How to call a spade a spade

The scariest line in Nadezhda Tolokonnikova's letter is the following: "Now I understand that I should have gone on a hunger strike back in May."

She explains exactly what happened in May: lawyer Dmitry Dinze, who had recently joined Tolokonnikova's defense, wrote to the prosecutor's office a complaint about the conditions of detention in IK-14. “The deputy head of the camp, Lieutenant Colonel Kupriyanov, immediately established unbearable conditions in the colony. A search followed by a search, a wave of reports on all my acquaintances, the seizure of warm clothes and the threat of the seizure of warm shoes. In production, they take revenge with complex tailoring operations, an increase in the production rate and an artificially created marriage. The foreman of the detachment adjacent to my detachment, the right hand of Lieutenant Colonel Kupriyanov, openly persuaded the convicts to cut the products for which I was responsible in the industrial zone, so that there would be a reason to send me to the ShIZO for damage to “state property”. She ordered the convicts of her detachment to provoke a fight with me.

At the end of June, I went on a date to IK-14 with Nadia's husband, Pyotr Verzilov. The conditions of the meeting were strikingly different from the conditions I had seen when I came here with Peter four months earlier: then the meeting took place in a colony buffet with pancakes with condensed milk; this time - in a narrow, cold office, where all the participants sat at strange desks and, moreover, quite far from each other. To Petino's surprise, the colony officer replied: "So then there was a light regime of detention." And I was asked not to write about it.

It was an unconditional success of the penitentiary system. A woman sentenced to prison precisely because she believed that it was necessary to speak, and speak loudly, and precisely when it was inconvenient for everyone, was finally convinced that sometimes it is better to be silent and endure than to speak. This was convinced by a woman who, in her last word to the defendant, said: “I, like Solzhenitsyn, believe that the word will eventually destroy the concrete.”

Of course, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova continued to speak: this is not just her vocation, this is her essence. At the courts, she speaks of freedom, of the political system and its inevitable collapse - and she speaks better with every meeting. But she, unlike Maria Alekhina, does not talk about the conditions of detention in the colony. At the meeting, she irritably brushed off her own husband, who brought a pile of papers modeled on the complaints that Maria Alyokhina wrote in her colony. Tolokonnikova explained that she was not looking for a fight in the colony, but wanted to calmly and monotonously hold out until the end of her term. She also brushed aside Petya's questions about whether she could make the milkshake she dreamed of - she was going to mash a banana with a fork, pour milk, mix, add cinnamon. Nadya said a strange thing: she didn't seem to have time to do these simple things with the products she had.

In a letter released yesterday, it is explained that in IK-14 over time: “My entire team in the sewing shop works 16-17 hours a day. From 7.30 to 0.30. Sleep - at best 4 hours a day. The day off happens once in a month and a half. Almost all Sundays are working days. The convicts write applications for going to work on the day off with the wording “of their own free will”. And at the same time - what is there with food: “For educational purposes, apparently, convicts are always given only stale bread, milk generously diluted with water, extremely rancid millet and only rotten potatoes. This summer, sacks of slimy black potato tubers were brought into the colony in bulk. What we were fed."

It seems that the history of our country knows no cases when silence about torture would benefit the victim. As, however, and the history of other countries. When a person is completely dependent on people who are able to draw benefits and positive emotions solely from the oppression of other people and mockery of them, there is little that can benefit him at all. Unless to give a small chance - firstly, to survive, and secondly - to maintain sanity and self-esteem. This chance is not given by silence, this chance is given by the ability to call a spade a spade and yell about them as loudly as possible.

In Russia, no one knows how to do it like Nadezhda Tolokonnikova.