In the Soviet era, female political prisoners who were sent to labor in Russia's Mordovia region described their privations in tiny words written on cigarette papers, which took months to reach the world. Today, an inmate can hand a real letter to a husband, and it is posted on a blog, emblazoned on Facebook pages, tweeted and retweeted around the globe. Other than that, little has changed.
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, a member of the Pussy Riot punk-rock band and a prisoner at Penal Colony No. 14 in Mordovia, declared a hunger strike Monday. She was protesting, she said, slavelike labor, threats to her life and prison officials who enforce their demands by enlisting inmates to beat each other up. The letter was posted online, and within minutes, her words buzzed around Moscow nearly 600 km to the northwest.
The women's penal colonies of Mordovia, where about 2,500 labor in three different settlements, living in large, army-style barracks filled with bunk beds, are Russia's worst, said Pavel Chikov, head of the Agora human rights organization. "Mordovia colonies are different than all the others," he said. "It comes from the time of the gulag."