Ben Stewart - Don't Trust, Don't Fear, Don't Beg

‘So you guys know where all my friends are?’

‘Of course. And if a letter or a package passes through your cell on the way to another cell we will keep track of it, keep a record. Received and sent from this cell to that cell. Each cell is required to do that so you can compare it later. That way, if a package disappears along the way we can tell who lost it, what happened. Although that doesn’t apply to the wet letters. Then we…’

‘I’m sorry, wet letters?’

‘Letters to the women’s zone.’

Vitaly explains that he and his cellmate Alexei have girlfriends in the women’s sector on the second floor. Lots of the prisoners are conducting relationships inside SIZO-1, though they’ve never met their lovers and they likely never will. ‘Our love is as strong as anything you know. Those letters, our love letters, they have a different status on the road. Not the same status as normal business, where the rules are very strictly enforced.’

Dima flips through the domovaya . He looks up.

‘Holy shit, you guys are pretty well organised in here.’

‘You sound surprised. What else are we going to do? We have many days to fill, my friend.’

‘Right.’

‘Oh, and Dima, one more thing.’

‘Sure.’

‘We have a saying here. Ne Ver’ Ne Boysya Ne Prosi. It is a fine motto. You can live your life by it. It tells you everything you need to know. It will help you survive.’

Ne Ver’ Ne Boysya Ne Prosi. ‘Don’t Trust Don’t Fear Don’t Beg.’

‘Don’t trust anybody in a uniform,’ says Vitaly. ‘The more faith you put in the authorities, the more it hurts when they screw you over. To trust the police is to disrespect yourself. And don’t fear because whatever you’re scared of, you can’t stop it happening. What will be will be. Your fear changes nothing, but it hurts you, so let it go. And don’t beg because it never works. Nobody ever begged their way out of SIZO-1, so don’t sacrifice your dignity on a false promise. There’s no point being nice to the guards, the investigators, the prosecutor or the judge. Your pleading only makes them despise you more.’

At SIZO-1 the policy is to hold prisoners accused of the most serious crimes in the same cells. Because piracy carries ten years minimum, most of the activists are held with Russians accused of killing or maiming their victims.

Frank’s cellmates are Boris and Yuri. Boris is squat and strong with dark skin, maybe central Asian heritage. He’s accused of stabbing two men to death. Frank asks him what happened but Boris won’t talk about it. He’ll only tell Frank that his father had both legs chopped off on a trainline when he was a kid, as if this is somehow a mitigating factor.

Yuri is skinny with an unhealthy pallor, but something in his eyes suggests he’s a smart kid. He’s in for a series of notorious robberies. The prosecutors say his signature weapon was the Taser, used mainly on conscript soldiers. Young men, gullible and new in town. And he went up to them – this is what the investigators claim – and patted them on the back then zapped them in the neck. He zapped them, they went crumpling to the ground like a ragdoll, then he rinsed them. The prosecutors say he targeted troops going back to their barracks, Tasered them on their doorsteps, then dragged them through the door and robbed their rooms.

Dima is in with Vitaly and Alexei. Vitaly is thirty-one and was an alcoholic on the outside. He lived with a woman in her fifties and existed on the fringes of society, without a passport or identity papers. They argued, he hit her. Because his arm was in a cast, he fractured her skull. He was arrested, she didn’t press charges but because he had no ID card he was kept inside. He’s been here five months and doesn’t expect to get out anytime soon. Alexei, meanwhile, is in for armed robbery. He broke into the house of an associate – someone who owed him money – and beat the guy, then threatened him with a knife before scooping up a box of computer equipment.

Colin Russell’s cellmate is a double murderer. He’s a young guy, maybe twenty-one, sprung like a tight coil. He paces up and down the cell, stops, examines his muscles, does press-ups and sit-ups. He gets plastic bags and puts jugs of water in them, and lifts them in front of the mirror. Sometimes he punches the wall.

Colin – the 59-year-old Australian radio operator – asks the kid to sit on his bunk for a moment. The Russian stares quizzically at Colin then sits down. They try to talk. The guy doesn’t speak much English but Colin manages to ask him why he’s here. The guy says his best friend and his girlfriend were found in the front seat of his car, stabbed to death. But it was somebody else who did it.

Andrey Allakhverdov – the ship’s chief press officer – has a TV in his cell, and every evening he watches coverage of his case on the state-controlled broadcast channels. It’s a tsunami of shit being heaped on the heads of him and his friends. ‘Do you see what they’re saying about us?’ he says to his cellmate. ‘Can you believe this?’ The news reports reiterate the claims made on NTV that the activists are agents for a foreign power, possibly employed by Western oil companies to sabotage Gazprom’s drilling programme. And Andrey’s cellmate – who is charged under twelve clauses of the criminal code, including hooliganism – says, ‘What do you expect? They’re all state channels, just don’t pay attention, it’s okay.’

The Welshman Anthony Perrett is in with Sergei and Oleg. The prosecutors say Sergei mugged a stranger, ran away, got caught by a security guard, stabbed the guard and ran away again. He was married soon afterwards but two months later his wife left him, and now he’s depressed. Oleg is from Ukraine. He was a chef on the outside, he makes beautiful salads, prepares them on a chopping board fashioned from an unfolded Tetra Pak and uses spices to season them with beautiful, rich flavour.

Anthony is thirty-two years old, a tree surgeon and director of a renewable energy company. Back home in Newport, he would tell people he was attacking climate change ‘in the same way Wile E. Coyote tries to catch The Road Runner’. Before sailing for the Arctic he was working on developing a wood gasifier to run his forestry truck off a charcoal kiln, and a 3D-printed river turbine to generate remote electricity.

He’s also a talented artist and loses hours sketching the view through the window. Oleg asks Anthony to draw something for him. He wants a giant bumblebee carrying a message. And Anthony says, ‘Yeah, sure, okay.’ He sits down and makes the sketch, and when Oleg sees it his face lights up. He adds a message, and that night he sends it to his girlfriend on the road.

‘Who is she?’ asks Anthony.

‘My girlfriend? She’s a hag, a crack whore, no teeth, but this does not matter because I will never meet her. I send her presents. She sends me little perfumed cigarettes.’

Anthony nods. And he’s thinking, sure, I get that. Aesthetics are a luxury of freedom.

It’s nearly 10 p.m. at SIZO-1, just before the lights go out, and Frank is sitting on the edge of his bunk, watching his cellmates Yuri and Boris construct the road.

Right now they’re making the ropes. There are two different types of rope, but this one, the one they’re making now, is a string made from the plastic bags that the prison bread comes in.

‘Boris, what’s that one called?’

The Russian looks up. ‘This? We call this the kontrolka. This we need to make cells link together. Here, I show you.’

In one hand Boris is holding an empty paracetamol tube, and in the fingers of his other hand he’s holding a broken razor. He slices off the end of the tube. Now it’s a hollow plastic cylinder. He pulls a plastic bag through the tube, draws a pencil from his top pocket and ties the bag around it. He grips the tube in his hand, Yuri pulls the bag and Boris turns the pencil. He turns it and turns it so the bag twists. Yuri pulls the bag, shuffling backwards. It stretches and twists and stretches as Boris turns the pencil, using it as a spindle. Now the bag is a long frayed length of orange plastic, like trash on a beach, but twisting waves are running up the line as Boris turns the pencil, the plastic is thinning, it’s getting darker in colour, getting denser and longer. It takes a few minutes, but forming before Frank’s eyes is a strong deep orange string.