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

‘We need to make them famous,’ Mads Christensen tells them. ‘We have to make every politician, every journalist, every business leader with investments in Russia, and every man and woman on the street know all about the Arctic 30. But we can’t attack Putin. Not personally. We do that, they’re fucked. We have to get them on TV and on the front pages, but not by hitting Putin. Instead we’re going after Gazprom as a proxy for the Kremlin. If we can cause them enough pain we figure Putin won’t think it’s worth keeping our guys in jail. We need to give Putin a wide turning circle. We need to give him space to backtrack and release them. If this becomes a battle of wills between Putin and the West, we may never get them out.’

At Switzerland’s St. Jakob-Park soccer stadium, FC Basel are about to face Germany’s FC Schalke 04 in a UEFA Champions League group stage tie. Every seat in the arena has been sold, the TV cameras are in position, ready to capture the action for highlights shows that will be watched later that evening by tens of millions of people across the globe. In the sponsors’ VIP boxes, suited executives are sipping on white wine and picking avocado canapés from silver trays, waiting for the game to start.

The evening’s main sponsor is Gazprom. Putin’s oil giant has paid to have its logo emblazoned across pitch-side hoardings at every one of that season’s games, right across Europe. The television coverage is saturated with Gazprom advertisements; the Schalke players are on the pitch warming up in shirts bearing the Gazprom logo. It is a forty-million-euros-a-year [65] http://rt.com/business/2012-sponsorship-football-marketing-882/ effort to detoxify the brand of Russia’s state-owned oil company. And Andreas Schmidt is not happy about it.

‘I used to practise climbing with Kruso,’ he says, ‘and now he was in the Arctic sitting in prison because of Gazprom. We wanted to show the public that what was going on was not right, that Gazprom is doing dirty business up in the Arctic while trying to polish their image in Europe by being a big sponsor. I know Kruso, he’s a friend of mine. I was there because of him.’

Now Andreas is on the roof of the stadium. He and his team rig ropes then roll out a forty-metre banner. ‘We had a little delay – we wanted to start just before the kick-off but we started just after.’ They abseil off the roof, bringing the banner with them, unfurling it as they descend. The players are distracted, the attention of the crowd shifts to the sky, TV cameras spin away from the game. And with a final tug by Andreas, the huge banner catches the wind like a sail and fully unfurls.

The referee looks up. It takes him a moment to understand what’s happening, then he blows his whistle and calls the players off the pitch. Andreas and his team decided that afternoon that if the game was interrupted they would immediately end their protest, so they climb up the ropes and pull in the banner. A few minutes later the game resumes, but not before the cameras have caught images that will soon be broadcast around the world. Including in Moscow.

The next morning activists shut down every Gazprom station in Germany, locking themselves to the pumps.

This campaign can’t go after Putin, but his oil company is fair game.

Dima is staring at the locked door of his cell, thinking, okay, there’s this door, it’s solid steel, twenty centimetres thick, the key to open it is the size of a shoe and I don’t have it. Now, I don’t want it to be closed. I want to get out of here. Sure. But if I keep banging my head against that door, that door is not going to open. But I will have a bloody head. So I’ll still have a closed door and a bloody head, as opposed to having a closed door and no blood. Okay, so that means it’s better not to bang my head against the door. And it’s the same with the situation I’m in, the piracy charge, the fifteen years, the fear, the panic. It doesn’t help me. And it doesn’t help to beg for freedom. It changes nothing, so I’m just going to let it go. I’m going to get my head down and do my time, in the knowledge that people on the outside are doing all they can to get me out of here and there’s absolutely nothing I can do to help them.

Ne Ver’ Ne Boysya Ne Prosi.

Don’t Trust Don’t Fear Don’t Beg.

For some of the activists, their cellmates are invaluable tutors in the techniques vital to psychologically survive the ordeal of incarceration. The Russians sit them down on their bunks and explain how to avoid antagonising the guards, how to stay on the right side of the bosses in the kotlovaya cells, how to communicate with their friends, how to fill the days and the long nights, how to hold on to their sanity.

Frank is sitting on his bunk with his head in his hands. His thoughts have been going round and round, faster and faster, and sometimes there’s no way to stop them. He’s thinking about his kids back home. If it’s fifteen years he may be a grandfather before he gets out. His girl is sixteen, his son is thirteen. He could even die in here, then he’ll never see his kids again. That could happen. That could actually happen. And if that happens…

‘Frank, no. Turma racing. Bad bad.’

He looks up. It’s Yuri, the quieter of his two cellmates. Because he’s younger than Boris, Yuri is deferential to him. He rarely starts conversations but now he’s looking at Frank and speaking softly.

‘ Turma racing. Bad, Frank. Bad.’

Frank shakes his head. ‘What?’

‘ Turma racing.’

‘What’s turma racing?’

‘This. Prison. This is turma. Russian word for prison. Racing. Your head. Round and round. Bad, Frank. Bad. Must stop. Not good.’

And Frank nods. Yes, Yuri’s right. This is one of those moments when you’re lying there and the vortex of panic is starting to spin, sucking you in, pulling you down to a dark place. You thought this thing ten seconds ago and now you’re thinking it again and it feels even more frightening.

Turma racing.

In a cell down the corridor Dima can feel a tight fist of fear in his stomach. It’s been there since that first interrogation at the Investigative Committee, and in his darkest moments he can feel it clenching tight. Sometimes it gets too hard to bear, when he’s been thinking too much about that locked door that won’t be opening anytime soon, or when he’s been looking at the sky through the bars, thinking, will I ever see the sky without those bars? Will I ever see a sky that’s not in squares?

In those moments he goes uyti v tryapki . It means ‘into the rags’. When the prisoners want to turn off the external world, when they need to turn away from their lives, when they want to turn their backs on everything, then they smother their bodies with all their loose clothes, their towel, everything they have. And under that pile of their earthly possessions they face the wall on their bunk and go uyti v tryapk . That’s what they call it, and Dima goes there often.

Joy and depression flood the cells in turn, but their arrival can rarely be predicted. When Dima finds out there’s a well-stocked library here, he’s ecstatic, this is great, he can be here for years, he’ll read books during the day and at night he’ll be on the road. Fuck this, man. I can do this! Then he turns on the TV and sees Medvedev, the Prime Minister of Russia, and he’s saying, ‘Well, pirates or not, these are very serious criminals. They’re threatening the very livelihood of Russia.’ And suddenly Dima is in freefall, it really is going to be fifteen years, and for the next hour he’s turma racing.