THREE years ago Nadia Tolokonnikova donned a balaclava and, with two partners in the Pussy Riot band, cavorted near the altar of Moscow’s biggest cathedral, screeching out a “punk prayer” in protest against the imminent re-election of Vladimir Putin as president. For her pains she was sentenced to two years in a penal colony. Though still an ardent opponent of Russia’s leader, Ms Tolokonnikova has narrowed the focus of her dissent to the conditions of prisoners in the country’s far-flung archipelago of jails. It is a worthy cause.
At the last count there were 657,000 Russians behind bars, one of the world’s highest ratios of prisoners to population. “Our current, vile law-enforcement system”, she says, “still grinds people to a pulp and spits them out into their graves.” The frequency of deaths in custody amounts to a “Russian Ebola”. Tuberculosis is the commonest killer, she says, followed by HIV-AIDS, which may affect 75,000 prisoners. The offences for which Russians are most often imprisoned, she says, concern drugs.
When she was first incarcerated in Penal Colony 14 in Mordovia, a Stalin-era camp about 500km (310 miles) south-...
from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1Ib2orp
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