US basketball star Brittney Grineri is headed to a Russian prison camp for as long as nine years for bringing a tiny amount of cannabis into the country. What will her life be like? Punk activist Maria Alyokhina of the Pussy Riot art collective spent two years in a Russian penal colony for protesting against Vladimir Putin. Watch the video above for her description of the experience. From CNN:
"This is not a building with cells. This looks like a strange village, like a Gulag labor camp," she said, referring to the vast penal network established by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to isolate and crush inmates.
"It actually is a labor camp because by law all the prisoners should work. The quite cynical thing about this work is that prisoners usually sew police uniforms and uniforms for the Russian army, almost without salary."
The colony was divided between a factory area where the prisoners made garments and gloves and a "living zone" where Alyokhina said 80 women lived in one room with just three toilets and no hot water[…]
In a Pussy Riot show that has toured the world and is now playing in Britain, Alyokhina relives the memories of her time as an inmate – snowy prison yards, plank-like beds, long spells in solitary confinement and punishment for minor infringements such as an unbuttoned coat or poorly attached nametag.
