kharp? How did you survive the polar night?

- They sent me felt boots of the fiftieth size from Moscow, there were no such boots in GUIN. The polar night is long, but this is a temporary phenomenon, one should not fall into prostration about this.

- Mosquitoes bother you a lot? How do you deal with them?

- I fight with traditional methods - I hit myself on the forehead. There is a Raptor in the barracks, ointments are allowed on the street, but not liquid substances, so that I don’t drink them. They say midges will be worse than mosquitoes. Compare - I'll let you know.

- And what worries you the most?

- The idiocy of judges and all sorts of arbiters of the fate of the country.

- Do you enjoy your work?

- Under these conditions, the manufacture of MZP (inconspicuous obstacles) is a boon for the psyche. But they don't provide me with jobs in my specialty.

- Do you get information from the will? Watch TV? Do you read newspapers?

- They watch TV in the barracks, usually not the programs that interest me. Once I watched half of the analytical program, but it's gray asphalt, I went to bed. I was prescribed Kommersant, Vedomosti, Nezavisimaya and Novaya Gazeta. Delivered, of course, late, but regularly.

- With whom do you discuss the events taking place in the wild?

- Including lawyers.

- With whom do you discuss the events taking place in the zone?

- Including lawyers.

- And who do you drink tea with?

- I drink tea in the colony without excessive (verbatim answer. - L.N.) company.

- Do you play anything?

- I don’t play any games with anyone here, and outside the colony, together with lawyers, I continue to play the so-called “justice”.

Do you discuss news from the outside with the administration?

- It's not accepted here.

- You are on duty in the barracks in line with everyone?

— And why should I stand out here with something other than the size of the boots?

— What do you think about the possibilities of using the Stabilization Fund?

— It depends on who and what wants to stabilize. And speaking seriously, this format does not allow me to answer seriously.

Sweet life

EVERY BEAUTY HAS A SHOOTING STYLE

In an effort to tell readers more about the life of IK-98/3, we also reprint with abbreviations a note by a young journalist that we liked from the Harp supplement to the Priuralie newspaper.

... In Kharp, on the basis of the institution IK-3, a stage of the all-Russian competition "Miss UIS-2006" was held. The ceremony was opened by the Deputy Head of the Federal Penitentiary Service, Lieutenant Colonel V.A. Dzis. In his speech, he honestly admitted that he was no less worried than the participants, and wished the girls to demonstrate in the best light not only their personal qualities, but also their professional skills.

... All the girls chose the rhetorical genre: monologues, dialogues, poems sounded, and all this was sincere, with soul, frankly. The second was a theoretical competition. I will give just a few questions from the tickets: “... the regime of special conditions in correctional institutions; the duties of convicts; the use of physical force; professional duty, honor and conscience; restaurant code of conduct.

…Each member had their own shooting style. Who held the gun in two hands, who in the right hand, who in the left ... To see how slender employees in heels at least six centimeters high carry out combat commands, clearly “clapping”, is an impression worthy of admiration.

...On the stage, against the backdrop of the Russian flag, there was only one, a little confused and surprised, Natalia Chesnokova, legal adviser of the organizational and analytical group IK-3. Yes, it was she who was awarded the title of "Miss UIS". It was to her that they crowned her head with an elegant diadem, presented a huge bouquet ...

("Novaya Gazeta" joins the congratulations - see photo)