#5
Horrors of Russian prisons exposed in Moscow exhibit
November 18, 2001
By Francoise Michel
Agence France-Presse
MOSCOW - Torture, tuberculosis, AIDS, and rampant promiscuity in Russia's hellish jails are being exposed in a dark Moscow exhibition which has just opened that aims to make the public at large come to grips with the horrors inmates face on a daily basis.
"The Human Being and the Prison" begins shockingly and never lets up, a slow walk through the exhibition hall as unforgiving as the torture some human rights activists say Russian prisoners endure.
A visitor is greeted with the sight of a gas mask filled with tear gas, a generator hooked to wires for electric shocks, and sketches of prisoners with their feet tied to their heads or in other painful poses they would be forced to stand in for hours.
This section of the display, housed in Moscow's polytechnic museum just a hundred meters (yards) away from the headquarters of Russia's infamous FSB security service (the former FKB), also features a letter written in a prisoner's blood in 1995.
According to Valery Abramkin, the exhibition's organizer, torture is still the rule rather than the exception in the Russian prison system.
Abramkin, a former Soviet dissident and director of the Center for Prison Reform, receives some 12,000 letters from prisoners a year and is regularly consulted by Russia's justice ministry.
He shows almost surreal photographs of prisoners that document the physical decay of many inmates from the moment of their arrest to their condition only a few months after incarceration.
Many stand pale, almost emaciated, with hollow eyes and only patches of unkempt hair.
Abramkin cites the case of Vitaly Kosudor, a schizophrenic arrested for theft, who died of pneumonia at the age of 23 after nine months in jail, before he could even face trial.
"This is a typical case. It was a young man of powerful physique, but after six months of imprisonment and humiliation, he looked like an old man," Abramkin recalled.
Another picture shows some 62 scantily clad inmates crowding in a cell designed to hold just 10.
"One cannot even light a match there, there is not enough oxygen," said Abramkin.
In such conditions, tuberculosis and AIDS permeate Russia's prisons, which house around one million people.
The number of Russian prisoners registered with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, has increased to 21,000, up nearly 30 percent over the past six months, and 90,000 inmates were suffering from tuberculosis, according to Russia's justice ministry.
One in 10 of the nearly 300,000 inmates who are freed from prison each year have tuberculosis, according to statistics.
In addition, violence remains a devastating fact of life, reaching particularly alarming levels of viciousness amid adolescent prisoners.
"It cannot even be compared with the adult violence" Abramkin said, citing the example of a 17-year-old girl who was force-fed excrements and cockroaches by her cellmates.
Next Article