My Fellow Prisoners

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

• Publisher: ABRAMS Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781468311617
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Russian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Russian oil mogul and activist offers reflections on his decades-long incarceration under Putin in this "illuminating and brave" prison memoir ( The Washington Post ). Mikhail Khodorkovsky was Russia's most successful businessman—and an outspoken critic of the Kremlin. As his oil company Yukos revived the Russian oil industry, Khodorkovsky began sponsoring programs to encourage civil society and fight corruption. Then he was arrested at gunpoint. Sentenced to ten years in a Siberian penal colony on fraud and tax evasion charges in 2003, Khodorkovsky was put on trial again in 2010 and sentenced to fourteen years on new charges that contradicted the previous ones. While imprisoned, Khodorkovsky fought for the rights of his fellow prisoners, going on hunger strike four times. After he was pardoned in 2013, he vowed to continue fighting for prisoners' rights, and this book is dedicated to that work. A moving portrait of the prisoners Khodorkovsky met, My Fellow Prisoners is an eye-opening account of Russia's brutal prison system. "Vivid, humane and poignant" — Financial Times

The Nazi

You certainly have some surprising encounters in prison. It so happened that most of the prisoners at my work-station were immigrants from Tadzhikistan and Kyrgyzstan. They speak Russian but prefer their own language, of course. So not wanting to be a nuisance (since, when I’m around, they politely try not to switch language), I sit myself next to a tall guy, who’s swarthy and dark-haired like most of them, but who obviously prefers to speak Russian – clearly his first language.

The young man turns out to be half-Lithuanian, from Novosibirsk. And a real-life Nazi – that’s to say he’s a member of one of Russia’s numerous National-Socialist groups. Alexander, as he was called, told me that the camp has ‘only’ twelve Nazi prisoners. They were all convicted for crimes committed as teenagers, which is why they’ve ended up in the general prison regime. He himself made bombs, and that’s what he was sent down for – though there were other things, too, hence his long sentence: seven years. He’s been doing time since he was seventeen; he’s now nineteen.

Alexander is no fool; he got through his secondary school exams (in prison), is interested in philosophy and politics, wants to teach later on. He doesn’t smoke, and says that he doesn’t drink.

The work we do is tedious and doesn’t stop us from talking. What’s more, I’m interested. I’ve never been able to understand how Nazism could be a phenomenon in a country where so many people lost their lives fighting it. I ask a few questions. Alexander is happy to answer them, at least as far as his general understanding and awareness allow him.

He got himself involved with a National-Socialist cell at thirteen: just saw a notice pinned up in a stairwell and gave them a call. He reveres Hitler as the standard bearer for white racial supremacy. He doesn’t consider black or yellow people (redskins somehow don’t come into it) as fully fledged human beings. For some reason he puts immigrants from Central Asia and the Northern Caucasus in the same category.

He doesn’t believe in the Holocaust or the concentration camps. He’s read all the relevant literature. He doesn’t show any particular enmity towards the Jews, just disdain (as if to say, look at all the bogeymen they’ve managed to come up with). He enjoys telling me about the SS death marches in the Baltic states, shows me his swastika tattoo.

His girlfriend, too, is a Nazi. They met through one of the relevant websites, when he was on bail pending trial. They plan to get married.

The conversation is made all the more surreal by what’s going on around us. Every so often there’s a yell in accented Russian from one of our work-station colleagues: ‘Hey, Sasha – another box.’ Alexander carefully hands over a packed box, and himself requests, ‘More paper.’ There’s no doubt our co-workers can hear what we’re talking about, and now and again they throw in a good-natured comment.

Sasha, I ask, so what are you going to do with the immigrants? – Deport them.

And the economy? – We’ll nationalize it.

Who’s going to do all the work? – The Russians.

And head up the businesses? – Committed National Socialists.

But where are you going to find enough good specialists with National-Socialist ideas? – We’ll nurture them.

Economics, by the way, isn’t Sasha’s strong point, and after two or three hours of unhurried conversation he clearly begins to see that National-Socialist ideas on the economy are going nowhere. I reassure him with the thought that liberals welcome pretty much any experiment with socio-economic structures, offering as an example the Israeli kibbutz and recommending that they too try out their economic theories on small voluntary communities.

We then turn to a more contentious issue – that of nationality, or, more precisely, race. There is no common ground of understanding on this one.

Sasha, what if your granddaughter was black, do you mean you couldn’t love her? – I’m not going to have a black granddaughter!

But Sasha, what if it just happened like that? Who knows what the grandmother of your future son’s intended might have been? – I’m not going to have a black granddaughter! Okay. A dead end.

On the whole Sasha isn’t an obstinate person, but on this one emotions have evidently clouded his logic. Never mind, we’ll come back to it later.

I tackle the issue from another angle. I try to clarify his vision for the existence of a nation of whites surrounded by those of mixed race. It’s fairly quickly clear that he doesn’t have such a vision, and I’m treated to a discourse on Hitler’s successful conquest of Europe.

It’s worth noting the extent to which Hitler is idolized as a man, and the SS and Gestapo as organizations. I remind him about Hitler’s friendship with the Japanese – the ‘yellows’ (in Nazi terminology). This gives him pause, before he comes back with: ‘Well, they’re not completely yellow.’

I agree that this approach could be helpful. The Japanese and Chinese are not completely yellow; Africans and African-Americans aren’t completely black, and so on. We both laugh.

We move on to the Holocaust. ‘There was no Holocaust’ – Sasha is unshakeable. He’s read a book about the concentration camps; it said that the crematoria didn’t have the capacity to process that many bodies. The same thing with the gas chambers. And in general it just wasn’t ‘like that’ in the concentration camps.

Sasha, I say, I personally knew several concentration camp survivors. I met the first one in 1978 – I was fifteen, he was fifty, so it wasn’t as if he was losing his marbles. He came to my school, gave a talk. And the most recent of my concentration camp acquaintances – Tom Lantos – died not long ago. And they all say the same thing: it happened!

In prison you never cast doubt on first-hand testimony. It’s one of the worst insults. Sasha goes quiet. It’s difficult for him. I can understand that.

The National-Socialist community had given the kid a sense of security, of being part of a team with a defined role, a sense of being part of something bigger than himself. They worked out together, went to football matches together, took on other gangs of (often ethnic) youths together. And it was there, amongst ‘his own’, that he met the girl who will soon be his wife. What’s more, his comrades-in-arms from various cities even write to him in prison. He’s not forgotten.

And Hitler? What about Hitler? For my generation – Alexander’s parents’ generation – he’s an enemy of the human race. But for many of today’s sixteen-to-twenty-year-olds, he’s simply a historical figure, like Genghis Khan. And this is a problem only of the last few years: there are vanishingly few Nazis over the age of twenty-five.

A state that crushes society and stakes everything on the dehumanization of its people does resolve some of its ongoing political problems. Competition for power is weakened. Bureaucracy is able to take advantage of universal apathy and arbitrary political control. But ‘when a country turns too grey, the brown will always come out’ (Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Hard to be a God). And so it has come to pass. And it has spattered our children with a vile, stinking slurry.

As for Sasha, we can still fight to keep him. We’re no worse than today’s Germans after all. And they’ve pretty much managed to deal with the problem there …

The Suicide

Tall, skinny, with sloping shoulders – the immediate impression was one of utter dejection. His story, though not an untypical litany of vicissitudes by prison standards, was also desperately sad.

He worked as a civil engineer. He’d been employed by a newly formed company, with responsibility for deliveries and the quality of construction – a good position and a decent salary. For eight months, while all the preliminary work was going on, everything went fine. Then his boss went on leave, and his deputy fell ill. Artyom (as our new cellmate was called) was asked to stand in for the bosses for a couple of weeks. At this point he became aware that nobody had ordered in the construction materials. Somewhat alarmed, he kept trying to contact the boss, but he was never in. His deputy was likewise unavailable. He went to the police, but they told him to get lost.

Shortly afterwards he started getting calls from anxious investors. Not only had the firm’s managers disappeared without trace, so too had eight million dollars.

The very same policeman who had refused to deal with his earlier allegation now demanded a million roubles, or else he’d make sure the buck stopped with Artyom. Clearly he’d kept that promise. Artyom got eight years. His car and many of his possessions were confiscated ‘to pay for the lawsuit’. His wife came to see him only once. The conversation didn’t exactly flow.

You feel sorry for the guy, but in this place every other person has exactly the same story. You simply don’t have the energy or time to listen to other people’s woes. Every day there are court hearings, another stack of papers you have to read through. You just don’t have the time for him! And yet he doesn’t seem to understand this. He goes around whining on about how hopeless he feels, how the judge couldn’t care less whether he was guilty or not, how his children are too ashamed to look him in the eye because ‘Dad’s a swindler who robbed people’, how the truth is irrelevant if you haven’t the money for a bribe …

Come on, we all know this already, and plenty more besides! It’s not exactly earth-shattering news. Your own misery is always greater, obviously, but what’s that got to do with anyone else?! Anyone will lend you a hand with the everyday stuff, but as for the mental anguish – sorry, pal, you just have to learn to deal with that yourself …

Prison has taught me to sleep lightly, so the throaty gurgling in the toilets wakes me instantly. I jump up, fling myself at the door, yank at it so that it bursts open – oh woe!

The light-bulb on the toilet wall is protected by a heavy-duty grille, some two and a half to three metres above the floor. Attached to this grille I see a cord made out of a torn bed-sheet, and hanging from the cord – Artyom. By the look of it, he’s clambered on to the toilet and jumped off, but the cord has stretched a bit and so his feet – the very tips of his toes – are just touching the ground as the rope bounces up and down.

He’s wheezing, clearly no longer aware of what’s happening. I dash towards him and grab him, lifting him up with one hand and attempting to pull the cord off with the other. I can’t do...