The men are loaded into different vans. The drivers turn the engines. The women are heading for SIZO-5, some of the men for SIZO-4. But most of them are driven to St Petersburg SIZO-1.
Kresty.
It’s a crumbling stack of red brick and barred windows on the banks of the river Neva and would look like a derelict Victorian mill or an asylum if not for the distinctive onion domes of the Alexander Nevsky cathedral that rise from the middle of the complex. Kresty means ‘crosses’. The nineteenth-century architect who designed the prison had it built in the shape of two crucifixes, so the prisoners could better repent of their sins.[111]
The prison housed the enemies of tsarism, then after Lenin’s seizure of power Kresty housed enemies of the new communist government. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn wrote: ‘During the whole year [1918] it would certainly seem that more than a thousand were shot in Kresty alone’ – of whom six were peasants guilty of clipping excess hay from a communal farm to feed their cows.
During the long decades of Soviet rule Kresty held both criminals and political dissidents from what was then called Leningrad, Russia’s most liberal city. Anna Akhmatova, one of Russia’s greatest poets, would wait for hours outside the prison walls in the hope of delivering a package to her son, the historian Lev Gumilev.[112] Akhmatova captured the anguish of the relatives of Kresty’s inmates in her famous poem, ‘Requiem’.
In the preface to the poem, she describes how she was prompted to put her experience into words after spending seventeen months outside the prison gates. She saw ‘a woman with blue lips. She had, of course, never heard of me; but she suddenly came out of that trance so common to us all and whispered in my ear (everybody spoke in whispers there): “Can you describe this?” And I said, “Yes, I can.”’
Escape from Kresty is almost impossible, but many have tried. In 1946 a prisoner named Volkov removed bricks from the wall of his cell, one by one, and put them in his chamber pot, which he emptied outside. Eventually he created a hole to the street, and one night he made his break. Having secured his freedom he went immediately to the public baths, where he was recognised by a surprised but diligent off-duty guard. It is said that Volkov was returned to Kresty humiliated but clean.[113]
In 1984 two prisoners forged KGB identification papers from cardboard and red thread. They scoured magazines for pictures of uniformed officers who resembled them, cut out those photos and stuck them to the card. Their counterfeiting skills were so advanced that nobody at the gates of Kresty thought twice about letting them stroll out into the street to embrace freedom.[114]
The Soviet Union was dissolved on 26 December 1991, but Kresty remained. Four years later, under the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, a monument was erected on the opposite bank of the River Neva, commemorating the victims of political repression. A year after that another monument was installed in Kresty itself, this time to the poet Anna Akhmatova. But recognition of past crimes did little to improve conditions there. By the end of the millennium Kresty housed ten thousand prisoners – three times its capacity – and was suffering a virulent outbreak of tuberculosis.[115]
As the avtozak pulls into the grounds of the famous prison the men see barbed wire and the decrepit, dominating cathedral that rises up from the middle of the jail, built in the same style and with the same bricks as the incarceration blocks. At the top of a white dome are two crosses. One is a typical Russian Orthodox cross, the other a more familiar T shape. From a certain angle the two crosses, overlaid, take on a very particular profile, and Dima remembers that it’s this shape that is the design of the prison tattoo that professional criminals have inked around their fingers across Russia – the U of the Russian Orthodox cross, over a T.
Gathered in the reception area are fourteen of the Arctic 30, including Pete, Frank, Phil, Roman and Dima. The rest of the men have been taken to St Petersburg SIZO-4, an isolation unit across town. The eight women are being taken to the all-female SIZO-5.
The activists at Kresty are processed, then led to their new cells. Dima steps through the door and puts down his pink bag. The door slams behind him. The smell of fresh paint fills his nostrils. A man gets up from his bunk and introduces himself as Vasily. He’s in his mid-thirties, well-built, very tall, wearing expensive sports gear.
‘Welcome.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Please, sit down.’
‘Thanks.
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘Sure.’
Vasily bends down in the corner of the cell and produces an object that makes Dima visibly flinch. ‘Wow, that’s a big motherfucker of a tea boiler.’
‘Thank you.’
‘In Murmansk we had these little sort of coils that you put inside the glass. But that looks like a ten-watt massive fucking tea-boiling pot. Are you even allowed that in here?’
The man shrugs, ‘Of course not.’
Then, while the water is boiling, Vasily says, ‘Dima, we do not eat prison food here in my cell.’
‘No?’
‘No, we do not.’
He opens up the fridge – ‘We have a fridge in our cell?’ – and pulls out a French baguette, cuts off a slice, spreads a knob of butter over it, produces a jar of red caviar, spreads a spoonful onto the bread, closes the sandwich with a flourish and holds it out. And Dima thinks, no, we’re not in Murmansk any more.
Vasily tells Dima his story. He rented out a house to some students who grew nine marijuana plants, and the investigators say he knew all about it. He’s been in Kresty a little over a year, waiting for his trial on narcotics charges. But Dima knows enough about Russia to suspect that’s not what Vasily is really in for. The clothes, the food, the fridge, the attitude. This guy’s a bandit. Rich. Influential. Sorted. A post-Soviet killer-type bandit.
‘The cells were all painted two weeks ago,’ says Vasily. ‘Refitted entirely for you. Kresty has the doroga but you aren’t allowed to be part of it. The guards told us, “If you want to stay in these lovely cells with the Greenpeace people, behave.”’
Then he shows Dima an order book for the prison shop. It has five pages of food to choose from.
‘You order on one day and get it the next day. It works. For people like me anyway. And you too, Dima. You too.’
In a cell down the corridor Frank is sitting on his bunk and looking out through the window. He can see the onion domes of the cathedral through the bars. He imagines Trotsky being marched down the corridors. Many people died here, Frank knows that. Many political prisoners. He can feel the weight of history. The weight of hopelessness. Frank was brought up a Catholic and has a fondness for ornate churches. This cathedral in the middle of the prison looks beautiful, but utterly incongruous in its setting. He writes a note to the governor requesting a tour of the church and hands it to a guard.
Pete Willcox is sitting on the edge of his new bed, writing in his diary.
12th November
Got to the prison around noon, suspected and neglected and put away. The cell is about half the size and I have a roommate. So it sucks. The view though has a bit of a large canal out to the left and a Russian Orthodox church to the right. Reminds me of George’s Cross we put up on Amchitka. I am not doing very well. Is this shit ever going to end? My roomy Igor is twice my size but very nice. He has been here 18 months. I do not know what for. He is very hygienic. Tonight he looked at dinner and said it was garp [shit]. So he took the sardines, pulled out the bones, and made a very nice sardine and noodle dinner. We do not talk much. All in all, I would much rather be back in Murmansk.