Putin’s enemy was held in a hard regime cell. The transfer was authorized by prison doctors. They want to remove it slowly, like it was done in tsarist and Soviet times. Life in Russian prisons is difficult for those who need medical attention, especially if they are political opponents.
Moscow () – The opponent Alexei Navalny – who has been in prison for two years – after numerous restrictive measures in the Melekhov concentration camp, in the Vladimir province, has now been detained in a “Pkt” cell (Pomeščenie kamernogo tipa). It is a “prison within a prison”, with an extremely harsh regime, similar to the “Šizo” punishment chamber where he was held for weeks, only now he must remain segregated for six months.
According to Russian prison regulations, this type of measure can only be taken with the permission of prison doctors, who must confirm that the prisoner is capable of withstanding the conditions of punitive confinement. As many doctors outside the prison world claim, this is actually a “deferred execution murder,” as it appears to be in the Navalny case. On the other hand, these systems are not an invention of Putin’s Russia but a tradition of past regimes, from the Czarist to the Soviet, when medicine was never used to save the prisoner.
Novaya Gazeta Evropa interviewed Aleksej Fedjarov, lawyer and writer, administrator of the “Status” legal aid center. He said that “in our prisons there are no real doctors or real medicine.” A common practice, for example, is the perforation of the teeth without placing any type of occlusion on them.
There are also paid services if family members are willing to bear the costs, which can only be provided by designated doctors, but after one or two visits, they stop seeing the patient for months, and only continue therapies after much insistence and long waits. The medicines that are distributed are the most generic and ineffective, and to obtain them you have to go through a complex series of procedures and go to the medical counter accompanied by guards. In this way, an endless queue of prisoners is formed who remain for hours in the rain or snow to get a paracetamol pill. Even more difficult is receiving medicines sent from abroad.
As Fedjarov explains, “in the legal sphere, a reform of the procedures would have to be achieved, because they are designed to confuse as much as possible and leave the maximum margin for the arbitrariness of the prison directors”. To the humanitarian activists who try to defend somehow the condition of the prisoners in Russia does not surprise them so much the cruelty with which Navalny is merciless, “because this is the norm for everyone, and especially for political prisoners. ” Nor do they have many illusions about the results of a intense campaign in support of the great “Putin’s personal prisoner”.
The rules of Russian prisons, explains the lawyer, are summarized in the “three N” (nasilie, nespravedlivost and neopredelennost): violence, injustice and imprecision. In particular the latter, according to which “the person must face a nebula where there is no definition, and this also applies to medicine, where it is easy to question anything.” In practice, it implies the “total absence of rights”, because the apparent profusion of official norms “gets bogged down in a multitude of decrees, measures and demands that only the prison director really knows what they are about”.
As Navalny’s punishments in recent months have shown, any detail is good to apply a sanction: the sleeves, the socks and the shoes, the back of the neck or the shirt outside the belt. This does not mean, continues Fedjarov, that there are not also “members of the prison staff, including doctors, who try to help the prisoners in some way”, but in the end it is the courts that decide the measures or treatments that are going to be applied. adopt, often putting them off for so long that “in the end people die in jail, as planned.
The transfer of Navalny from Šizo to Pkt, Fedyarov assures, was planned, and the next step will be the “Sus” (strogye uslovia soderžanija), rigid confinement measures, until reaching the “osobyj režim”, the “special regime”, which in practice it consists of throwing the convict in a cell until he dies. The activist agrees with many other observers that “Navalny’s only hope of survival depends on Putin’s quick exit from the scene.”
