On February 16, 2024, Russia announced the death of Alexei Navalny, the best-known opponent of Vladimir Putin’s regime. Having passed through several high-security prisons, the activist was found lifeless in the IK-3 penal colony in Kharp, in the Arctic. This event underlines the opacity maintained by the Kremlin on a prison system inherited from the Stalinist period (1922-1953) and criticized for the conditions imposed on prisoners.
For information on prisons, it is impossible to go to the Federal Penitentiary Service of the Russian Federation, an agency reporting to the government and providing only scant quantitative information on the country’s detention centers. According to the World Prison Brief, a global database created in 2000 with the support of Birkbeck University in London, there were 433,006 prisoners in Russia as of 1is January 2023, i.e. an incarceration rate of 300 per 100,000 inhabitants, one of the highest in the world (in France, it is 109)(1). These people – men, women, children – would be distributed in 872 establishments: 642 colonies, 204 preventive institutions, 18 centers for minors and eight prisons. This does not include other places of deprivation of liberty, such as police station cells or disciplinary battalions for the military.
Stalinist legacy
These figures reflect a geography like the surface area of Russia, the largest country on the planet with 17.1 million square kilometers. Prisons are located everywhere, from north to south and from east to west, particularly around Moscow, but especially in isolated and inhospitable regions of Siberia or the Arctic. It is impossible to know the exact map. However, it more or less repeats that of the Soviet gulags, established thanks to the work of the NGO Memorial, created in 1989 in a context of perestroika and of volume in the USSR and with the aim of preventing the return of totalitarianism and fulfilling a duty of memory towards the victims of repression(2). In Russian, the word “gulag” is the acronym for Main Directorate of Camps, the management body of a concentration camp system sending opponents, intellectuals, minorities, common law convicts, etc. to “re-education through labor”. 1929 and 1954, up to 20 million people passed through one of the 476 camps known at the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953; 4 million lost their lives.
Under the Stalinist dictatorship, the gulag was intended to “break” individuals, to submit them to the regime in place, without allowing either redemption or reintegration. The current Russian prison system functions in much the same way. If incarceration rates have fallen over the last twenty years – it was 729 in 2000 – this can be explained in particular by the demographic crisis and penal reforms intended to reduce the number of prisoners. However, this is not synonymous with a reduction in convictions or an improvement in infrastructure. On the contrary, political trials have increased since Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 and the start of the conflict in Ukraine two years later.
Lawless spaces
Several human rights NGOs regularly denounce the conditions of incarceration in Russia, particularly in centers located in the polar north, where low temperatures are only the lesser evil imposed on detainees. Violence, torture, harassment, contagious diseases, no light, lack of hygiene, food and water…, the list of ill-treatment is long. The IK-3 colony in Kharp, known as the “Polar Wolf”, where Alexeï Navalny was located, is considered one of the worst in Russia. Certain democratic countries, like France or the United States, have criticized the Russian prison system, presented as corrupt and having significant financial and human resources (nearly 300,000 employees) to the point of embodying a “State in the State »(3).
In addition, Russia would manage prisons where it exercises significant influence, such as in the Central African Republic, or even release local detainees in exchange for enlistment in the Russian army to fight in Ukraine. This method would be applied in Russia itself, explaining the drop in the incarceration rate. Furthermore, Ukrainian intelligence services accuse the director of the Federal Penitentiary Service of the Russian Federation, General Arkady Gostev, a close friend of Vladimir Putin appointed in 2021, of having created a network of concentration camps in the occupied territories.
Russia’s penal colonies obey their own laws, internal to the establishments, and those dictated by the Kremlin, even if it means violating international law. The country has no longer been a party to the European Convention on Human Rights since 2022 and, under international sanctions, it is withdrawing into itself. The NGO Memorial was even dissolved in 2021. Already opaque, a tool of repression of the regime, the Russian prison system is not about to be reformed. G. Fourmont
Russia: a prison geography
Notes
(1) The World Prison Brief is available at: https://prisonstudies.org
(2) The map of the gulags is on: https://gulag.online
(3) OFPRA/DIDR, Russian Federation: Conditions of detentionavril 2023.
