Nadezhda Tolokonnikova has disappeared into the gulag transit system between Russia’s penal colonies, and her family is worried that authorities are trying to crush her spirit.
Early
in the morning on October 21, prison guards put Nadezhda
Tolokonnikova—nicknamed Tolokno, the most famous face of the Pussy Riot
band—on a train and sent her away from her Penal Colony#14 in Mordovia
region.
This
is the secret “etap,” the gulag-style phase of transit still used in
Russia, which ships prisoners off, often to an unknown destination.
Tolokonnikova’s husband, Petr Verzilov, told The Daily Beast that the
last time he received information about his wife was over a week ago,
and that the train had taken her through Ulyanovsk and Ufa to
Chelyabinsk. He immediately flew to Siberia to look for his wife. But in
spite of all his efforts to find out where she was, officials preferred
to keep Tolokonnikova’s location secret. The punk-turned-inmate has
effectively vanished.
“This
is how the system makes a person disappear without a trace for weeks,”
Verzilov said. The time during which an inmate is transported from
prison to prison is a veritable gray zone in the Russian corrective
system that can last from two weeks to two months, depending on the
number of stops at transit prisons on the way. So far it has been 13
days since Tolokonnikova’s lawyer saw her for the last time on October
18th.
“After two hunger strikes
she had in October she must be still weak and physically vulnerable—I
am very worried about her,”said another Pussy Riot member, Yekaterina
Samutsevitch, to The Daily Beast.And Tolokonnikova’s five-year-old
daughter, Gera, was upset when she learned that visits with her mother
have now been postponed for an uncertain period of time.
Tolokonnikova’s
supporters and family say they feel proud that there was a rare,
satisfactory reaction to her recent hunger strike: prison authorities
fulfilled one of her demands and transferred her to a different colony.
The letter she wrote from prison was a declaration of war against
violations in prisons. Once again, already from behind bars,
Tolokonnikova managed to grab the world’s attention and now an NGO is
shaping up in Mordovia to peruse with defense of inmates’ rights.
But
there is still a long way to go to win her freedom. And there are
seemingly no end to the punishments for that one feminist song the band
members attempted to perform in February 2012, in protest against the
Orthodox Church at Christ the Saviour Cathedral for interfering with
state politics in Russia. Why would officials want to give a harder time
to Tolokonnikova now, a few months before her release in March, 2014?
“Officials intend to teach Nadia a lesson for her protest behavior even
behind the bars,” Verzilov said. “But they have no legal methods except
for keeping her locked without a chance for her to stay in touch with us
The war goes on.”
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