“Prisoners understand what is happening much better”: monologue of Vyacheslav Egorov, who has just been released from the colony

Kolomna activist Vyacheslav Yegorov, who opposed the construction of the Volovichi landfill, left the colony on August 8. In October 2021, the court found him guilty under the article on repeated violation of the rules for holding actions (Article 212.1 of the Criminal Code) and sentenced him to a year and three months in a penal colony. We are publishing Yegorov's story about how his life changed after his release.

I got out of prison a little over a week ago. In prison, you live in such a way that it is simply impossible to think about release all the time, to plan something - you will go crazy. Therefore, everything goes as it goes. And the day of liberation is just as ordinary a day as any other.

When you are met by friends, relatives, close people with whom we went all this way with a garbage dump , even strangers come to support - it's incredible. When you hug everyone, talk, you feel a surge of positive emotions, and some of them traveled six hours from Moscow just to meet me.

I felt such support throughout my imprisonment, in fact. Both acquaintances and friends wrote to me, but I was especially struck by the number of letters from strangers. They learned about my case from human rights organizations, from Facebook posts. Several people were constantly in touch with me: they wrote to me first in the pre-trial detention center, then in the colony once a week or two. When I left, I found out that some letters never reached me.

During the first week after my release, I acclimatized, talked with relatives and friends. Immediately went to work in a real estate agency, where he worked before. They were waiting for me there and all the time that I was in prison, they supported me both morally and financially.

For now, I'm just getting back to work. This is a long process, because the market has changed, and many unresolved problems have accumulated over the year. But you need to earn money, so I'm now in a fighting mood - I have accepted all the remaining cases and get used to new processes.

If you do not touch on political events, it seems that nothing has changed in Russia in terms of everyday life in a year. You also drive around the city, communicate with people ... There are no hints of how the world has changed during this time. This feeling persists until you start talking to people about what is happening in Ukraine. Here it becomes clear that everyone has different positions on this matter. There are misunderstandings and disagreements.

I did not watch TV in the colony, I only heard about some news that the prisoners discussed. But I still kept in touch with the outside world. Calls are allowed in the colony, so I got some idea from conversations with relatives, but I tried not to delve into the information flow. Otherwise, it would be very difficult, especially after February 24th.

I found out about what happened a few days later. I thought that life in Russia would never be the same. It was still too early to draw any conclusions, and I did not discuss it with anyone in the colony. Still, for such a conversation, people with a certain mindset are needed. There are not so many of them in prison, although, in my opinion, prisoners understand what is happening much better than people at large, it is more difficult for them to fool their brains.

I myself never initiated conversations on political topics with prisoners, I even tried to bypass them, because I didn’t want to argue or convince anyone.

I know how some of my acquaintances read the tragic news every day after February 24 and were very worried that they could not do anything, and also express their position. In prison, it feels even harder, so my brain tried to block the information flow and somehow isolate itself from it. No matter how cynical it may sound, but I chose this path consciously and tried to live the life that I had in prison, concentrating on this.

And my life was the most ordinary: getting up, breakfast, work, free time, dinner and a quiet hour. I worked, like Alexei Navalny, in a sewing workshop. Since I had a short time, I was entrusted with the “most difficult” operation of cutting the threads that remained after sewing the product - a work suit or jacket, for example, so that later these products could be packed and sent somewhere. In his free time, he could play sports or read.

I tried to read a lot - it distracts and gives me the opportunity to develop. The choice in the FSIN library is meager, but the prisoners actively passed on personal books to each other - this way one could find many interesting, modern books. If there was nothing modern, I read the unforgettable classics: Dreiser, [Leo] Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky.

There, almost every detachment had a cat - our detachment was called Murka. Sometimes these cats get pregnant and give birth, and then something needs to be done with the kittens. One of the kittens of our Murka, a little white girl with fawn ears and a ponytail, Lisa, was agreed to be taken home by the relatives of one of the prisoners. He became attached to this cat, they have a complete mutual understanding. And I took Lisa out into the wild and handed him over to his family. Now she is doing well. She was all so kissed, caressed, a very kind creature.

Do I regret that I ended up in the colony? It is difficult for me to talk about this, because the subjunctive mood does not exist for me. All my actions were conscious. Of course, I never intended to go to jail, but I understood that it was possible. I wanted to achieve the closure of the landfill without casualties, but such a sacrifice happened. There's nothing to be done - we move on.

the main problem that hung over our city in the form of a chemical bomb It's good that we figured out . Whether we paid a high price for this, I cannot say. What happened, happened. I know that it was impossible to remain silent and do nothing. Of course, everyone suffered from this, including me, but God bless him. The hardest thing to realize is that all this falls on the shoulders of my children, wife and mother, who have been very supportive of me all this time. I don't have any far-reaching plans yet. It is pointless to plan something further than a month in advance in modern Russia.

Posted by Karina Merkurieva