Incidentally, on a cold January day, before the Butyrki, the oldest Moscow detention center, one can not help but have a thought for the defendants who live by - 13 ° C in open cells to all the winds, a simple iron gate serving window. Life is pretty tough to Butyrki! Built in the eighteenth century on the orders of Catherine the Great, the fortress of red brick was originally a barracks for hussars.In 1775, it received its first prisoner shows, the leader of the peasant uprising, Emelian Pugachev, who spent a few days before being tortured. Sentenced to have all four limbs severed with an ax, then the head, he saw his sentence softened by Empress: first the head, then the members.
With a church and a museum, is a concentrated Butyrki history. Visited by Tolstoy for writing his novel Resurrection, she has seen the insurgents of the 1905 revolution. In 1937, during the Stalinist purges, she counted among his inmates writers Isaac Babel, Varlam Shalamov, Evgenia Ginzburg, and the poet Osip Mandelstam, not to mention Sergei Korolev, the father of Soviet astronautics.
Later, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the writer of the Gulag (the Stalinist camp system), where he was incarcerated. Even today, the old fortress, with its 2,000 inmates, is the largest detention center in the capital. The terrible conditions of incarceration (old cells, overcrowding, poor hygiene and care) were revealed in broad daylight November 16, 2009 when the British jurist fund Hermitage Magnitsky Sergei, 37, died of a disease banal digestive system shortly after his transfer to another prison hospital.
Early in his stay at the Butyrki it was installed in a cell "drafts". When he complained, the prison authorities transferred him to the ground in a cell flooded with dirty water from a pipeline exploded. Detained for one year, the lawyer was never allowed to see his family, received no health care, lost 20 kg, then life.
On remand, therefore, theoretically innocent, Sergei Magnitsky was pressed by investigators to testify against his boss William Browder, founder of Hermitage. You had to make life so that cracks and signs the statement written by the investigators. "The inhumane conditions are created specifically for the accused has one desire: to admit as soon as possible," writes Alexei Kozlov, a contractor jailed in Butyrki in a fraud case.
In nine months he lost 40 kg. He too has seen the draft. But unlike Sergei Magnitsky, he learned to sail in murky waters. "For 1,000 rubles (24 euros), the doctor is still willing to visit." When transferring to the court, he befriended a fellow prisoner, a former Kremlin official suspected of embezzlement.
On payment of 85,000 rubles (about 2000 euros), it has arranged the transfer of Alexei in his own cell. What a change! The new place is comfortable, complete with windows, double glazing and shower with hot water. Inmates have their own mobile phones, provided by the guards against hard cash.
The laptop business is particularly lucrative. Entered each search, we must redeem them. For the Butyrki, everything is bought. Olga, the wife of Alexei, was quickly understood. After suffering rejection on its refusal to all requests for visits with the judge, she has finally found an obliging intermediary who offered an interview alone with her husband against a pot of wine.
It was introduced into the prison as a "singer of the choir." The most expensive visits took place at Tverskoi court of Moscow, where her husband is considered. Olga says: "Depending on the inquiry committee of the Ministry of the Interior, the tax practice Tverskoi highest", or 49 euros per minute.
The court Presnenski is half the price: 24 euros per minute! Alexei Kozlov describes all this on his "blog Butyrki. He wrote his diary on paper, with each visit his wife was recovering his writings and put them online. The couple has made a fascinating book. The book, entitled Butyrki, was released in October 2010 to Astrel editions.
Meanwhile, Alexei Kozlov was sentenced to eight years, he is now serving his sentence in a penitentiary in Tambov. But that changes to the Butyrki! The cells were repainted and the toilets were fitted with doors! Even better, the prisoners will soon enjoy sunbathing with ultraviolet rays through the solarium acquired by the prison.
They will have access to telephones by the Skype network, promised Sergei Tsygankov, the spokesman for the Prison Service. He did not specify at what price. "It would be better to feed the cells in hot water," said Zoya Svetovit, visiting prisons and prison life specialist Russian. Marie Jego Article published in the edition of 07.01.11
No comments:
Post a Comment