Prison or sanatorium

Print Igor Svinarenko

Recently I was lying in a very, very good Moscow hospital and there, out of boredom, I was thinking about different things. And, looking around, I suddenly noticed that this hospital, or rather this ward, reminded me of something. What? You will laugh - a cell in the Champ-Dollon prison, near Geneva! Yes, yes, our elite hospital is their ordinary prison. What a hospital, the cell was better and the rooms in the Moscow State University dormitory (I’m talking about the branch of the Student House, FDS, on Michurinsky Prospekt). High, more than three meters, ceilings, high windows, double-glazed windows, quite decent renovation, walls painted with expensive paint, decent furniture, a bathroom with hot water in every room, sorry, cell - in the university dorm we had one toilet per floor , at the end of the corridor, and the shower is in the basement, men's and women's days, even and odd.

I also compared government food in the hospital and in prison. The first served thin soup, overcooked pasta, and poor cutlets. You can eat it, but... In Geneva they fed you baked fish (not frozen) and packaged yogurt - we don’t have that yet, in Moscow they gave you jelly, poured it from a saucepan.

It’s funny that Colonel Yuri Afanasyev praised that Swiss prison when I visited him in the Oryol women’s colony. Which he successfully led for many years.

He is no longer with us - he was a holy man, truly. A saint, not in a figurative sense, but by definition, he did not put his own interests above those of others, and we are not talking about his family, but about ordinary prisoners whom he did not choose, who came to him by chance. Not only did he sacrifice his career or entertainment, he sacrificed his health in the service, with these eternal squabbles and scandals. And, in fact, all my life... Instead of giving up everything and going somewhere calmly for treatment.

Afanasyev was in that Geneva prison on an internship; he was sent to learn from experience. So he then dreamed of going there, to prison, to go on vacation, to be a simple prisoner there, to relax and think about life.

Well, this joke is only part of the joke. In fact, the conditions are no worse than in a Soviet sanatorium. An indispensable TV in the cell. If it is single-seater, it is more than 12 meters. (In the FDS, the four of us lived in a smaller area, and then they gave us a fifth person, with a folding bed). Three-seater - 25 meters, five-seater - 38. What is it? I have already praised the food. Now about the library: it has 10,000 volumes. The air is clean... True, not everyone liked it there, Pal Palych Borodin and Sergei Mikhailov, our fellow countrymen, were unhappy, and the latter even sued the Swiss justice for 800,000 local francs; for illegal imprisonment.

What are we talking about here? About our poverty and other people's wealth? About respect for human rights, long-standing humanistic traditions and the gentleness of the Swiss people? About our totalitarian habits? About a slave past that will never be forgotten? About the fact that a crop must be cultivated for 300 years, like an English lawn?

I don't know...

But I think the appearance of such a prison in our country would shake the foundations of society. Therefore, this is a fundamental question. The other day I read in Ogonyok a note by a man who was in a pre-trial detention center where former cops are collected. On charges of corruption. He explained in detail how the matter was set up there. All vodka and all mobile phones from outside are delivered by the police officers - it’s good for the prisoners, and it’s more convenient for the police officers, because they are the ones who monitor the strictness of the regime. And one prisoner’s friend went to study at a university in the Ministry of Internal Affairs system, but he was not accepted into the FSB academy, where the bribe for admission was unaffordable - 5,000 dollars. All the cops either serve or are imprisoned, everyone understands everything, life goes on. This order is extremely convenient.

However, I saw one prison like the Swiss one in Russia. It was a Pskov pre-trial detention center. There, his boss, Colonel Boris Fedotov, set up amazing cells: without “eyelashes” [1] , but with a real bathroom - with hot (!) water. They sat there either for money, officially, or for working at construction sites and repairing cameras. The authorities were angry, it was not clear to him why the prisoners needed such comfort, Fedotov was put under pressure for a long time, then he was kicked out of work, and then he died, a short and simple story. He was strong, strong, self-confident and naive, he looked like a bear. I went to take out bandits without a pistol - in my last service. But the system destroyed him. He was alien, she did not need him, and when he was gone, balance was established again. It’s a pity for the man, he was wonderful, but he destroyed what everyone around him liked... What is there today, in the Pskov pre-trial detention center? Probably, the hot water was turned off, there isn’t enough of it even for the free people, look, they should set up a sanatorium. Looks like it's all over...

Whenever I start thinking about a Russian prison, I always remember Colonel Afanasyev, about whom we have already spoken, a slightly blind fat man like Pierre Bezukhov. I probably went to his prison five times, and one of the subjects of journalistic interest was Lyubov Sasina, a lady with the profile of Dante Alighieri, who was imprisoned for some nonsense. One theft, then another, and during one of her imprisonments, after a stroke, she suddenly began to sculpt - from clay, even from the ground, from whatever - all sorts of figures. The purest naive sculpture. The late Afanasyev did, although it cost him nothing, the incredible: he allowed an amateur sculptor to fill the entire territory of the zone with her works - approximately this is how Luzhkov benefited Tsereteli. Life-size mermaid, lions, angels, Chekhov and so on and so forth. The mermaid, as I remember now, had a white alabaster body, painted lips and a blue tail. Luxury! The zone began to look completely unofficial. I won’t say it’s cozy, but something human appeared... Sasina was even allowed to work to order, she sculpted various figures for pennies, or even for free, out of artistic vanity... After the death of her benefactor Yuri Yakovlevich (who, when she was released, he got her a room in Zonov’s village) all the sculptures were removed from the territory of the colony. Finita la comedy! Everything became the same as before, as always.

These outbursts and their subsequent extinction are a manifestation of the most important rules of Russian life... Which cannot be broken - unless by exterminating the Russian people. Naive liberals and other good-hearted people think: well, nothing, we’ll strain ourselves a couple more times, we’ll work hard for another year or two, we’ll teach the public about Western abstract humanism - and then everything will go by itself.

In their dreams, they imagine clean, bright cells in new Russian prisons. The prisoners are re-educated there and do not sew plastic balls into their penises, but learn useful crafts for subsequent work in the wild. Liberals also see military units where old-timers do not rape young fighters, but, on the contrary, warmly welcome them and help them master the science of war. And also tidy cemeteries, not covered in dirt, with neat tombstones, where even in autumn you can walk along the paths without rubber hunting boots!

But no, this Manilovism is not for us, sober and responsible people. We must first understand the structure of Russian people's life, and then spend energy on improving and remaking it. It cannot be allowed that in our country (we are not considering the rich bureaucratic and raw materials elite here, it is beyond the scope of this study) a scarce resource is directed to a place where it will burn up uselessly, without light and heat...

First of all, you need to understand that the value of a person is low in Russia even in freedom, let alone in prison. This is something you need to figure out first - and not immediately demand respect for an abstract and unfamiliar person in places of detention. If the price of the life of a free Russian person is, let’s say offhand, twenty percent of the amount that the life of an average Westerner costs, then the life of a soldier locked in a barracks will cost 10 percent. Prisoner - 5, no more. And where should we include a person who, not because of a good life, ended up in the hospital? If through connections, for money, then I think it’s about 15 percent! (I figure this out from fresh tracks, after lying down.) What if this is a simple hospital, on a general basis, and everything is free, as under communism? I think this is a soldier level, a solid ten. A pensioner will also end up there, at level ten. This means we take 10 percent, the basic level - soldiers with pensioners, rural teachers with paramedics, librarians, students of various technical schools... The average level of average citizens of the country. If these people eat meat twice a week, have the opportunity to wash themselves with hot water once a week, do not go to theaters, wear rags, huddle in barracks closets or in rotten huts with cockroaches, do not have the opportunity to buy either good books or more expensive press yellow, - so that they do not completely degrade, do not become homeless, do not get poisoned to death with a windshield wiper, but continue to flutter pitifully and retain self-respect, which saves them from the desire to hang themselves on a nail, such people need to be provided with daily confirmation of their relatively high status, to inspire that they - respected citizens with a fairly high level and quality of life. The task is complicated by the glamorization of the media space, which is full of pictures of the luxurious existence of small, cheap singers, prostitutes, not to mention stars and oligarchs. The murderous picture of the cheerful life of the upper strata undermines the faith of the lower strata in at least some semblance of truth, truth for the poor. If we, in addition, show them a Swiss prison moved to Pskov, where every cell has a hot shower, and is clean and renovated, and then - sculptural artistic mermaids who create an art environment for old prisoners, then what will our average client say, who washes in trough and lives in a barracks overlooking a garbage dump? What if we also tell you about the gym in the prison? About a library of 10,000 volumes? And when he, toiling in a workers’ dormitory, among alcoholics, finds out about a separate room that was given to an imprisoned thief, what will he think about his senseless, honest work? What kind of terrible and just rebellion will we push him to? I don’t even want to think about it, that’s enough.

In order to maintain at least the appearance of a reasonable structure, at least the illusion of justice, so that a person respects his pitiful status, we must show him pictures from Butyrka or Krestov, and there they sleep in four shifts, there they huddle under a bunk, there they cut up fellow inmates and lose at cards, and they eat them, and rob them, and infect them with various diseases, and in all other ways they increase the status and self-esteem of the poor working man in the wild. He begins to think: there are so many more steps to the bottom! And in the morning, instead of taking an ax and hacking to death a foreman, who in an urban village would pass for an oligarch or a governor, a person will go to work for humiliating pay and will feel like a free citizen who is the smith of his own happiness and can at any moment, let alone drink tea as much as he wants, or smoke “Prima”, but even fry potatoes, as if he were the overseer or the godfather!

What should we grab hold of today in order to raise the degree of humanity in society? How to create an environment in which a soldier would not have a zinc coffin waiting for him, and a prisoner would not have his lung cut off and his eye gouged out with an awl? Probably, we should start not with the Europeanization of prisons, but with something else. Maybe because of the well-being of a rural teacher? Bring it up to such a level that with her salary she could buy some kind of rubbish car, a Zhiguli, for example, and could vacation even in the Crimea as a savage, and once a year come to Moscow or St. Petersburg and pay for a room even in a cheap hotel, where now would she have to shell out a week's or month's salary for this? Such a teacher will be able to feel sorry for the prisoner, she will be horrified by the cramped conditions in the cell and something else. And today I cannot demand from her compassion for another...

[1] Employees and prisoners call “eyelashes” the kind of blinds that until recently covered the windows of prisons and pre-trial detention centers. They were firmly welded to the bars on the outside and completely blocked the prisoners’ view from the window. — Note. ed.

Demonism Punishment and Restorative Justice