2013
Family members of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, a currently imprisoned member of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot, say the political protestor has not been heard from in nearly two weeks, and fear she may be in the process of transfer to a Siberian prison camp. Tolokonnikova recently underwent a hunger strike in opposition to what she claimed were abusive practices on the part of Russian prison officials. The Telegraph reports:
Russia's prison service has refused to disclose Ms Tolokonnikova's location since it announced she would be transferred from her previous prison in Mordovia, about 300 miles from Moscow, on October 21.
However, her husband Pyotr Verzilov told Russian agencies on Tuesday that he believes she is headed for Colony Number 50 in the Krasnoyarsk region of western Siberian, 2,700 miles from Moscow.
"Essentially, she is transferred 4,500 kilometres from central Russia to the heart of Siberia as punishment for the resonance of her letter" that alleged abuses, Mr Verzilov said.
1962
In One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn took readers into the heart of a Siberian gulag and into the banal horror of one man's experiences there. In the first pages, he breaks down the skills necessary for survival:
Shukhov never overslept. He was always up at the call. That way he had an hour and a half all to himself before work parade--time for a man who knew his way around to earn a bit on the side. He could stitch covers for somebody's mittens from a piece of old lining. Take some rich foreman his felt boots while he was still in his bunk (save him hopping around barefoot, fishing them out of the heap after drying). Rush round the storerooms looking for odd jobs--sweeping up or running errands. Go to the mess to stack bowls and carry them to the washers-up. You'd get something to eat, but there were too many volunteers, swarms of them. And the worst of it was that if there was anything left in a bowl, you could't help licking it. Shukhov never for a moment forgot what his first foreman, Kuzyomin, had told him. An old camp wolf, twelve years inside by 1943. One day around the campfire in a forest clearing he told the reinforcements fresh from the front, "It's the law of the taiga here, men. But a man can live here, just like anywhere else. Know who croaks first? The guy who licks out bowls, puts his faith in the sick bay, or squeals to the godfather."