24 August 2025
by Aleksandr Podrabinek
Source: Facebook
How do prison camp days play out? Naturally, there’s work—dull and exhausting; sleep—disturbed, sometimes with bed checks every two hours; and interaction with people not of your choosing. The prison camp leadership’s job is to keep the zek so busy that he has nothing of his own, so that he doesn’t even have time to think, so that he’s wholly subordinated to the bosses. Prison camp ‘rehabilitation’ has just one goal: to break the prisoner’s will, to turn him into an obedient robot carrying out any order from the bosses.
This especially concerns political prisoners, people of independent mind and principles of their own. The administration’s ultimate goal is to obtain the political prisoner’s voluntary submission, cheerful, self-motivated submission. This rarely works with anyone, though.
It hasn’t worked at all with political prisoner Valeria Zotova in Kostroma penal colony no. 3. The administration has persisted in suggesting she start down the path to reform—that is, cooperate with the bosses and participate in ‘public life’. Zotova refuses.
Recently the camp club showed a film—the Russian propaganda film Code Name Passenger. Here is what Wikipedia writes about this film: ‘The film’s action takes place in 2015. The film’s main hero is the fashionable Moscow writer and carefree party goer Nikolai Ryabinin. His brother volunteered for the war in the Donbass and went missing. Nikolai sets off in search of his brother and joins a detachment called the Aurora battalion, where his brother had served. There he acquires the ironic nickname “Passenger” and under the guidance of a battalion commander nicknamed “Trigger” reevaluates his own life and becomes a supporter of the separatists’.
Unimaginative, hack propaganda based on a novel by Aleksandr Prokhanov, Murder of Cities. Cheap goods, of course, like the author himself, but prisoners are required to swallow this cinematographic mess whole hog. Everyone’s chased into the club. Zotova refuses to go. In the end, that’s her right—to watch a film or not. But what does her right have to do with anything when we’re talking about Russian patriotism! Zotova is taken to the film room by force: watch our high art—see what talented directors made this, what artists acted! But Lera Zotova turns away from the screen and looks in the other direction.
Turn away from the propaganda—it’s simple. Simple but dangerous. The pressure on Valeria has not let up. There has been no end to the fault-finding. The bosses called in Zotova’s friend and spelled it out: ‘Either freedom or Zotova. You choose’. They are trying to create a vacuum around the political prisoner, to deprive her of contact with those close to her in any way. The young woman is 21 and she’s being harassed like a hardened criminal. Because according to the prison department’s idea, she should be like everyone else: be obedient, participate in the camp’s public life, act in performances, carry out the production plan, and not stand up to the bosses.
Translated by Marian Schwartz
