To freedom with a clear conscience

Information leaked from the Federal Penitentiary Service that the first deputy director of the department, Eduard Petrukhin, was asked to resign “of his own free will”

Information was leaked from the Federal Penitentiary Service that the first deputy director of the department, Eduard Petrukhin, was asked to resign "of his own free will." The general allegedly fell out of favor after returning from the Chelyabinsk region, where he personally supervised the localization of the rebellion of prisoners in IK-6 Kopeysk and allowed himself to sharply publicly criticize the reform of the penitentiary system

On December 3, while still in the Chelyabinsk region at a meeting with the participation of members of the working group of the Human Rights Council under the President of Russia who had flown in from Moscow, General Petrukhin said:

“I am ashamed to listen to flaws throughout the system. The FSIN reform failed. It was written without taking into account the opinion of the public, the prosecutor's office, the Investigative Committee.

Human rights activist, founder of the Gulagu.net project Vladimir Osechkin, who also participated in this meeting and provided Novaya with a dictaphone recording of Petrukhin's statement, is sure that the reason for the general's revelations was an emotional breakdown:

- At the beginning of the meeting in Chelyabinsk, General Petrukhin looked very confident. I did not notice any prerequisites for repentance. But then unintelligible explanations of the employees of IK-6 about the reasons for the riot in the colony followed, and Petrukhin wilted. And it was after this that he made a statement about the failure of the reform of the Federal Penitentiary Service.

The human rights activist is convinced that the general's statement is a clumsy attempt to distance himself from the failure of the reform of the Federal Penitentiary Service:

“It’s strange when a person who has practically unlimited powers and has real levers of influence on the situation in the Federal Penitentiary Service speaks about the failure of the reform,” says Osechkin. - Petrukhin became the first deputy director of the Federal Penitentiary Service in July 2007, he is directly subordinate to the operational department of the Federal Penitentiary Service. Namely, this unit is the most powerful, most capable, in fact, shaping the internal policy in prisons and colonies. It is on the operatives that it primarily depends whether corruption flourishes there or not, whether convicts are tortured or not.

Osechkin is sure that Petrukhin is well aware of the real situation in colonies and prisons:

- And it is he who should bear personal responsibility for the current situation in correctional institutions.

Our sources in the Federal Penitentiary Service and the Ministry of Justice of Russia claim that after returning from Chelyabinsk, Petrukhin was summoned by the Minister of Justice Alexander Konovalov. The minister accused the general of personal guilt in the failure of the reform of the Federal Penitentiary Service, an attempt to shift responsibility to others, and offered to write a resignation letter.

According to our information, Petrukhin refused to voluntarily leave his post and was suddenly hospitalized with a hypertensive crisis. According to our sources, before going to the office of the Minister of Justice, Petrukhin contacted Yuri Kalinin and coordinated his actions with him.

It should be clarified that the career rise of Eduard Petrukhin took place precisely at the time when the Federal Penitentiary Service was headed by Yuri Kalinin. It was Kalini, who headed the department for twelve years (from 1998 to 2009), who brought Petrukhin close to him and elevated him to the first deputy.

Ironically, after the emergency in Kopeysk, Kalinin also fell into disgrace. True, not in IK-6, but in the neighboring IK-1, where in 2008 guards beat four prisoners to death. After the emergency, Kalinin went to Kopeysk and announced that "the prisoners were beaten after they attacked the prison staff with sharpeners." But a scrupulous investigation conducted by the prosecutor's office revealed the true causes of the death of the convicts. The result of the work of the prosecutor's office was that nine employees of IK-1 Kopeysk ended up in a pre-trial detention center, and Kalinin was removed from his post.

For several years, Kalinin sat on a “quiet resignation”, representing the Penza region in the Federation Council, and last Wednesday, December 12, he was appointed vice president of ROSNEFT, in charge of the personnel policy of the state corporation.