After the door closed behind me, I shook the man’s hand. He stared at my hands, then back at me, took a drag on his cigarette, and asked, “Any questions?”
I looked at him, confused.
He smiled. “Is this your first time here?”
I’ve never heard this exact Russian word, but I understand it based on context: pervokhod, This means “a person going through the prison system for the first time.” (I’m American, but I grew up speaking Russian at home with Soviet immigrant parents.)
“Yes,” I said.
He nodded.
“What’s your article?” he asked. “This is the ‘Is there any trouble?'” method. “
“Articles” means “Articles of the Russian Criminal Code”. “Number 276,” I said, remembering the number from when Russia’s domestic security service, the FSB, filed charges against me. My cellmate looked like he was trying to remember what it represented, so I added: “Espionage.”
He coughed and opened his eyes wide. “Are you a spy?”
“No,” I said. “I’m a journalist. An American journalist.”
He looked suspicious. “They just framed me as a spy,” I explained. “They took me to exchange.”
He smiled. “Of course,” he said. “Most people here are not guilty, just like in The Shawshank Redemption. But I’ll take your word for it.”
I blushed. My attorney advised me not to disclose the details of the case, so I decided not to explain further and started arranging my affairs.
That night, I didn’t sleep all night. I was lying next to an adult I had just met, his feet inches from my head, in a small concrete box that I couldn’t leave. I wonder what my friend was doing. It was a Friday night, and Berlin — where many had moved after Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022 — was an hour late. Are they having dinner? Going out to the bar?
The next morning, my cellmate saw my puffy eyelids and told me that he hadn’t slept well either. “It’s always like this when you meet new people,” he said. “But with every change, it gets easier.”
I’ll call my cellmate Therioga. (He was still incarcerated, so to protect him I used some details from other later inmates to present him.) I told him that my official name was Evan, but in Russian I had always been Ivan. Therioga immediately started calling me by my family nickname, “Vanya.” Before I arrived, he hadn’t been with his fellow inmates for three days — enough to drive him a little crazy, he said. By this time he had been in Lefortovo for over a year, some of that time in solitary confinement, and he could not stand the loneliness.
Serioga, who was charged with running an illegal weapons store, has pleaded guilty and hopes to be sentenced soon. he wants to move on area, or “The Zone,” Russia’s vast network of labor camps. He was tired of life in the detention center – monotonous, cramped dormitories and lack of lively social venues. He longed for the routine of a weekly job and the open space of camp, where he could cook in the evenings and be with a group of friends. “I already want to go to camp,” he said, although he acknowledged that situations vary. Refugee camps in the area east of Moscow are notoriously hellish places, but the one to the south near the Black Sea should be “a resort,” he said. “Think of all the fresh fruit we’d get if we got there,” he added with a sigh.