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

When they’re done, the Russians start ripping strips from a bed sheet. They tie them together then attach the thin rope – the kontrolka – to the sheets.

‘Boris, don’t the guards punish you for ripping the sheets?’

‘Our sheets get smaller. They don’t care.’

‘The big rope, what do you call it?’

Boris lifts the torn strip. ‘This?’

‘Yeah.’

‘This is the kon .’

‘ Kon? ’

‘It means… what you say? Like a horse. It means… stallion.’

Frank nods and looks down at Yuri. The other Russian is on the floor of the cell, rolling up a sheet of newspaper. Every few days a paper is delivered to the cells but it’s a state organ, absolutely pointless, no real news. Now Yuri is kneeling over a full page, rolling it tightly into a tube. He rolls it on the floor then stands up and rolls it on the wall. He rolls it and rolls it, taps the end and rolls it again until he has a stick about a metre long. Then he pushes a bent nail into the end.

He tears strips from another plastic bag, and he wraps those strips around the newspaper stick and melts the plastic with a match so it’s sealed. It’s as stiff as a truncheon now. Frank thinks you could do some damage with it. Then Yuri takes the thin rope – the string made out of plastic bags – and he attaches it to a bag with a bar of soap inside and hangs that bag off the bent nail.

Yuri hands the contraption to Boris, who walks over to the window. He slides the stick through the bars and leans forward as far as he can go. Frank jumps off his bed and stands behind him, peering over his shoulder.

Boris shouts out and a guy in the cell next door shouts back. That guy puts out his own stick. Frank can just about see the tip with a hook on the end hovering in the dull light. Then Boris flicks his wrist and the bag of soap arches through the air, carrying a trail of string. The guy with the other stick tries to catch it with his hook but misses. Boris pulls in his stick, reattaches the bag and tries again. And on the fourth attempt the guy next door catches it and shouts, ‘ Doma doma! ’

He pulls the string through until he’s got hold of the thicker rope – the torn sheet. Now their cells are connected.

For twenty minutes Boris does this in every direction, feeding ropes to the left, right, up and down. And everybody’s doing the same across the wall, shouting, ‘ Doma doma! ’ – ‘It’s home it’s home!’ – when they catch a string with the pole. When the ropes are in position they attach a sock to each line and soon the socks are going back and forth, up and down. An internet made of ropes.

Now the prisoners are banging on the floor and the ceiling. Frank worked out the thumping on the first night. Two bangs means, ‘You’ve got mail.’ Bang bang bang means, ‘I have mail for you.’

To stay up until morning, Boris and Yuri brew a drink they call chifir , which they sip as long as the doroga is running. They take fifty grammes of tea, boil it up in a mug, take the tea out, add another fifty grammes of tea and boil it again. Then they add more fresh tea and boil it again – and again and again – until it’s thick, like a soup. For some of the prisoners, chifir is not strong enough, they prefer to drink a concoction they call kon – again, it means ‘stallion’. It’s the same as chifir but with ten spoons of coffee powder added, and a splash of condensed milk.

Frank lies back on his bunk and watches the road come alive, counting the number of messages coming through his cell. Tonight is quiet, maybe a hundred notes. But on a busy night there are three or four hundred, and on those nights Boris and Yuri are absolutely buzzing because they have to drink themselves into a stupor with the chifir .

The road is against regulations. All pre-trial investigative detainment should mean total isolation. ‘But the road is our revenge,’ says Boris. ‘All the things we do, the illegal things, they give us self-respect. We resist the rules. And there is solidarity in resistance.’

Roman is at gulyat – exercise hour – with his young cellmate. The kid shouts over the wall, explaining to somebody unseen that one of the Greenpeace prisoners is in with him. A commanding Russian voice comes back. ‘Listen to me, and listen attentively. When you return to your cell, tell the guard this. Tell him I have instructed that you must break out. Be clear to use those exact words. Do not say anything more, do not ask him again, just wait. Do you understand?’

‘I understand.’

When the gulyat is over, Roman and the kid return to their cell. The kid pulls a lever that drops a flag in the corridor. A guard opens the hatch.

‘What do you want?’

‘The kotlovaya has instructed that I must break out.’

The guard says nothing, the hatch slams closed. Then in the early evening the door swings open and the kid is told to pack his things and leave. He shakes Roman’s hand, wishes him luck and disappears.

And that is that. An act of compassion by the kotlovaya , to protect Roman Dolgov from the taint of being a woollen guy.

On the second floor of Murmansk SIZO-1 the eight women from the Sunrise crew are being held alone. There is nobody to tell them about the road, they have no cellmates to explain this place. They don’t know why the prisoners spend all night banging and thumping and screaming.

When Alex sees a rope dangling outside her cell with a bag hanging from the end, she jumps with surprise. She gets up from her bunk, wraps herself in her purple ski jacket and cautiously, silently, she approaches the window. The bag is small, the size of a fist, and it’s swinging gently back and forth. She comes closer, stands up on her toes and looks into it. And she sees it’s full of white powder.

Whoa! Cocaine. Okay, don’t touch it. Do. Not. Touch. It. She backs away from the window. Okay, I’ve got these absolute nutters banging on the ceiling above me. They’re obviously all fucking high on coke. And they’re dealing. They’re trying to sell me drugs, maybe half a kilogramme of cocaine. Be careful now. You’ve got to play this right.

She edges forward, bends down, tries to look up to see where the rope is coming from. And all the time the bag is silently swinging in a narrow arch in front of her window. Then suddenly the rope twitches, the bag is pulled up and the coke disappears.

Alex retreats to her bunk. The screams and shouts and bangs and crashes are exploding all around her, from above and below. She stares at the ceiling, her heart racing. If she’d had a cellmate she would have known that one of the Russian prisoners on the third floor was offering her some sugar for her tea.

Solitary confinement makes the hours feel like days and the days feel like weeks. The women maintain their sanity by constantly tapping to each other, using the code they agreed on that first gulyat . Camila, Sini, Faiza and Alex tap for hours. Each conversation takes an age to conduct, with a single sentence taking five or ten minutes to tap out. In an era of instant communication these exchanges take on a poetic quality, where every word has great meaning.

They greet each other at 6 a.m. as the porridge comes, and again at 8 a.m. when the prison falls silent and they grab what sleep they can. Then from 11 a.m. they’re tapping constantly.

good morning how are you all

am seeing lawyer today

is there news

everybody talking about us

my lawyer said its big on british german dutch tv

my lawyer said they closed road outside Russian embassy in buenos aires because so many people protesting