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Read, Debate: Engage.
| topic: | Human Rights |
|---|---|
| located: | Russia |
| editor: | Andrew Getto |
Nobody wants to end up in a Russian prison: the pictures of deadly Soviet camps are forever ingrained into world culture by the testimony of survivors, like Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. Today, the biggest campaign of state oppression since Stalin is taking place in Russia. Thousands of inmates, including some as high-profile as opposition leader Alexei Navalny, have shed light on the hidden world of modern Russian prisons.
A former inmate spent his years behind bars working as an IT technician at a tuberculosis facility in a Saratov-region prison. He downloaded forty gigabytes of video from the prison servers. The content was so harsh and incriminating that he had to be evacuated from Russia by activists from Gulagu.net and is currently under protection. The organisation has shared just a few clips from what it refers to as a secret archive of special services.
The following descriptions contain unsettling descriptions of violence and sexual assault.
The videos mostly depict the rape of naked, bound inmates - either directly by other men, or by use of a broomstick. Survivors identified the team of about ten rapists as their fellow inmates from the tuberculosis facility. They raped about two-hundred people and filmed the abuse of about thirty-five to forty of them. To capture the footage, they used not mobile phones, but body cameras normally worn by prison guards. The prison officers handed over the body cameras to the rapists, and four or five of them proceeded to beat a target until he couldn’t resist, tie him, and sexually abuse, or, for example, urinate on his face. Human rights defenders claim that the filming was sanctioned by officials from the state security service FSB or by the prison authority, FSIN.
In former Soviet prisons, an archaic, century-old caste system is still in place. In the lowest caste are the so-called “roosters” - a homophibic slur for passive men. Yet, it is not only reserved for homosexuals: in this group, anyone from victims of rape to men who have admitted to having oral sex with a woman - and even those who have touched another “rooster’s” belongings - are included. The damning reason for being included in this caste is arbitrary and endless, and once one is committed to it, there is no caste mobility.
The perpetrators and inmates working for the prison administration made these videos as tools for blackmail; their release would make the already nightmarish lives of victims even worse.
Gulagu.net denominates four main categories of victims. Some are made to testify against political figures. Others are forced to fulfill any of the prison officers' wishes. There are also rich or influential people who are raped with the goal of extortion. Lastly, people from outside the prison can pay the officers $40,000- $70,000 to participate in the assaults.
“Don’t let the fact that it happens in a prison tuberculosis hospital fool you,” warns lawyer Snezhanna Mountyan. The only function of this facility is to rape and beat any inmates that authorities see fit. And apparently, there are many more of these facilities in the Russia, which has a prison population of 520,000 people: other videos depict similar sexual violence and torture in the Irkutsk region, Kamchatka and more.
Sexual abuse is deeply rooted in all levels of Russian security agencies, including elite military intelligence units. The authorities are investigating the case of GRU Spetsnaz officers who extorted money from their soldiers and also raped them with a broomstick. This investigation merely covers one of the innumerable cases.
The Investigative Committee launched 7 criminal cases after the release of the videos by Gulagu.net. There is a small chance that victims of the state-mandated rape facility in the Saratov region will get some justice. But there is no chance to get rid of the problem if officials deny its existence and its systemic nature. The current head of FSIN, Alexandr Kalashnikov, believes that the main problem of the prison system is that the inmates are “eating through the budget” instead of working behind bars.
Photo by Emiliano Bar
