Russia by Donna Welles

          One wonders whether or not Prime Minister President Putin can maintain his high approval ratings in the midst of Russia’s current state of affairs. In an annual question and answer session between Putin and the Russian people last Thursday, Putin said that Russia would weather the current global economic crisis with “minimal losses”. He also extended an olive branch to President-Elect Obama, praised NATO for not setting a time table for their induction of Georgia and Ukraine, and spoke out against Ukraine- presumably for their pro-Western foreign policies. Putin started these sessions while he was president and he’s continued to conduct them under his new role as Prime Minister. Of course President Medvedev conducts no similar session.
          Putin faced questions about rising inflation, housing problems, and job losses. Russians have been buying dollars in place of rubles for fear of another ecomonmic crisis like that of 1998. Putin plans to use gold and foreign exchange reserves to ensure there will be no such dramatic inflation.
          Russia is a petro state, that’s how it makes the vast majority of its money. It has no high-tech industry that can support its import-export ratio. But the need for gas in the past decade has landed the country amidst an economic boom. The only complex man-made products Russia exports are weapons. In any recession, the demand for oil and other natural resources drops. Putin’s first question via telephone was from a man who lost his job along with others in his town. When asked how the man could survive without a job, Putin assured him that Russia would increase state-assistance for unemployment. If I were that man I wouldn’t be all that comforted by Putin’s words, ‘democratic’ Russia doesn’t do a very good job of providing its people with social services.
          Putin pointed to signs that an Obama presidency would reconsider the deployment of an anti-missile system in Eastern Europe. He said, “We hear that one should build relations with Russia, taking into account its interests. If these are not just words, if they get transformed into a practical policy, then of course our reaction will be appropriate and our American partners will feel this at once.”
          Regarding Ukraine, there was no such olive branch. Putin accused them of siphoning off Russia’s oil on the way to its Western European destination. Putin dismissed any concessions to Kiev on gas prices, saying they already pay much less than other European countries. “If our partners do not follow agreements or illegally siphon off our gas from transit pipelines as they did in previous years, then we will be forced to cut deliveries. What else can we do?”, he said.

     So I was on my way back from western Europe to St. Petersburg, Russia and I had decided to fly in to Helsinki, Finland and then take a bus back home. I found out later that I had bronchitis but all I knew at the time was that I was very very sick. It was March so it was absolutely freezing outside and there was ice everywhere. I got to the Helsinki airport around midnight and I tried to get a ride to the bus station. I had planned to just spend the night in the airport and then get a ride in the morning but I was just too sick to do that- I figured it was worth it to rent a room. I got on a bus at around 2 am that went to the train station because I decided that I was so sick it was worth it to take the more comfortable, faster train. I checked into a hotel across the street and slept until the sun rose. Mind you, it’s normally a very stupid move to leave Finland and go TO Russia when one is so sick, but I knew I had antibiotics at home so I figured that was the better move. My fever was so high that I thought I was going to pass out.

          Someone told me that one could take the Finnish train instead of the Russian train for $40 more and that it was worth it because the Finnish trains were so much nicer. I did not want to deal with a Russian train that day. Riding Russian trains is an adventure in and of itself, you’ve got to be on your guard the whole time. Also, every other country I’d been in let riders board the train and sit down before their tickets were checked. With Russian trains, everyone stands outside in a line forever until a devilishly reluctant usher comes to the door and slowly picks through each person’s documents. Also, I’ll talk about my train trip across Russia when they ran out of food but not beer you so have 100 drunk, hungry, belligerent, bored Russians. Two fights broke out on that trip. I just didn’t want to deal with that so I bought the Finnish train ticket.

          I had about 6 hours to wait until my train left so I asked the hotel if I could check out late because I was so sick. They of course said no so I packed up and went across the street to the station. I found a bench in the corner of the station and I lied down to take a nap with my foot propped on my suitcase and my arms clenching my purse. Probably 15 minutes passed before a cop came up to me and told me that I wouldn’t lie down while I was there. That’s the first time I’d ever been told that in any country.

          I had to find some comfortable place to sit and wait because I was just so so sick. I figured some tea would help so I went to the cafeteria. I ordered my tea and it was brought to me. I sipped it for a while and then a leaned back, crossed my legs, and rested the side of my knee on the table- anything I could do to make myself a little more comfortable. Upon seeing this, the waiter came up to me and told me, “In Finland we sit properly.” At this point I was almost crying as I asked him to please let me just lean back in my seat to take a nap. He looked at me and told me that it was policy that nobody could sleep in the station anywhere. Maybe that was trashy to even try, but again, I was so sick. So I sat and the hours passed and finally, it was time to board.

          I walked out onto the platform with my suitcase, passport, and Finnish train ticket and in an instant, my relief upon the idea of finally being able to relax turned into absolute horror when I saw that it was instead a Russian train pulling up to the station. I had been duped. I knew my journey was far from over and I had the feeling that things were about to get interesting. I waited in line for probably 25 minutes in the ice storm while our tickets were checked and were allowed to board.

          This is where things went south. I found my cabin and standing outside of it was an old woman waiting for people to come so she could arrange her things. She took one look at me and asked if I was sick. Russians can be deeply compassionate people so I thought that she asked so she could help me in some way. I told her that I was indeed sick and she instantly replied in Russian, “Well you’re not staying in my cabin.” She started yelling at me to go ask the usher if I could be moved. I told her that I wasn’t going to go ask but she could if she wanted. So she found the usher and he assured her that after the train disembarked, I would be dealt with. I stood outside the cabin door, my suitcase leaned against me, and waited for him to come back so I could move. He promptly appeared and escorted me into a cabin with two young women. The same thing happened and once again, the usher was summoned. I again waited in the hall until he decided on my final resting place.   They decided to put me in the cabin with the other ‘trouble maker’, Anton. I learned that Anton had lost his passport so he had to spend a week at the border crossing waiting for a new one after visiting Finland. I leaned over and fell asleep. The border crossing came. We pulled into the Finnish disembarkation stop and we were inspected without incident.

          Then came the Russian checkpoint. The Russians saw my US passport and were immediately suspicious. They simply could not accept that I would be riding a train when I was sick as I was unless I had some ominous agenda. So they tore my bags apart looking for who knows what. They did the same thing to Anton. Then the customs agent took my passport and walked off with it. When he brought it back it was missing this little white paper they give you when you enter into the country. I knew that one has to have that little sheet of paper when you leave or you have to pay a ‘fine’ оr штраф. So I I looked up and down the train for this guy so I could get my little piece of white paper. I know he did that on purpose. That’s his whole job is to handle people coming into the country. I found him and got the paper.

          The train pulled into the only station in St. Petersburg where there is no traffic so it took me forever to walk up and down the street to flag anyone down. Nobody uses real taxis in Russia. You just hitchhike to where you want to go. It wasn’t until I got back home to Texas that I realized that was dangerous. But I finally found one about 10:30 pm and we drove to the apartment where I lived with a Russian family. I dragged my bags up the stairs, opened the door, saw the wife and daughter and said only, “ я болна” or “I’m sick” The dragged me inside took off my clothes, dressed me, told me to lie down and then stuck a thermometer in my mouth. They house-arrested me for a week.

Morals to the story:

1) I’m never going back to Finland. Big deal their country is so clean and beautiful. It’s too expensive, there’s nothing to do there, and I learned from this trip how they treat foreigners.

2) Don’t buy the Finnish train ticket because you’ll get a Russian train just like I did.

“While the excesses of the gulag are now history, a United Nations inspector visiting a pre-trial detention center in Moscow in the mid 1990’s commented that he would need the literary skills of Dante or the artistic skills of Hieronumus Bosh to describe fully the horros with which he was confronted.” (1)

          Until the late 1990’s, the imprisonment rate in Russia was the highest in the world. Although the number is decreasing, Russia is now it is second only to the United States. The number of imprisoned in Russia are 670 per 100,000 people in Russia’s 10,000 prisons, whereas the United States has 702/100,000 in prison. (1) It would be unwise to omit the historical context in which this high level of imprisonment exists. Of course during the Stalin era, millions were put in gulags. Today, sentences of merely probation and community service are rare, whereas another legacy of the Soviet Union leaves conviction rates at around 99%. The government is trying to address the magnitude of those serving in prison by reforms including the introduction of alternative sentencing and other legislation discussed below. (4)

          In this article I will attempt to provide a context in which the prisoners live. I will focus on overcrowding and living conditions, brutality and corruption with regard to the prison guards, and healthcare, disease, and what happens to prisoners upon their release. As with all things Russian, state-sponsored statistics are skewed and so I will rely upon two respected American journals, an article from the St. Petersburg Times, an article from the BBC, and of course my own observations.

I want to give you a sense of the demographics of those imprisoned stemming from the most recent census in 1999:

·        90% were adult males

·        4-5% were females

·        4-5% were juveniles

·        More than 85% were between the ages of 20 and 49

·        Nearly 60% were under 30

·        1.3% had a university degree

·        14.9% had vocational training

·        78.5% had secondary education

·        5.3% had primary education

·        60% had not worked or studied before being arrested

·        70% were unmarried

·        50% received no outside support in the way of parcels, food, or money

·        Between 50-80% had no visitors over the previous 3 months

          How do people die in prison? In 2002, the three leading causes of death in prisons were 32% of inmates died of heart disease, 27% died of infection diseases, and 14% died of ‘external causes’ (probably suicide, overdose, and violence). (1) Although the numbers have since declined, between 1991, the last year of the USSR, and 1997, crude death rates among convicts in Russian jails more than doubled. The early and mid-1990’s saw a notable decline in deaths from injuries. This likely resulting from a reduction in industrial production in jails. Such a decline was, however, more than compensated for by an increase in deaths from infectious diseases and in particular, Tuberculosis, which by 1997 accounted for 29.2% of prison deaths, and heart disease, which made up 18.2% of all deaths in the same year.

          Surprisingly, there is a lower mortality rate among inmates than among Russia’s male population as a whole. “The finding of an apparently lower mortality rate among Russian convicts than among the general population may seem counterintuitive, but, while caution is necessary with comparisons, it may be explained by the very high death rate from violence among men of the same age in the Russian population. In these circumstances, imprisonment, even in circumstances that are often indescribably bad, may actually increase one’s chance of survival. The decreased mortality among Russian convicts from heart disease cannot be explained by difference in age distribution. It is likely that it partly reflects the growing evidence of a causal role for episodic heavy drinking in sudden cardiac deaths in Russia, with convicts being relatively protected from this exposure. In interviews, some prison officials privately revealed that unclear and ‘politically sensitive’ causes of death (such as overdoses) than to be registered under a ‘more appropriate for prisons’ label of heart disease. This can inflate the figures for heart deaths in prisons so the true difference may be even greater.” (1) Also, in many cases terminally ill patients are released from prison presumably for compassionate reasons.

Overcrowding/Living Conditions:

“Prisons in Russia are better funded and some are refurbished but these improvements can’t work whilst a humiliating regime is in place.” –Lev Ponomarev, from the Movement for Human Rights

          Overcrowding is a major concern for prisons that are effectively converted gulags, some 100 years old. The federal law ratifying the Convention for Protection of Human Rights and basic freedoms requires a living space of 4m². However, Article 99 of the Penal Code of the Russian Federation specifies 2m² in correctional colonies, 2.5m² in prisons, 3m² in prison hospitals, and 3.5m² in juvenile correctional institutions. Even these modest requirements have not been adhered to in many years, with the worst conditions in the pre-trial detention centers. These standards have worsened since the late 1980’s. Although conditions have since improved slightly, as late as 2000 the average space per person in pre-trial detention centers was only 1.7m² and as low as .5m² in some areas. (1)

          The decrepit states of prison buildings play a role in the inhumane living conditions. Some have inadequate ventilation systems, high humidity, and poor lighting. Many detention centers are without flush toilets so inmates must use buckets. The vast majority of prisons have showers or bath houses but many have no warm water combined with frequent interruptions in water supply. When I was living in Russia, one minute you’d be brushing your teeth and the next minute a dark brown stream of water sprayed out of the faucet. When I got back home my teeth were brown. So the absence of clean water to bathe or drink from is not limited to penal institutions. As will be discussed below, overcrowding is a major contributor to tuberculosis.

          Drug-related offenses make up the bulk of the convictions in Russia. Evidence in Russia shows a high proportion of inmates use drugs and that a high proportion IDUs have a history of imprisonment. In Saint Petersburg, 50% of those in prison are there for drug-related offenses. Laws in 2003 and 2006 aimed at reducing the number of these convictions raised the legal amount of heroin from .005 g to .5 g. (2) In Russia, heroin is often the drug of choice because it is easy to get. Russia is in the middle of the opium trade route between central Asia and Europe. Russian drug laws make marijuana nearly as illegal as heroin so everyone just uses heroin.

Brutality and Corruption:

          Unchecked brutality prompted a wide-spread protest in 2006 when 300 inmates slashed their wrists, necks, or stomachs with razor blades. Lev Ponomarev asserted that, “The prison authorities are harassing, beating, even killing people sometimes. The act of protest by the prisoners in Lgov, who cut themselves by the hundreds, was a manifestation of the despair.” (4) According to the BBC, the subsequent sacking of two high raking prison officials was ‘rare’.

          Drugs are prevalent in Russian prisons and will be discussed throughout this article, but one such method is unsettling. If a police officer wants to close a case without actually finding the perpetrator, police barter drugs for guilty pleas from convicts. This compliments the amount of drugs sold by prison guards to cellmates.

          As in many countries, prison is the great equalizer. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, formerly Russia’s richest man, has served 5 of his 8 year sentence in eastern Siberia. He allegedly gave an interview with Russia’s version of Esquire magazine. The punishment for this ‘crime’ is 12 days of solitary confinement where you sit in a tiny room with no bed and only a concrete bench to sit on. Khodorkovsky’s lawyer denies the interview and says, “Prison authorities who doled out the punishment don’t have any proof that Khodorkovsky wrote letters to [the magazine]”. The timing of the charges is the most interesting because they came immediately before his parole hearing. We can assume he will not be granted parole. Khodorkovsky has also been reprimanded for drinking tea in a non-tea-drinking zone. My own opinion of Khodorkovsky is that he is a murderer among other things but he is serving what will amount to a life sentence because he is a political prisoner. I’ve read in the past that he gets to shower only once a week.  

Disease:

          Amnesty International receives regular pleas for assistance from Russian prisoners. One inmate wrote, “I was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for the crime I committed, but now everything looks as if my life is taken away and that is not just a saying. I am dieing here…coughing out the last bit of my lungs.”

          Inmates are screened for disease upon entrance into the penal system. This includes a chest x-ray (for TB) and lab tests. Prisoners infected with certain diseases are quarantined from the general population. More than 90% of STD cases are detected upon admission into the Russian penal system. However, an outbreak of syphilis in a remote penal colony where 76 convicts tested positive for syphilis after their initial testing demonstrates the inefficacy of such screenings.

          For many convicts, imprisonment is one of a few opportunities to obtain much needed healthcare and counseling. This is compared to the health system of Russia as a whole where a common saying is that one goes to the doctor to die. When I was in Russia one had to pay extra for a clean needle and there was a pharmacy around every corner that sold, at best, placebos. I believe many of these pharmacies are fronts for organized crime. 

          Official nutritional standards exist. However, differentiated terms of the physiological needs of the convicts have led some experts to question the adequacy of these standards. Food rations are often insufficient as most prisons have self-sustaining farms. Russia has some land good for farming but a lot of these gulags aren’t in those places. (1)

Tuberculosis-

          In 1991, the cases of tuberculosis in prisons far exceeded the population at large. Cure rates were also low with 74.2% becoming smear negative and 64.4% achieving cavity closure. (1) During the following decade, the number of TB cases rose by a factor of 4 but the number has dropped since 2000. Three potential factors account for the 1998 decrease in TB cases in prison. 1) Many of those at greatest risk may have died before then 2) There have been some reporting problems because of the transition of penitentiaries from the Ministry of Interior to the Ministry of Justice 3) There may have been selective releases of the most severely ill in some places, perhaps because of the amnesty that took place that year.

HIV/AIDS-

          In Russia, if you are tested positive for HIV, the authorities can and do use that as evidence against you for IV drug use.

          The AIDS epidemic in Russian prisons is hard to overstate and rates are far higher than in the general population as a whole. (see my article for AIDS in Russia). By late 2002, the registered number of AIDS cases in prisons exceeded 4% of the population. This number, 36,0000 people, makes up 20% of the reported AIDS cases in Russia. Between 2002 and 2003, there was a decline in prisons of 1,000 AIDS cases. This was probably due to three factors. 1) the decline in the prison population 2) decisions by many to release those living with HIV/AIDS early, and 3) a decline in the coverage of HIV screening. (1) Since then, like the Russian population as a whole, the number in prison with HIV has increased dramatically.

          Most of those infected with HIV were likely infected before serving their prison terms. However, there is rampant spreading of HIV within the prison system primarily from collective IV drug use. Prisoners think that since people are screened upon entering the system, then they are safe to share needles. This does not take into consideration such factors as the 6 month period one can be infected with HIV and still not test positive for it. Cells and cells of people, whole prison wards, share needles with each other. Prison guards who find needles take the offender away and beat them until they admit how they got the needle inside.(2) (which is probably from a guard anyway)                   

Syphilis/Gonorrhea-

          Data on Russian prisoners with regard to STD’s dates back to the 1920’s when surveys showed that 14% had syphilis and 11% had gonorrhea. (1) During the 1990’s, the incidence of syphilis in the Russian penal system increased by a factor of almost 17 times. (1) A report from a Nizhny Novgorod pre-trial detention center in the late 1990’s showed a rate of syphilis that was 27 times higher than in the general population. The rate of gonorrhea was 14 times higher. Interestingly, rates among women were 8-10 times higher than that of men. (1)

Non-Fatal Disorders-

          Mortality rates provide an incomplete assessment of health in prisons. Not surprisingly, data on non-terminal disorders is incomplete. Before the 1980’s data indicated that up to 50-60% of those in Soviet prisons had psychiatric disorders, “although this needs to be interpreted in the light of the Soviet psychiatric paradigm.” (1) Surveys from late 1990’s recorded such illnesses as respiratory diseases (23.5%), mental disorders including alcoholism and drug addiction (19.6%) and skin diseases (10.9%). (1) Little or no resources are in effect to counter drug-addiction by rehab centers, the use of methadone. By the late 1990’s, the situation had worsened due to the increase of drug use across the board prompted by the fall of the Soviet Union.

           In 2002, Russian prisons contained 120,517 people or 14% of prisoners with psychiatric diseases besides that of drug addictions. (1) Of course the process of adaptation to prison life (especially in Russian prisons) is often extremely difficult, frequently resulting in depression and anxiety. It’s important to note that nations outside of the United States view mental disease differently. People simply don’t go to therapists and they either don’t have access to psychiatric drugs or deny themselves of their use. 

Upon Release:

          Research on mortality of people released from jail has shown a high risk of death shortly after their release. This is especially due to drug overdoses because people don’t have the tolerance for heroin they enjoyed before going to prison. The rate of cardiac death increases by a factor of 5 among men who had a history of being under arrest for three days or more, with the increased risk remaining at 2.8 times this number for those who smoke and/or drink excessively.