He could handle having his fingernails pulled off.
He could take the sleep deprivation and even the back-breaking stress positions, but when he heard
his wife and kids screaming in the next room, he was broken. He would never be the same. The family
in the adjacent room, the spine-tingling howls of loved ones; that broke just about everyone.
This didn’t just happen to one man. It’s happened to thousands, hundreds of thousands,
in Russia’s many interrogation jails. As you’ll soon see, the torture still happens,
although you could say it had its heyday back when Joseph “Man of Steel” Stalin had a firm
grip on Russia’s bloodstained reins. Some of you might have read a book called “The Gulag
Archipelago,” written by a former prisoner of the Gulag system named Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
The Infographics Show team of Russia-focused researchers have read it, and we can tell you that
it is the stuff of nightmares. So, before we get to the modern prison horrors, let’s have a look
at what they were like when Stalin was in charge. After serving in WWII, fighting bravely
in the Red Army, and witnessing atrocity after atrocity, Solzhenitsyn was arrested for
spreading anti-Soviet propaganda. On July 7, 1945, he was sentenced to eight years in
a labor camp, and the nightmare began. We are talking about interrogations before
prison involving a veritable cornucopia of sickening types of torture. As our real-life
intro shows, if the constant beatings and sleep deprivation didn’t break a man, his wife
screaming in the next room usually did the trick. Solzhenitsyn said no matter how tough a guy was,
he couldn’t put up with that. During this time, the prisoners were kept in investigation
prisons, and only after that slice of hell were they sent off to the work camps in
Siberia, where life got progressively worse. Solzhenitsyn talks about relentless
beatings, men’s backs literally being broken, and guards taking soccer-style penalty kicks
into the prisoner’s private parts until that man would never have children again. He even
mentions a machine used by the NKVD - Russia’s security agency at the time, that weeded out
and tortured the so-called “class enemies” and “undesirables.” The machine was used to pull
off or squeeze off a prisoner’s fingernails. These men were forced to stand in stress
positions until they passed out. Sometimes they were shoved into what Solzhenitsyn called
“kennels,” where naked men were piled on top of each other for days on end. Many of
them had no idea what they’d done wrong. The Gulags were only around from 1918 to
1956, but don’t think things have changed so much. Even before the gulags, under the
ruling tsars, the prisons were horrific. The great Fyodor Dostoevsky,
the writer of the classic novel “Crime and Punishment,” experienced the
Russian prison system in the mid-1800s. He talked about “unendurable cold” and
filth like nothing he’d ever seen. He said men were kept in horrid conditions and treated
worse than animals, so in the end, Dostoevsky said the prisoners behaved “like pigs.” Among
many things, Dostoevsky is famous for saying, “The degree of civilization in a society
can be judged by entering its prisons.” There’s a good reason for reducing a man
to the state of an animal. It’s not just about causing pain. It’s about dehumanizing
people, so they lose their sense of self. This is what Russian prisons are designed to do.
There’s a Japanese proverb that goes something like, “The nail that sticks out shall be hammered
down.” This is what authoritarian societies do to people that like to upset the apple cart.
It’s what the Sanheedron did to Jesus Christ, what the CIA did to JFK…just kidding, guys.
But you get the message. And in Russia, which remains authoritarian today, nails that
rise above all the other prostrated nails get smacked back down. Prison is not there for
rehabilitation. It’s there to annihilate a person's character and mold his very soul
into whatever shape the government wants. That’s the whole point of prison in an
authoritarian society. They want to take away every bit of personality and uniqueness
that you have. They want to rid you of your skepticism and curiosity and make you believe
that two plus two equals five. As George Orwell said in his book about a future totalitarian
society, “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again
in new shapes of your own choosing.” Orwell wrote that book, “1984”, not
just about the Soviet Union but about totalitarianism in general. But he wrote it
knowing full well what Russian prisons were like under Joseph Stalin. Orwell understood
better than most what re-education meant. You need to understand this today because when
we are talking about the major difference between Russian and US prisons, it’s got a lot to do
with authoritarianism and bashing down nails that stick out. Whatever you might think about the
US, and by God, its prisons can be brutal places, prisoners there aren’t generally tortured all day
into thinking two plus two can equal five, or even three, depending on what the Thought Police want
you to think. Russian prisons are all about that. As a journalist said a few years ago:
“Accounts are spreading of the extreme abuse that goes on in Russia’s penal
colonies with claims the treatment is aimed at destroying people psychologically.”
Sure, the US has more gang troubles behind prison walls. There’s more inmate-on-inmate murder and
arguably more bullying, but if a prisoner chooses, they can likely get on a work or education
program. They aren’t told all day what to think. As Reuters said in 2021, unlike Russian prisoners,
US inmates aren’t subjected to “beatings, medical neglect, and severe psychological pressure.”
Trust us, the Communist madness might be well behind Russia, but the totalitarian spirit
lives on in the new prisons and penal colonies. Russians still have to put up with very poor
medical care, beatings from guards, and disgusting food that would even make the hardliner sheriff
Joe Arpaio mutter the words “human rights abuse.” Some are worse than others, of
course, which goes without saying, considering the size of Russia. Some are filled
with mafia who form their own prison rules, and some differ considerably concerning filth and the
cold, but one thing that runs through all Russian prisons is a lack of human rights for prisoners.
Once you’re in, you’re forgotten. You are fed to the wolves- the guards- who, according to Amnesty
International, can often torture a prisoner with total impunity. This is what a Ukrainian prisoner
who just got out said prison guards did to another Ukrainian. The “Russians hit him with a machine
gun and a hammer and threatened to pour hot iron on him.” She said this about her own experience:
“Then they took me to the corridor and beat me with a truncheon. I fell. One of the
commandos put his foot on my back and said: ‘Get up or tell your heart to stop functioning.’
I was also beaten with a stun gun on my legs, arms, shoulder blades, and other parts
of my body. Then they forced me to sing the Russian anthem and kiss the Russian flag.”
Recent former prisoners have said it is common for guards to threaten men with death, which is
traumatizing because they know the guards have killed prisoners before. It’s not a lame threat by
any means. Just imagine each night after you go to bed, you think there’s a chance you’ll be tortured
and disappeared. This happens. One prisoner told the media his guards would stand outside his cell
with accelerants, laughing as they told him they were going to set him on fire in his sleep. They
liked to remind him that no one would ever know what had happened to him. He was powerless,
and he knew it, and that’s what broke him. It’s one thing when prisoners are bashing each
other up, but it’s a totally different world when the people who are supposed to be taking care of
you are torturing you and threatening to kill you. And God forbid you are homosexual because there
are reports, too nasty to describe in full detail, about gay men being treated very, very harshly.
Let’s just say certain tools were used on them. This has all been well documented.
In Russian prisons, men don’t usually squabble and fight and stab each other
because they have to stick together. It’s them against the guards. The enemy is the
state, which is always trying to break you. There are reports of guards beating prisoners
after putting a kind of gas mask over their heads so that while they’re being hit with
batons, their airflow is restricted. The guards called this the “Elephant Method”
of torture. It has this name because the gas mask looks like an elephant’s trunk.
Sometimes they would spray chemicals into the mask first, such as ammonia or bug repellant, which
made it harder to breathe as prisoners took their beating. Boris Botvinnik, a mathematics Ph.D.
student, said when they did this to him while he was behind bars, he almost lost his eyesight. Some
prisoners don’t even survive the interrogation, such as a musician named Sergei Pestov, who died
after his beating behind closed doors in 2015. Just like in the days of the Gulag, there are
reports of men being kept in a room with a bag on their head, from where they can hear their
loved ones screaming from another room. Just think for a second what that would be like…Other
prisoners have been shot at with blanks, thinking they were being executed after guards told them
they were real guns. One guy, Anzor Gubashev, said the guards pulled out power tools on him. He
was being asked questions with a Black+Decker or some such brand-name tool buzzing around his
arms and neck. Other prisoners have talked about pencils and ballpoint pens being pushed so
far into their ears that their eardrums burst. As another report said, “If the officer believes
they won’t be brought to justice, they use primitive torture methods resulting in a great
deal of physical marks on the victim’s body.” Zubair Zubairayev, who was sentenced after hitting
a police officer and being found with a weapon on him, had his feet nailed to the floor while he was
in prison. Yep, Jesus style. His story was re-told by a human rights activist who saw the scars
on his feet. In what sounds out of this world, Zubairayev said even the prison doctors beat
him, not one, but several. Talk about a breach of the Hippocratic oath. At least Roman physicians
knew Nero and other wicked emperors were out of their minds. They didn’t join in the carnage.
Zubairayev was so beaten up that he could not sit down or even stand comfortably. He
said the prison warden made it worse by putting some kind of powder on his open
wounds so they wouldn’t heal. Suddenly, American prisons don’t sound all that bad.
Some tortures are of a sexual nature, which we can’t describe because that would be
breaking YouTube’s policy rules. Rest assured, the stories are absolutely horrifying.
Let’s just say the word ‘insertion” is used a lot when they’ve been described.
Other prisoners talked about the “Phone Call to Putin” or “Polygraph Polygraphovich,”
method of torture, which consisted of covering a prisoner’s head with a plastic bag and then
giving him electric shocks all over his body, including to his genital areas. An article
explained that a guy named Igor Peskarev was electrocuted with such force that he tore
off his handcuffs. The same article explained: “To get a weak, yet high-voltage current…officers
use an old electrical insulation testing device, a plunge battery, or a field telephone
that has an electric generator.” A guy named Igor Akhremenko talked
of his electrocution torture, saying: “I was chained to a heater, and one guy
held my legs, and another held my head. They asked me questions and turned the
handle. At first, they turned it slowly, then faster. When they would turn it quickly, I
would just pass out. I passed out five times.” You name it, it happens; all that stuff that
used to go on in the Gulag happens today, but not to such a large degree. Electrocution,
binding, stress positions, nailing hands and feet, being hanged from ropes while beaten, and a
hell of a lot of punching and kicking. One guy said he was tortured on the “rack,” where
they hanged him from his wrists from a beam, so his feet couldn’t touch the floor. They left
him there for hours, occasionally hitting him with various objects in the face and kidneys.
Pretty much any kind of torture you can imagine they’ve done, especially in the new penal
colonies, where guards know they can get away with anything. Inmates have now and again
got letters out of these colonies. It happened quite recently at a place called Nizhny
Novgorod region prison. The letter said: “The riot police officers came into the
prison with weapons and started beating and humiliating people who were being held in
solitary confinement cells as punishment. They kicked them and bludgeoned them, choked them
with towels until they lost consciousness, then doused them in cold water.”
Just like in the Gulags, the mere cold can be enough to break a prisoner. In
temperatures that make a New York winter look warm, men are sometimes doused with water
and left outside. One of the torture methods is called the “refrigerator,” where men are
forced into a small box, left out in the elements, and brought back in before they die.
Russia does have human rights lawyers, of course. There is the rule of law in Russia. It’s just that
guards can often get away with their brutality because the people they are beating are said to be
enemies of the fatherland. They are usually poor, too, and often don't even know they have rights.
It’s said there is one state where there is no torture at all these days, the state of
Tatarstan, a republic of the Russian Federation in Eastern Europe. The main reason why it is
torture-free is a terrible story in itself, which, again, we can’t describe in all its gory
detail. This 2012 case involved a man named Sergey Nazarov. While detained in police
cells, he had unspeakable things done to him with a champagne bottle, after which he died.
Russia’s Investigative Committee got on the case, and all parties linked to the death were
imprisoned. After that, the state cleaned its act up. A Russian human rights lawyer said:
“All the officers who used to be untouchables were put behind bars. Almost every police
officer has a former partner or colleague who was sentenced. But this is just one
region, as a result of just one case…” It's not total anarchy in the jails and prisons,
but it isn’t far off. Human rights lawyers generally don’t win in Russia, especially
where those penal colonies are concerned. The lawyers just cannot be out there in the
hinterlands of such a large nation helping out the prisoners that need them the most.
It happens to women, too, when they are locked up. Again, there are reports of
women being kept in horrible conditions, full of filth and sickness, where “cruel, inhuman,
and degrading treatment” is the norm. There are reports of doctors as well as nurses taking
part in the torture! This is beyond ugly. In one case in a men’s prison, a prisoner said
the nurse was a “sadist.” She once screamed when the guards brought her a sick man, “Let him die
in the barrack. He should have thought about his health when he committed his crime.” Imagine how
you’d feel if the state, the police, the guards, and even the doctors and nurses wanted you dead.
In penal colony number 7, aka, Segezha prison, one man named Hazbulat Gabzaev said a guard
accused him of using bad language. For that, he had his legs stretched to breaking point,
the soles of his feet bashed with batons, and then they stuck in his head in the toilet and
flushed it. He was then left with his injuries in a punishment cell. His mother said he lost
the use of one ear after the beatings but at least was sent to the prison hospital.
In 2012, a guy named Zelimkhan Geliskhanov was beaten so badly that his ligaments were
ruptured, and after being confined with his injuries in a freezing cold isolation cell, he
developed seizures. But his mom said it was the psychological stuff that really broke her son.
The guards would come back to his cell each day, threatening to do more terrible things to
his body, telling him they were going to kill him in the worst ways imaginable.
She told the media, “Beatings in prison are not as dangerous as the moral humiliation.”
Her son was indeed broken. He would tell you if you asked him that two plus two equals three or
five or anything you asked. He’d no doubt tell you, “WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE
IS STRENGTH…and perhaps, “PRISON IS PRIVILEGE.” But the guards, for the most part, aren’t always
just trying to break a man to force ideology down his throat. Sometimes it’s just about
sadism. In societies that are very oppressive, you almost always find that when doors are
closed and no one is watching, sadism flourishes. It so often happens that the sadists themselves
are being bullied by someone above them, so they don’t mind taking out their anger
on the ones below them. Everyone is abused from the top down. Violence is a vicious cycle,
but don’t forget, the instruments of government allow this to happen. It’s how they control
things. The last thing they want is solidarity between citizens. They rule by fear.
Another prisoner at penal colony number 7 said prisoners would be beaten and their limbs
stretched to the point of serious injury. One former prisoner said through their chilling
screams, the nurse would sometimes shout, “be patient” or “stop pretending.” This dismissal
of their obvious pain was just another part of the torture. It was as if sadism was contagious,
but as we said, when the totalitarian ball gets rolling, it usually takes everyone with it.
Violence begets more violence. It’s often hard to find a good person that goes against the grain.
Just as Zara Murtazalieva said, who was locked up in the women’s colony, IK13, for eight years. She
said about 160 women shared three or four toilets, and there were no showers at all, just
miserable little sinks. She saw people go mad after mistreatment by the guards and said
if they were poor, like most prisoners were, they would never get any help. You have
no rights in those colonies. None at all. As you watch this show, people all over
Russia and suffering in prisons and colonies in ways that would make you question humanity.
That’s just it, though, in authoritarian societies ruled by tyrants from the top down, people
in authority so often just say they are doing their job. That’s what Nazi officers said at the
Nuremberg trials. They were just following orders, massacring Jews, and then going home to read their
kid a bedtime story. It was the banality of evil. The same goes for Russian prison officers. They
will tell you they are just doing their job, even though they are responsible for many deaths
of detainees, as listed by an activist named Maria Berezina. She once said, “People should understand
that if they are taken to a police station, there is a chance they will not come out alive.”
That’s not an exaggeration. There are numerous reports of men’s parents being told their child
died behind bars. In these cases, the guards will make it look like the prisoner wasn’t killed.
They can make it look like anything they want, and other prisoners won’t say anything because
they fear they will get the same treatment if they open their mouths. So, when every day a guard
passes a cell and informs someone they are going to set him on fire, that really does break him
because he actually believes them. He should. After telling you this, let’s now
introduce you to possibly Russia’s most famous prisoner at the moment.
On August 20, 2020, a passenger plane was in mid-flight on its way to Moscow
when suddenly, the most nightmarish groans imaginable filled the cabin. It sounded
as if someone’s skin was being flayed. The other passengers were in shock as
flight attendants rushed to a man who, not hours before, had been enjoying a cup
of tea in the airport. The plane made an emergency landing, and the man, an unflinching
Vladimir Putin critic named Alexey Navalny, was rushed to the hospital, where he
was put into a medically induced coma. When you badmouth Putin, expect there
to be serious, sometimes life-changing consequences. It turned out that the tea Navalny
had drunk while waiting to board his flight contained the nerve agent Novichok. He survived
this terrible ordeal, but after being arrested on bogus charges, he’s currently experiencing Putin’s
famous prison hospitality, a fate, some say, and Navalny might agree, that is worse than death.
Navalny wanted to end the corruption in Russia. He became the head of the Russia of the Future Party,
from which he railed against Putin, against the terror of Russia’s prisons and the omnipotent
fear that regular people have to live with if they are to get along in certain Russian circles.
Given Navalny’s standing, it goes without saying that putting him through the Elephant Method of
torture or the Phone Call to Putin electrocutions would not be easy. The story would get straight
out into the public sphere, so even bashing his head with batons or burning his feet would
be dangerous for Putin and his cronies. But they are trying to break Navalny. They
know they have little chance of making him say two plus two equals whatever Putin says it
equals, but they can at least break his spirit, the driving force that has spurred him on
in the past. Right now, he is suffering. In January 2022, his wife Aleksei said he was
very sick. He’d been kept in solitary confinement for months on end, which in itself can break a
man. When Navalny was taken out of isolation, they put him in a tiny cell with a guy that was
even sicker than he was. This guy is apparently mentally unwell and spends much of the night
howling like a wolf. Mrs. Navalny said they did this so he would contract whatever the guy
had. They want to break his mind, and they want him to die slowly from sickness so they can
write on his death certificate “natural causes.” As his team said online:
“Putin is still trying to kill Navalny but in a quieter and slower
manner compared to the Novichok poisoning.” Putin never thought this guy would have
survived his tea infused with Novichok, but he also knows that this close date with death
considerably weakened Navalny. He just needs a little push over the edge right now. The Russians
want to break Navalny mentally, but they also hope he will just bite the dust in his cell from months
and months of physical and psychological hell. Leaks confirmed that Trump officials requested
from the CIA options to abduct or kill Julian Assange. Now all they can hope for is death
by chronic ill health. And it’s the same with Navalny. The entire world is watching, and
unlike some prisoners with high profiles, Navalny is seen as an angel fighting dark forces.
When you think about it, Assange and Navalny are similar, both being called enemies of the state by
some and heroes for humanity by others. Choosing heroes is selective business. It would be
best for their enemies if both Navalny and Assange died from slow indirect torture.
It’s not as if the authorities haven’t been trying. Mrs. Navalny explained:
“Imagine that you are shut in a cage measuring 2 by 3 meters. That they place
a person with you who is already sick, so that your cold grows stronger and so that the
flu is added on top of your cold. That they get you up at 6 a.m. and they keep you from lying down
all day, even though you have a high temperature.” You’d think that Putin could do more, but he
really can’t. Public relations is very important to him. He needs the country on his side. Putin
is walking a tightrope here and he knows it, especially after 200 doctors just signed a
letter addressed to him saying Navalny needs to be treated better. If 200 doctors said that
about Assange and made it public, and the UK government thought they were losing support, you
can bet your bottom dollar that within a month Assange would be lying on a lounger in Center
Parcs watching shows about himself on Netflix. Putin is now dealing with protests, and
millions of Russians have suddenly got interested in YouTube videos talking about
Russian corruption. Some are probably watching this. Maybe even Putin is, and if that is so
Mr. Putin, you know very well that this prisoner isn’t one you can mess with. Unlike most other
shmucks in Russian prisons, he’s untouchable. But this is a one-off case. Let’s remember that
the treatment Navalny is currently getting in Russia is about as good as it gets. He’s on
the VIP list. Navalny actually said he was being detained in what he called a “friendly
concentration camp.” But he also said he was probably being kept in a Potemkin village-type
environment, and he found it easy to believe that some guys are almost beaten to death
with hammers when they don’t toe the line. Every day he is awoken by loudspeakers blasting
the words, “Be glorious, our free Fatherland.” Free?! That’s Orwellian “Doublethink” again. The
prisoners have to look like they believe that, but they don’t, or at least until they have
it beaten into them. A former Russian prisons inspector admitted as much, saying, “They
are crushing the prisoner as an individual and calling it the betterment of a person.”
A former inmate named Radu Pelin said even after just six months, men’s psyches can be
broken. He said at some point that happens and “they don’t speak to anyone.” This was
the same prison where Navalny is detained. Another former prisoner there said, “You have
to keep your head down, eye contact is banned, and you’re not allowed to move without asking,
even to scratch your nose.” Like the mother we talked about earlier, he said not knowing
if you’ll survive the day is worse than any of the beatings. The guards constantly remind
you they can take you out and get away with it. Put in this way, for a poor Russian in
a penal colony, America’s prison gang problem and the specter of a shiv in your
back, on top of not-so-tasty prison chow, would feel like a blessing. The Shawshank
Redemption would look like a romantic comedy… Now you need to watch this epic, “How Insanely
Creative Prisoners Escaped From Maximum Security Prison.” Or, have a look at a classic. “Man
So Violent Even Other Prisoners Fear Him.”
