Let’s do this.’” Navalny went on to clarify that, so far, he has “not seen any violence”, but can still “easily believe the numerous stories that, not long ago, people here were beaten to within an inch of their lives with wooden hammers”. “I think someone upstairs read Orwell’s 1984 and said: ‘Yeah, cool. Navalny hinted at this in a message posted on his Instagram account last week: “I had no idea that it was possible to arrange a real concentration camp 100km from Moscow,” it said. Similarly, the ways in which anti-establishment figures are treated have also stood the tests of time. Suggested reading Don't fall for Putin's enemies Just as the Gulag system imprisoned enemies of the Communist regime, the penal colonies of today are home to dissidents who have dared to criticise the rule of President Putin. The offences that lead to incarceration also bear some resemblance to those of the past. Little else has changed, with many of the buildings and facilities in the penal colonies dating back to the time of the USSR. Indeed, in many cases all that has changed is their name: from falling under the auspices of the Gulag, a Russian acronym for “Main Camp Directorate”, to today’s Federal Penitentiary Service. Some of the modern labour camps - including the notorious Penal Colony Number 14 in Mordovia - exist on the sites of their Gulag forerunners. In fact, these “corrective labour colonies” are the most common type of prison in the Russian Federation. Unlike in Germany, where the death and concentration camps of the Nazi regime have become monuments to the sins of fascism, the spirit of Stalinist oppression so vividly described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn has survived in modern Russia, with penal colonies constituting an integral part of the country’s correctional system. It will be his home, if you can call it that, for the next two and a half years after he was found guilty of breaking a parole violation from a previous charge of embezzlement in 2014 - although the European Court of Human Rights has described the allegations as “arbitrary and unfair”.
Last week, the opposition politician was transferred to Penal Colony Number 2 in the small provincial town of Pokrov, roughly two hours’s drive east of Moscow. But the truth is that, thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, such places continue to exist in Russia - as Alexander Navalny, Putin’s most prominent political enemy, is currently finding out. It is certainly not an image that one would immediately associate with anywhere on the modern European continent. Such a description no doubt evokes memories of the worst years of the 20 th century, an era of totalitarian horror that is fast fading from living memory.
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The penal colony is a place where the authorities can act with impunity, free to torture prisoners in the hope of extracting a false confession. Organised into work brigades and subjected to the violent whims of sadistic military guards, the day-to-day lives of the inmates are punctuated only by malnourishment, corporal punishment and death.
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