Kopeisk after the riot

Between Chelyabinsk and Kopeysk - 10 km. The metallurgical district of Chelyabinsk is separated from the rest of the city by the same 10 km of industrial zone. For the last two years, plans to annex Kopeisk to Chelyabinsk have been discussed in the region. Kopeisk is the fifth largest city in the Chelyabinsk region with a population of 140 thousand people. After the closure of the coal mines, residents mainly work at the Kopeisk Machine-Building Plant, which produces mining equipment, and in four correctional colonies, two of which (IK-6 and IK-11) are located within the city, the rest (IK-1 and IK-15) - in the suburbs.

“There was a state of siege here recently,” a taxi driver tells me on the road from Chelyabinsk to Kopeysk. “The road was blocked because of rioting prisoners. But we learned about this from the news, and it was generally not clear what was happening.” Prisoners, I say, are being tortured. “Everything has improved since the 90s,” he snaps. “I myself worked in the police for 17 years, in a temporary detention center. We’ve been working for a year and a half, so I’m already retired. We guarded crooks who had not yet been charged. Different things happened." Unexpectedly, he tells a particularly memorable case: “A man killed. They looked for him for a long time. And they found him only 8 months later, they closed him down. And then exactly a year after the murder, on the anniversary day, he - bang - cardiac arrest. He died before the ambulance arrived. That’s how It happens". From old memory, he feels sorry for drug addicts: “They catch someone like that. And he’s on the system. And the first three days out of ten are still so normal, and then these people start having terrible withdrawals. They called an ambulance, but what’s the point? The doctors will come and give them valerian to suck, yes some analgin, like they numbed the pain and that’s it. And some will even look and say: “It’ll break, it’ll break and it’ll go away.” They are not allowed to take drugs."

Five-story buildings, broken roads, uncleaned sidewalks with paths trampled through freshly fallen snow. Opposite the colony, relatives stand in small groups, waiting for members of the Public Monitoring Commission to come out. They agree to talk only on condition of anonymity - they are afraid of reprisals against their loved ones from the administration of IK-6.

“On Saturday (November 24 - editor’s note) there was an open day,” says the wife of prisoner K. “Several hundred relatives came to the colony, obviously, that’s why the guys staged a riot (more details in the PublicPost material ). Without our support, without witnesses would have been dealt with quickly." I ask why they suddenly rebelled. The woman looks at me as if I am not from Moscow, but from the Moon: “Torture, of course, extortion. Here everything depends on the relative’s wallet. In the two years that my husband has been imprisoned, I have not received a single scheduled visit for free. It’s just that , apparently, the administration has completely finished it."

Relatives give different amounts of extortion. It turns out that someone paid for the transfer from the stage to adaptation and from adaptation to the detachment tens of thousands of rubles in the form of “humanitarian aid”, someone paid several thousand for each meeting (scheduled and out-of-hours), someone paid only hotel, and some didn’t pay anything and didn’t see their relatives at all. “I had a funny incident,” says my wife, “I paid for a date, for a hotel, 650 rubles a day. And they returned the money to me. It turned out that there was a check in the colony. They also asked me to write that I liked everything. Well, I think , great. A couple of days later my husband calls and says that I need to bring the money back. I sat down and took it."

Photo: Alisa Ivanitskaya/PublicPost

“It wasn’t a riot,” the wife of convict T intervenes. “They didn’t break anything, didn’t rush at the guards, they simply refused to return to the cells and stood in the common corridor. They climbed onto the roofs after the riot police arrived. They were afraid that they were going to kill them now.” “How do you know this?” “I stood here at the fence for three days, didn’t eat, didn’t drink, shouted at them. They asked to call the press, asked not to leave,” she replies. “But in the end it was not them who suffered, but us.” Riot police beat me with batons. I smashed the cars, tore off the windows and tore off the handles. A man was passing by here. With a child! They pulled him out, thrashed him, the child was screaming." "What happened to them?" I ask. "I don't know, there was no time for that. There was a command: “Let’s run!” and the cops rushed to thrash everyone. We are from them. Those who had time ran away, those who didn’t have time got it.” The girl points to a group of women: “They spent three days looking for their two relatives and found them beaten half to death in the detention center. And now it turns out that it was us the riot police who beat us, and not them, supposedly eight of them were injured." Other relatives also begin to complain about the bias of media coverage. "I arrived here on Monday (November 26) in the afternoon, and they (prisoners — editor's note) are still standing on the roofs,” says prisoner L.’s wife. “While I was on my way, my son-in-law called me and said, why are you going, it’s already over. They said that everyone was fed and sleeping. I arrive and they are still here. Why is this? So we don't come?"

IK-6 is a maximum security colony, it is considered one of the best in the Chelyabinsk region. Those convicted for the first time on serious charges: drug trafficking, violence, murder go here. Not all relatives name articles. Few people dispute the guilt, but there are also those who are trying to get the case reconsidered. A woman in a down scarf comes up to me and complains that she hasn’t seen her son since he was sent to the colony: “My salary is 5 thousand, I wash the floors, I can’t afford a date, I spent two months collecting money for him.” From the woman’s confused speech, it turns out that her son is 18 years old and that he was set up by acquaintances who sold heroin and paid off the police: “They needed a scapegoat. So they bought a mobile phone from their son, he came for the money, and then they took him. There aren’t even his fingerprints on the heroin, just witness statements. So he’s in prison for 2 thousand rubles.”

Photo: Alisa Ivanitskaya/PublicPost

Soon, POC members Nikolai Shchur and Dina Latypova leave the colony, having managed to get inside only after the intervention of the chief Russian ombudsman, Vladimir Lukin, three days after the riot. Relatives surround the human rights activists; in the hum of voices one can discern the names of the prisoners and the same questions: “Alive? Safe? Beaten?” Latypova reassures the women: “All the prisoners took part in the action, not 250 people. We saw a pack of 800 complaints, they will pass them on to us. All are alive. There are rumors about the corpses. All are intact - I myself saw only two cut ones (prisoners who opened their veins as a sign of protest - editor's note), everyone ended the hunger strike, except Terekhin - he is in a punishment cell, his condition is bad." Latypova has a camera in her hands, on it is the testimony of the prisoners - a short video from several dozen people.

The calmed relatives, who stood near the colony for almost four days, disperse.

However, the next day I meet several relatives in the corridors of the administration of IK-6. The women demand the head of the colony, Denis Mekhanov. Suddenly it turns out that he is on vacation. They go to other offices, trying to find out what is wrong with their relatives, when they will be given visits and why the packages are not accepted. The colony staff are trying to reassure them: “Everything is fine. There will be visits next week, not yet.” Some say that there is a flu in the store through which packages are delivered to prisoners, others that the saleswoman is afraid to enter the detachments. “They don’t say anything,” one relative whispers to another. “That’s how rumors are born. It’s not clear what kind of flu is in the store.”

Photo: Alisa Ivanitskaya/PublicPost

There are really a lot of rumors surrounding the incident in the colony. Some of them are born directly near the colony. Seeing the hearse leaving the colony for the third time, the relatives begin to discuss that, probably, there are still dead, it’s just that human rights activists were not everywhere. Another popular rumor in Kopeisk, which even an employee of the Chelyabinsk administration (who asked not to give his name) expressed in a conversation with me, is the escape of several prisoners. However, there is no evidence of this.

Exhausted from running around offices, women go to human rights activists for information.

The Commissioner for Human Rights in the Chelyabinsk Region, Alexey Sevastyanov ( an interview with him on PublicPost), is a supporter of the official version, according to which 250 prisoners, led by leaders, disobeyed the leadership in order to change the regime of detention and achieve the release of “supervisor” Givi Dzhangavadze from the punishment cell. A member of the Public Monitoring Committee, human rights activist Tatyana Shchur, argues with him: “Even if Givi, supposedly some kind of authority, was important to the prisoners, it is only because his administration does not let him out of the punishment cell into the detachment at all. They write him penalties one after another, although according to the law A punishment cell is a maximum of 15 days, then at least for a day they have to take him out and show him. How do the prisoners know, maybe Givi is no longer there or they’re beating him.” Shchur shows me photographs of Dzhangavadze: “We went to see him in the summer, he wrote a complaint, for example, he told how Mekhanov (the head of the colony - editor’s note) came into his cell and immediately hit him on the forehead with his fist, saying that he doesn't like Saakashvili."

Photo: Alisa Ivanitskaya/PublicPost

In the office cabinets of the Ural Human Rights Group there are thick folders with letters from those convicted in the Chelyabinsk region, complaints and lawsuits are collected separately. I find IK-6. Among the filed documents, the eye picks out the phrases: “he gave me several blows to the head and body,” “they doused me with cold bleach from buckets in the cell,” “the staff sprayed gas from a cylinder into my cell,” “I was subjected to a deep anal search” (more about torture in IK-6 - in the PublicPost material ).

Photo: Alisa Ivanitskaya/PublicPost

“There are plenty of complaints, but there are no cases,” the human rights activist shrugs. “I’ll tell you more, there was a prisoner Abakumov, before his eyes the colony staff kicked the convicted Korovkin to death, this summer everything happened. Abakumov wrote a complaint. So what do you think, the investigator The committee immediately opened a case against him for false denunciation, and he had 8 months to serve.” According to Shchur, a case was not opened against the colony, no checks were carried out: “The employee whom Abakumov pointed out, as they later said, was not in the colony, he was either given leave or a business trip, and the official cause of Korovkin’s death was AIDS ". “In general, sometimes it begins to seem to me that there are two organized crime groups in the Chelyabinsk region,” the human rights activist sighs. “One is behind bars - employees of the Federal Penitentiary Service, the other is on this side, the prosecutor’s office and the Investigative Committee. Of course, not all, only a part, the rest - point to their shoulder straps and they shrug their shoulders, saying, “What can we do?”

The revolt in the colony did not greatly change the measured life of Kopeisk. It probably only affected the revenue of bars and restaurants, where the guards and management of the colony relax after a hard day. In the evenings, the establishments that taxi drivers pointed out to me were empty. “What else were you waiting for,” an employee of the Chelyabinsk administration tells me. “They are now undergoing an inspection. There will be mass purges, layoffs. Now they are sitting at home. Come in a couple of weeks, I’ll introduce you.”