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Uitgeverij Van Oorschot

Amsterdam

Fifth Wave

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Uitgeverij Van Oorschot

Herengracht 613

1017 CE Amsterdam

The Netherlands

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www.fifthwavemagazine.com

www.fifthwavemagazine.nl

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Editor-in chief:

Maxim Osipov

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Editorial Board:

Otto Boele, The Netherlands

Robert Chandler, UK

Boris Dralyuk, USA

Sergey Gandlevsky, Georgia

Yuli Gugolev, Russia

Kerstin Holm, Germany

Michel Krielaars, The Netherlands

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Design Rouwhorst + Van Roon

Cover image © Semen Agroskin, Dinner (1994)

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The Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds manages more than 450 registered cultural funds. This grant was made possible with the help of the Ludo Pieters Gastschrijvers Fonds.

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This publication was published with the support of Hans Botho von Portatius and Jan Mojto.

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ISBN 978 90 282 3019 4

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www.vanoorschot.nl

Editorial

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, every generation of Russians – those whose native language is Russian – has experienced its own catastrophe. The current generation has not broken that pattern: totalitarianism has again come to Russia; freedom of speech is severely oppressed; the regime’s number of victims and political prisoners continues to grow; and Russia is waging a war of aggression against its neighbor, Ukraine. Each catastrophe triggers an outflow of productive people from the country. The current wave of emigration is the fifth in the last hundred years or so, and just as before, both writers and readers feel an increasingly urgent need for uncensored publications. The purpose of this magazine, which we have titled Fifth Wave, is to play a part in satisfying that need.

The magazine will be published quarterly in a partnership with Van Oorschot in Amsterdam in two languages, Russian and English, and distributed around the world both in paper and electronic formats. This is not the first time in history that Van Oorschot has been involved in the Russian human rights movement; it is enough to mention the numerous publications of Russian dissident writers, published with the support of the Alexander Herzen Foundation, founded back in 1969.

The Fifth Wave project is literary, not socio-political: we plan to feature exciting, well-crafted work in various genres, including poetry, fiction, art history, memoir, etc., and not only on the burning topics of the day. The contributions will be solicited from authors living in Russia and abroad, all of whom are united by their rejection of war and totalitarianism, their love for Russian culture as part of European culture, their sense of personal involvement in and responsibility for what is happening, and their desire to see Russia as a free, peace-loving country, no matter how far-fetched this wish may seem.

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Maxim Osipov

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Vasily Antipov

Incarcerated

An account of a Belarusian prison and mental hospital

Translated by Reuben Woolley

1. The border

I need to find the right starting point, the point from which everything that I went through will seem useful not just for myself, but for others whose stupidity might land them in a similar situation.

So, I’m on the bus from Warsaw to Minsk, 12 kilometres from the border. I’m under the influence of some narcotics that are pretty decent, but not strong enough that I lose track of my surroundings. In my pocket are some unfinished leftovers: white powder wrapped in foil. I’m sat at the back of the bus. I think my companions, the young men who’d come from the south of France and who gave me the powder, got off back in Warsaw. On my right is a man, a worker, who’s telling me about how extensive the border guard inspections are for passengers. I make a mental note to throw the foil wrap in a bin as we approach the border on the Polish side.

The Polish border: I put my hand in my pocket and walk over to the bin. A guard is stood by it and stares at me. I realise I’m looking a bit suspicious. There’s a moment of consternation, and the guard looks at me with redoubled interest – or am I seeing things? – one way or another the moment passes, and my jelly legs take me back to the bus.

The Belarusian border: the doors at the front of the bus open and a Belarusian border guard enters with a dog. The dog is pulling the guard determinedly towards me – this time I’m definitely not seeing things. I decide not to wait for the dog, and run out of the back door. I scramble into duty free, take out the foil wrap and sneak it between two bottles of alcohol. My heart’s pounding like mad. I walk back outside and get in the line for inspection, and through the glass door I can see that the dog is following my trail. Any moment now it’ll reach duty free and they’ll find the wrap. There are cameras everywhere, they’ll watch it back and arrest me. I run back into the duty free, grab the foil and put it in my pocket, race over to the inspection, and the dog catches up with me. I’ve been exposed.

In the customs office they take everything off me and lock me in a cell.

I just sit there, completely crushed. ‘What have you done, what have you done... It’s all over, all over... You had everything, now you’ve lost it all... And my loved ones, my friends, my family, my daughter, everyone who loves me... What’s gonna happen to them?’

A few hours go by, and investigators arrive. They set up a camera to film the investigative re-enactment. I can see a table in the office, and a foil wrap lying on it. ‘Last chance,’ I hear in my head. The cell is opened and I run – no, I can’t really run anymore – they’ve cuffed my ankles – fly through the air in the direction of the desk; I see my hand reaching for the wrap like a slow-motion shot, grabbing it, and it’s already in my mouth. My jaws get to work, and my mouth is filled with the bitter taste of carbide. I shield my head and face because they’re throwing me in all directions, beating me, trying to fit their batons between my arms, pry my jaws apart. I’m given an electric shock. I push what’s left down my throat, it’s gone.

All that’s left are some scraps of foil. They’ve scratched up the inside of my mouth. I hear: ‘Turn the camera off, fellas...’.

They beat me with the taser a little more, take the foil from my mouth, take me into the corridor with no surveillance cameras. In the corridor: a short educational chat. Then they locked me back up in the cell.

2. The give-in lawyer

Some more time passed, during which I chatted with the border guards and the investigator. I tried to build a rapport with them, tried to figure out what awaited me. Both the guards and the investigator sidestepped my questions. We’d already got to know each other a bit and I could see that they had some sympathy for me, but they stayed quiet on my prospects (and the fact that I had a huge sentence coming my way): ‘Wait for your give-in lawyer.’ Finally, the lawyer – Marina Grasevich – appeared. In Belarus every defendant is given a state-appointed defence attorney, referred to as ‘give-in’ lawyers. Belarus used to have an independent bar, but it’s been ground down. The lawyers who are still left have merged with the siloviki and help out the prosecution. The first mistake you can make in custody is trusting your give-in lawyer. I made that mistake.

The lawyer informed me that my only chance of getting ‘a teeny-tiny sentence’ was to admit to everything. It might limit my case to half a year in prison (a deliberate lie). Later on, when I spoke to other prisoners who’d been given huge sentences (10, 12, 14 years) in similar cases, I learned that all the give-in lawyers make the same promise to their clients, carbon copied, promise them a small punishment, always with the same end result: confession, trial, huge sentence – you get the same if you plead not guilty. The trial isn’t adversarial, its aim is to talk through the whole situation according to a template: ‘The suspect has committed such-and-such an act, which meets the requirements for such-and-such a legal article and calls for such-and-such a punishment’, a punishment to which the defendant is duly sentenced. A lawyer can do almost nothing in such a situation, but they don’t want to do anything anyway, they have no such intentions, because they work for the prosecution.

I would discover all of this later, but for now I trusted Grasevich, her reasoning seemed sound: she said there’s no point denying anything, they had it all on camera. On top of which I could be charged with ‘resisting’, an aggravating circumstance. As a result, we agreed to gloss over the episode with the swallowed leftovers in exchange for my ‘forgetting’ the educational measures taken against me. I signed a statement saying that I had no complaints against the border control officers. They had no complaints against me either. I was taken for a medical exam, then the foil remnants were sent off to forensics. At first I was delighted, I thought they couldn’t pin anything on me. But then they told me that the video taken at border control shows them taking the foil wrap off me. Admitting that I ate it all would have caused trouble for them and for me (the aforementioned ‘resistance’), so they’d still analyse the remains, and charge me with the absolute minimum they could manage.

The forensic examination claimed that traces of a-PVP (something I had never encountered) had been found on my fingernails, along with 0.2 grams of amphetamine residue in the foil. But they said nothing about a-PVP, they stuck to discussing the amphetamine. They reassured me, told me that such a negligible amount meant I had a good chance at freedom. But where did they get the 0.2 grams figure from? It’s very straightforward. Let’s open the Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus: anything up to 0.2 grams is considered a ‘significant size’, ‘large’ is up to 2.5, ‘very large’ 500 or more. So it was exactly the right amount to be ‘significant’, and I was very glad it wasn’t ‘large’ – the corresponding sentences were substantially longer.

I was taken to a garrison prison, where they left me for a few days. The room had four square metres and four bunks. No windows. A dim fluorescent light. I was in there alone. Time dragged on excruciatingly. I eventually came to realise that my former, happy life was over, for good. It was all in the past for me now. It was unbelievably painful to come to terms with that fact. Sometimes it felt like I couldn’t face it, but generally speaking, a person can endure far worse. I didn’t eat, I was constantly nauseous, nauseous from realising (at the time I still believed the give-in lawyer) that the coming half-year of my life would be spent in conditions like these. After a bright and eventful life, the first part of imprisonment can be very hard to bear. The walls, the thoughts, they press in on you. You try to sleep, but sleep won’t come.

Several days passed by. I was summoned twice for questioning. Thanks to my give-in lawyer’s efforts, a statement was drawn up in which I admitted that I was travelling under the influence of drugs and that I was also carrying a small amount of them on me. A few days later the give-in lawyer, trying not to make eye contact, would tell me that since the substance is considered extremely dangerous, I would be charged under a different section of the article, and that the minimum sentence I’d be facing was six years. She knew this in advance, of course. In Belarus, all substances that aren’t cannabis are considered extremely dangerous.

By that time I’d already been transferred to Pre-Trial Detention Centre 7 in Brest, where I would spend the next five months.

3. Pre-Trial Detention Centre 7; Vanga

Pre-trial detention Centre 7, Karl Marx Square, Brest. Admission. A stark contrast from the military prison. The people sat behind the glass openly mocked you, making sure the new arrivals knew that their human rights ended then and there, beyond that wall; in here, they were nobody. From the group of guards out stepped Vanga – the prison doctor, a young woman with coarse, dyed-black hair. The dye was so coarse that it turned her hair to straw, but the straw was at least black. The medical survey began. I told her that I have epilepsy, and that it was critically important I was not deprived of sleep. No matter what, I required an hour and a half of sleep during the day to prevent seizures (prisons in Belarus have a strict schedule – wake up is at 6:00 a.m. sharp and you must be on your feet until 10:00 p.m. bedtime. Napping is strictly prohibited).

‘Who do you think is going to give you permission to sleep?’

‘Well, given the fact that I have epilepsy, could you not give me a note that grants me permission to sleep during the day?’

‘Nooooo, I will not be giving you any such note. Who do you think you are, no chance; look at him, he’s curing his epilepsy with sleep, ha-ha-ha, that’s the first time I’ve heard that one! No, you won’t get any sleep, you’ll get our pills, we’ll prescribe them for you. Until you manage to crawl your way into the normal schedule.’

Skipping ahead briefly, I can tell you that I did not take those pills, because they made me so tired that it was impossible to stay awake to their schedule.

At first they put me in a solitary cell – for quarantine. I spent ten days in there. I slept my way through all ten of them, and nobody bothered me. I slept day and night, although I noticed day-by-day that I was beginning to feel gradually more rested. I’d have to put a stop to this habit soon enough, since sleep was being replaced by unpleasant thoughts. What weighs down most on a person in my situation is the gradual realization that you are now going to spend a long time cut off from the people you love, and who love you. The realization that years will go by, and those close to you, who continue to live a full life, will be pushed further and further away; you yourself will lose your best skills – your capacity for reason, confined in four walls, will start to fade, contract to the dimensions of your cell, grow bleak and powerless. Feelings that reason has no control over, on the other hand, will become deafening. At some point you become conscious of yourself as a living lump of bare nerves, and you’re amazed at how much pain your body can bear.

Nevertheless, while in solitary confinement, life seemed tolerable. Somehow I convinced myself that soon I’d be allowed a guitar in my cell, and I could compose my own cycle of works. Every day I would ask the guards about the guitar, which caused them great merriment. This merriment was shared in the crowded cell opposite; each of my requests was met with an explosion of laughter: ‘He’s got a queen, another queen, and blackjack!’

After ten days, I’m transferred into the cell opposite, the one the laughter had been coming from.

4. Cell number 40

I felt an immediate difference the moment I entered this cell. First of all: the stench. The stench of unwashed human bodies locked tightly into a small space: the cell was designed to fit twelve people – six triple-tiered beds against the left and right walls. A narrow aisle between them, and a table made from a plank and two iron legs.

The stench was interrupted by cigarette smoke, which gave the chamber’s crooked walls and ceiling a mouse-grey overtone. The cell did not make a particularly great impression on first viewing: either this establishment was not actually built for human beings (but why else would they build it?), or the negligence and theft that took place during its construction reached catastrophic proportions. Crooked walls, crooked floors, crooked ceilings; greying, bubbling plaster; cracks, damp, and the stench. God, the stench.

I spotted an empty place on the top bunk closest to the window, and went there silently, without any formal prison greetings, or any of the other expected cordialities. I threw my mattress down, and when they started yelling at me that I wasn’t supposed to be there, that they had a notice of inhabitancy, a ‘regulation’, I just said: ‘I’m sleeping there, full stop. And if you’re right, and even if the guards are going to pull me up on it – then I guess we’ll wait for them to do it.’

That evening a servant really did come (they aren’t called ‘correctional officers’ here – that’s too long – just servants) and enquired on which grounds I had taken the window bunk. I said that I was too tall for the other bunks, my legs would intrude into other people’s beds: ‘Do you really want to turn this into a pederasty case?’ That argument had an indelible effect. Everyone in prison is paranoid about pederasty – although it does actually happen too. You’ve got the so-called ‘roosters’1 – people who’ve lost the right of control over their own bodies. They are raped freely and forcefully, and the rapist who loathes pederasty but does not loathe the arsehole of the rooster does not consider himself to be a pederast.

Here was the population of our cell:

Yuri Matyl was a recidivist murderer. He’d already served 20 years, just got another 17, and was currently awaiting appeal. He and an accomplice had been accused of raping (his 36-year-old accomplice did the raping) a 73-year-old homeless woman, and then both taking part in her murder. The woman was killed with three knife wounds to the neck. The three of them had been drinking spirits together just beforehand.

Sergey, the hysterical fire-engine driver – accused of draining diesel from the vehicles and trading it. He’s looking at 2-3 years prison time.

Sergei Lukashik – it was unclear what he was accused of, he was a shady guy. Greedy bastard. ‘Typical Lukashenka cadre reserve’ is how Aliaksandr Velesnitski, another resident of our cell, characterized him.

Aliaksandr Velesnitski was a ‘political’. He was serving a sentence as part of the so-called ‘Zeltser case’ – the one in which an IT technician shot and killed a KGB officer who broke into his flat, and was himself killed in a shoot-out with the arriving backup. Aliaksandr Velesnitski was accused of having written a comment online regarding the news of Zeltser’s death: ‘Eternal memory to the heroes’. He had been under investigation for almost a year, the entire time just waiting for the results of a linguistic analysis to see if his comment qualified as ‘extremism’. And though the analysis had not yet produced any final conclusions, he still bore a yellow placard, a preventative measure warning that he was ‘prone to extremism and other destructive activities’. The placards were given to anyone who had anything to do with the protest movement, even those who just publicly expressed their dissatisfaction with the authorities.

In other prisons I’ve crossed paths with a few people doing time for the ‘Zeltser case’. One, for example, had posted the very laconic comment ‘-1’. He too had been waiting almost a year for the results of the linguistic analysis. But while this very analysis is underway (which in theory could prove their innocence), all of them serve time as if they were guilty. At the request of a servant in the corridor, once every half an hour they have to loudly proclaim: ‘I am prone to extremist and otherwise destructive activity.’This procedure is called a profuchiot, a ‘prophylactic account’. Once every half hour, the slat is opened, a servant pokes his head in and casually shouts, ‘profuchiot!’ And all the politicals have to line up in front of the slat and take turns saying the tongue twister.

There were two ‘extremists’ in our cell. The second was a machine-gunner for the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Dmytro Zhunusov. He was being charged with ‘participation in the armed conflict’. His case had been under investigation for six months. The extraordinary duration of each detainee’s investigation starts eating away at them – not many can endure conditions like this without sustaining serious damage to their health.

Our cell also had: a young guy in for drink-driving (investigation: around a year and counting) and the so-called ‘three-twenty-eights’, really young guys who stash drugs in various locations around their local forests. Some of them hadn’t even managed to plant a single bag. Someone had just messaged them on VKontakte and offered them a chance to make some money. Explained where to pick up the load and where to drop it off. The guys got to the forest, but never even made it to the delivery point – they were caught, their phones taken away and they were charged based on the correspondence. The guy in our cell was sentenced to 12 years; that’s not an isolated incident. Case fabrication like this is endless in Belarus. Every cell, every single one, has one or two guys like that sat inside it. Most of them were recruited by social media provocateurs and then turned over to the police. Judging by some of the prisoners’ stories, it’s clear that the provocateurs worked for someone with very cosy police connections. The stories of their arrests are quite revealing: one demanded payment and was immediately detained, another just wanted to get away, and got 15 years. This is how he told it: ‘I messaged my boss that I was done, I couldn’t take it anymore, and asked for a payment. The manager suggested I do one last trip, to drop off the remaining bags. I agreed, and they took me in as I did it.’

Everyone arrested under this article had been advised by their lawyer to confess, and promised that they would be back out in no time. But they were all given huge sentences. Some of the trials were show trials – with TV presence, and classmates of the defendants summoned to court. Events like that create the illusion, even for the defendants themselves, that the state is fighting with all its might against narcotics. But the stream of young people being carted to prison camps never stops, much like the stream of awards for honest police service and exemplary investigations.

Sat in my cell, I listened to an enormous quantity of these stories, and read a huge number of verdicts. Belarusian verdicts (I can’t speak for any others) contain information about the testimonies, as well as which of the defence’s conclusions the court found substantive, and which it didn’t. Reading material like this leaves you with no illusions: the Belarusian judicial system does not work in order to find the truth, nor to achieve justice; it works strictly to put people away, and for the long haul, too. The only reason they need this entire entourage is to make the case look wholly legitimate. This is the real reason for the existence of the prosecutors, judges, and state attorneys – they all work in tandem. And the state-appointed lawyers get to charge a not-inconsiderable sum for their services too, nudging the defendant’s relatives into signing a contract with them on the side, promising an entirely different quality of defence. But after taking the relatives’ money, they carry on drowning their clients.

Jumping ahead, I’ll note that the only viable route for a defence in my case would be to find me insane, i.e. not criminally liable. There were some prerequisites in my favour – I had focal epilepsy, which is often paired with Schizotypal Personality Disorder. My lawyer was informed of this, but, while taking my wife’s money, she kept advising me not to raise the topic of my abnormality. And at the first psychiatric evaluation, which took place in prison, I followed her advice, and told the expert: ‘I am completely healthy, and have no problems whatsoever. Please, put down that I am healthy.’

5. Prison life

Yury Matyl, an old-timer who’d sat out a lot of sentences, recounted the good old days when ‘the prison could breathe’. When there was no 24/7 camera in each cell, he meant; when you could sleep during the day, wash and dry your stuff, when there was a ‘horse track’ between the cells – string stretched from one cell window to the next, which facilitated the delivery of ‘prison post’ and the exchanging of goods. When prisoners cut out ‘holsters’ with broken bottles – holes in the walls between cells, also for exchanging goods and little notes. When there was a ‘warden’ who controlled the life of the entire prison from just one room. When there were quiet tribunals against the unruly, when there were roosters who could ‘suck you off for a cigarette, so good that your feet would curl up into fists’.

This is all in the past now, our prison is ‘cop frozen’. After the protests, doing time became completely unbearable, worse and worse by the day. While I was in the cell, there was a new ban every two or three days. Curtains over toilets were banned while I was there (inmates had to defecate in front of one another). We were forbidden to dry clean clothes on radiators or the backs of beds, or to use plastic cups, spoons or forks. While I was there they forbade us to sit with our faces turned away from the CCTV camera. It should be noted that these bans made no real sense: the cells still managed to exchange and deliver shanks made from toothbrushes – they heated them with a lighter and moulded them into the right shape. Toothbrushes were used to make everything, including knives, forks and spoons. Then everything would get taken away during searches (and searches were once a week minimum), so everything had to be remade from scratch.

The curtains we did like this: first we made a ‘horse’ – a rope, out of rubbish bags. We fused more rubbish bags together to form the curtain itself. Then we fused a pen lid (an important prison building material) to the wall, the rope was tied to the lid, and the curtain was attached to the rope. This meant someone sat on the shithole could conceal himself from the others. The curtains were also then taken away and destroyed during searches, and had to be remade each time. For some reason, the management deemed it necessary that we (all twelve of us) shit sociably. But ultimately the only thing they achieved was that all of the prisoners were constantly engaged in a production process. Of course, even the most incompetent prisoner can’t help but observe the Kafkaesque nature of such a cycle taking place within prison walls, but everyone was told that all hands were tied, that it was all because of the politicals. That, yes, before they had been allowed to serve sentences like human beings, but now they could not.

In all of this there was a clear calculation: it was partly to transfer the matter of physically punishing those the state found unsatisfactory from the UDIN (the Belarusian state judicial department) employees to the prison gangs, so in case there’s a squeak from a human rights defender that has miraculously survived somehow, they can shrug their shoulders: ‘What’s that got to do with us? They (the politicals) just forgot to behave themselves around their cellmates, and they got punished for it... But what can we do about that?’

These calculations, it should be noted, are only somewhat accurate. Our prison is a special prison, it’s small and it’s in the middle of nowhere. In the big central prisons like Volodarka (Pre-Trial Detention Centre 1), the number of political prisoners has long exceeded the number of pure criminals. And even in the gangs you’re starting to see more and more political prisoners appear.

6. Prison rituals

There are masses of superstitions and rituals in prison. For example, there’s the ‘understanding’ process that determines a prisoner’s status: if you rub your dick in a man’s face, he loses his human status at once and becomes a ‘bitch’, a ‘downcast’, a rooster. Now you can do whatever you want with him. But you’re not allowed to touch him yourself or shake his hand, and you can’t take anything he offers you. If you break those rules then that’s that, you’re ‘downcast’ too.

The first matter I raised for public discussion was this question of excessive sensitivity in one area and severe laxity in another. This was in Baranovichi. A newcomer had just been evicted from his cell the moment his rooster status had been revealed. I noticed the hysteria with which they scrubbed the sink and the shithole. ‘That bastard managed to piss in there!’ one of them said. ‘Now thanks to him we’ve got to disinfect the whole place!’

I immediately began to wonder how they reconciled the fact that having intercourse with a rooster involved a much more intimate exchange than sharing the same dishes or sink: an exchange of the contents of their mucal membrane. I explained to them that while in the anus, the penis absorbs foecal matter (even if only in small parts) through the mucosa, which then circulates through their own blood. Surely this is far worse than a handshake, tantamount, as it is, to eating rooster shit, even if only in homeopathic quantities? Naturally, they tried to interrupt my explanations. The situation was heating up. I must have been crazy, but I continued my train of thought all the same, breaking down the cell’s friendly protests. My cellmates, dumbfounded by my antics, considered me mentally ill. The phrase ‘Warden! Get this one out of here! He’s fucked in the head!’ has been uttered, sooner or later, in pretty much every cell I’ve ever been in.

The anxiety to remain ‘one of the guys’ in prison sometimes takes quite bizarre forms, forms which are then reflected in the corresponding ‘rules’. For example, before going to piss, a prisoner has to first turn on the tap in the sink. Why? So that the hand that touched his penis while urinating does not touch the tap before he washes it. I could give many more examples.

7. The rooster starts to show itself

In Brest prison there were no roosters in the cells. They were all put together in special units, and there were lots of rumours about them. The idea of being transferred into these cells frightened even the most stubborn of inmates, and it was often a very powerful argument when a prisoner was trying to oppose the administration.

But there were stories of that type in our cell, too. One day a new prisoner came in: a boy of eighteen. Also in on article 328 (narcotics). His mother sent him pink slippers, which already got him sideways glances and censuring. ‘Uh-oh, the rooster is peeking out...’ a ‘veteran’ drawled with a characteristically nasal intonation. The boy got embarrassed. Then he dropped his slipper into the shithole and put it back on his foot. By prison standards, that’s a serious misdemeanour. In a camp they would immediately lock him away on his own without any further discussion. The matter was brought up for debate.

The guy grew despondent and gave a frightened look around, so I stood up for him:

‘Why are you lot all “rooster this” and “rooster that”, are you not faggots yourselves? As far as I can see, you just want to use the boy’s mistake to act on your own personal fag inclinations...’

There’s no particular need to detail what happened next; let’s just say that once someone’s said a thing like that, they need to stand their ground, and stand firm.

After passing through its various stages, the conflict was resolved in a very unexpected manner: coming face to face with a harsh pushback, my opponents changed tactics. They started saying they were just pretending, they wanted to teach the guy some sense, they were all nice guys, no one would make a rooster out of him, they weren’t gonna ruin the guy’s life... They were only giving him a little fright, to discipline him, prepare him for camp life, where he would almost certainly get sent to the ‘harem’ for something like that, and even psychos like me wouldn’t be able to save him. Eventually the same guys successfully convinced him that I was his real enemy, because I was keeping the ‘fellas’ from training him. That was the end of the story, but I have a feeling that if it hadn’t been for me and Aliaksandr Velesnitski (the political) in that cell, the case would have taken a very different turn, a turn that would’ve left them all saying that they hadn’t forced him to do anything, that he had become a rooster by choice.

8. Prison leisure