Moscow Retaining GULAG Features Even in Newly Designed Prisons, Critics Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 8 – Moscow is building new prisons which it says are models for the future, but despite the shining new buildings, the Russian prison system retains many of the features of the Stalin-era GULAG – and that pattern may even increase given plans to shift detention centers out of city centers to more isolated places, expert critics say.

            Indeed, prisoner right groups suggest that if incarceration facilities are placed outside of population centers as Moscow now plans to do, it will be easier for guards to torture prisoners in order to get them to confession or to demand payments from them and their families not to do so (ng.ru/politics/2020-12-08/1_8034_prisons.html).

            These dangers are why the activists have now sent an appeal documenting  such problems to the European Committee against Torture, an open letter that includes reports from prisoners, their lawyers and their families about Stalinist practices even in the most modern jails Russia has (gulagu.net/legal_initiative/2020-12-08-325.html).

            The appeal has taken on new urgency given Moscow’s plans to move detention centers and prisons out of urban areas into isolated rural ones. That isolation will make it harder for lawyers and family members to keep track of what is going on behind bars and easier for guards and investigators to violate legal norms governing the treatment of those incarcerated.

            “The construction of new preliminary detention facilities without a change in the principles of their work which they have inherited from the GULAG and the NKVD will not change the vicious and illegal actions that regularly take place behind bars” and out of public sight, the activists write.

            Vladimir Osechkin, president of the independent Russian Committee Against Torture and Corruption, adds that jails and prisons must not be allowed to develop into torture facilities designed not to rehabilitate prisoners but to make up for the shortcomings of investigators and prosecutors.

            If the latter are doing their jobs, he says, they don’t need guards and other prison officials to mistreat those in their charge to get the information they need for trials. If they aren’t and if prisons become only a means of acquiring such data, then the entire system must be changed because it violates both the Russian Constitution and international law.

            Osechkin says that the problem is getting worse because the leaders of the justice ministry and the Federal Penal System often do not know what is going on. Their subordinates tell them what they want to hear and those on top accept these reports without checking because they don’t want to open any can of worms.

            If the prisons and detention centers are now removed from city centers, the activist says, the situation will likely get even worse, with guards doing whatever they want for money, sadism or at the demand of investigators and prosecutors who remain convinced that torture is a good way to get the information they need.