TABAGA, Russia (dpa) – Did he murder, maim or rob? Pavel Nissen prefers not to say. “I don’t want to think about my past any more,” the thickset bearded young man murmurs.
He looks awkwardly at the floor. “I spent two long winters here, I want to get out,” he whispers as the guards stop for a smoke.Nissen’s appeal is pending, all he can do now is pass the months in the remote Tabaga prison camp in northern Siberia.He says he has found strength in his faith as he tends the camp’s small Russian Orthodox chapel between monthly visits by a priest. The room is heated, but he keeps on his heavy felt boots and padded vest – it’s minus 38 outside and the frost attacks every surface.Some 1,200 serious offenders live and work in penal colony No.7, located 6,000 kilometres and six time zones east of Moscow in Yakutia, a remote Russian republic the size of Western Europe.More than ten years after the Soviet Union broke up, this is the first time the facility has opened its gates to foreign journalists.“We have nothing to hide,” says justice ministry official Nikolai Burtsyev.Tabaga is the product of a grim tradition of incarceration. Siberia served as a vast prison without walls since Czar Peter the Great in 1691 commuted the death penalty for murder, theft and rebellion to lifelong exile to the far east of his empire.“The prisons were elementary. A pit in the earth, two heavy timbers laid over the top with just a small hole for air,” one Yakutian historian writes about the camps in the early 18th century.Up to the 1917 October Revolution thousands of people were imprisoned in Yakutia for crimes or for their political and religious persuasions, as well as captives from wars with Sweden and other nations.But it was under Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin that the GULAG camp system was perfected as hundreds of thousands of “criminals”, often innocent men, women and children, were transported east.In Yakutia alone more than 100 camps were built to house the flood of prisoners sent to work in appalling conditions on construction sites or down mines.Today life is at least bearable for inmates at Tabaga, which was built in 1969. All of its wooden buildings are heated and there are no bars on any of the windows, let alone pits in the earth.The 500 by 500 metre camp is divided into working and living sections and the perimeter is sealed with three wooden fences and rows of barbed wire. Armed soldiers man the watchtowers.But there is little sense in trying to escape. The camp sits in the middle of a plain that stretches as far as the eye can see. For nine months of the year the snow reveals any fugitive’s footprints.“All the prisoners here must work, they mostly earn money at the carpentry shop,” says guard commander Major Alexei Bespaly, 33. Wages are 40 roubles (1.3 U.S. dollars) a day, “enough for food and a few personal items”. Later one of his officers lets slip that there are only enough furniture orders to keep one in five prisoners employed.In the canteen a few inmates huddle round the radiators and kill time. Tins bowls stand piled on long wooden benches that seat 30. As in all Russian prisons there are no knives. It makes little difference here, they rarely get meat. The day’s mealplan hangs on the wall: tea, bread and lentil broth for breakfast, lentil broth for lunch, lentil broth for supper.Most of the prisoners look thin and drawn but no one is willing to complain out loud. “The food is okay, we get enough,” says Oleg Chibiryov, 24, with a sidewards glance at the guard.Oleg is serving eight years for armed robbery. But as a university law graduate he is respected among the prisoners, who turn to him for legal advice. Life in Tabaga is hard, he says, but most inmates try to treat each other “like human beings”.His parents come to visit a few times a year and there is even a small apartment set aside for family visits. The “living room” has sagging armchairs, an old television and tatty flowered wallpaper, but the surrounds don’t matter in the precious hours together.“Those who work well get to see their families more often,” says the duty officer.At a two-storeyed house that serves as living quarters prisoners jump to attention by rows of bunk beds as visitors are shown in. The guard lists the occupants by ethnic group: 18 Yakuts, 3 Evenks, 78 Russians, 4 Ukrainians, 4 Germans, 1 Buryat, 5 Chinese, 3 Kazaks.The barracks are cramped and offer no privacy but they are clean and warm. They also have some obvious advantages over, say, Moscow’s infamous Butyrka detention centre, where small cells hold up to eight men who sleep in shifts because there are not enough beds.The Tabaga administrators also claim there is less violence among inmates here than in other camps and a comparatively low incidence of tuberculosis and other infectious diseases.Health statistics for the nation’s prison population of one million are horrific. Every tenth person has tuberculosis and 10,000 die each year from infectious diseases, including a rocketing number of AIDS victims.The days of the GULAG are long gone but the flow of prisoners in Russia is strong and fast. Minor crimes still carry draconian sentences and state-supplied lawyers are pitifully underpaid, so a person caught stealing food can be jailed for several years.Meanwhile, bribes to corrupt judges can keep a person at liberty, so if you end up behind the wire it is often as much a reflection of your finances as your guilt.“It’s the poor devils who end up here,” the guard comments.The camp gate swings open and the departing visitors pass a sign that reads: “To freedom with a clear conscience.”
