Lev Shlosberg

17 February 2026

by Lev Shlosberg*

On his daily prison routine. Continuation of the diaries of a political prisoner from Pskov Fortress

by Lev Shlosberg

Source: Novaya Gazeta

Prison is a mechanism for standardising a person’s life down to the smallest detail. A person who ends up in prison finds themselves in a system that has been fine-tuned over many years, in which practically every step is anticipated, planned and calculated.

A person in prison cannot take any initiative, cannot take any action. Life within the prison mechanism goes on as usual, just as a clock wound up for the long-term ticks steadily.

A person in prison is not supposed to have any notions about how they would like their life or its daily routine to be. A prisoner doesn’t need to think, ask questions or organise their own life in any way — it is organised for them. In prison a person has no need to exercise their own will or take their own decisions.

In such a situation, especially if it becomes prolonged, a person’s most essential qualities and traits — will, motivation, independence, responsibility — may atrophy.

You cannot simply switch them off temporarily with the flick of a switch, only to switch them back on again later. Failing to act as a person, even if only for a limited time, transforms a person from a subject into an object, becoming the object of the actions of other people and forces.

To avoid losing oneself, you need to create your own way of life in prison which, without disrupting the prison order or coming into conflict with it, is the result of your own efforts, your own decisions, and your own actions. Figuratively speaking, it is like inserting your own cog into the larger mechanism: one that does not affect the mechanism’s operation but organises your life in such a way that you can say to yourself: ‘This is happening because I decided and did it myself.’

True, the vast majority of these decisions and actions will always be linked to the routine of prison life. But from the things that are possible but not compulsory, you shape your way of life, and no one can do that except you yourself.

The motto of such a way of life could be: ‘I don’t have to do it, but I do.’ Because I want to, I decided to, and I did.

Exercise is recommended but not compulsory. You do it yourself, and it gets your day off to a good start. Simple exercises. Squats, push-ups. Sit-ups. Plank. After 15 minutes, your body is ready for the day. A bath is only once a week, but every morning you wash your hair and wipe down your body, and every evening before bed, you have a warm foot bath. You must always be clean. A sense of cleanliness is part of self-respect. After washing, tea or milk with oat biscuits from the prison shop. That’s my first breakfast.

Washing your own clothes is entirely up to you. The feeling of clean clothes is part of the feeling of a clean body. I can’t even remember the last time I washed by hand. We — the consumers of modern civilisation — deal with washing by pressing two buttons on the washing machine: on and off. In prison, I’ve learnt to wash light and dark colours in the same water: light first, then dark. Thanks to my friends, a lovely little kettle provides me with hot water for washing and laundry. And I bought the ever-reliable ‘AIST-Universal’ in the prison shop.

Yes, it takes a long time. But the process and the result are satisfying. Soaking. The main wash. Three rinses in warm water, two in cool. Done. The horizontal heating pipe is my magnificent drying rack. Everything dries in a few hours, including terry towels and trousers.

Hand washing, as is well known, is a form of tactile psychotherapy. After a long hearing at Pskov Regional Court on 12 December, which upheld the order for my detention, I returned to my cell and felt that I needed some kind of physical activity to release the negative emotions I was feeling. So I set about washing my underwear.

Your way of life in prison is made up of details that matter only to the individual.

If you’re used to shaving, you must shave. You need to see your face in the shard of mirror embedded in the tiled wall above the washbasin, just as you’re used to seeing yourself. No one else needs this but you. You have to respect your own face, your own habits and traditions.

Prisoners are provided with state-issued crockery: aluminium bowls three times a day, and on signing for them – an aluminium spoon and a plastic mug. There’s no problem with using a spoon that thousands of mouths have eaten from. Wash it – and that’s that. But your table is your table. My friends sent me a set of plastic tableware, and I bought a new aluminium spoon and a new mug from the prison shop. Because my table is my joy.

There are clothes for the cell, and there are clothes for exercise. In your cell, you’re in your home trousers; for exercise, you put on your prison trousers, even though you don’t need to go outside — the exercise ‘yards’ are attached to the sleeping block. It’s simply a habit of keeping to the uniform — part of your way of life: at home, in your home clothes; on the street, in your street clothes.

Walks in prison are a rather peculiar affair. The exercise yard is a stone ‘cage’ measuring roughly 3 by 5 metres, with a reinforced wall of thick bars in place of a ceiling, wire mesh over the reinforcement, and a roof above it all; and between the roof and the outer wall of the ‘cage’ there is a grille and a web of barbed wire. It is through these that you can see that very ‘strip of sky’ which Eva Merkacheva wrote about. Unless, of course, the strip of sky is blocked by the wall of a neighbouring building.

Many prisoners dislike walks in such a situation and refuse to go. I always go for a walk. A walk is movement. A walk is fresh air, which, unlike the ‘strip of sky’, is always present in the walking ‘cage.’ The ‘cages’ can be wider (almost 4 metres) or narrower (just over 2 metres). You ‘trace’ ellipses along the ‘cage,’ with the rules of the remand prison’s internal regulations or some FM station playing in the background.

Often, a staff member will pop in before the end of the walk (one hour) and ask: ‘Going home or still walking?’ — ‘How much time is left?’ — ‘10 minutes.’ — ‘I’ll have another walk.’ And again, a series of clockwise ‘ellipses.’

A particular focus of cleanliness is the cell in which you live. In correspondence with family and friends, I began to refer to the cell as a room. Yes, if anyone says that a cell is not a room, let them be the first to cast a stone at me. But it is not a matter of the clash of concepts. A cell is a place of confinement. A room is a place of life.

The first thing I did in my room (at first a quarantine cell, then a permanent one) was to scrub every object in it. In quarantine, I used a sink cloth left to me by my predecessor; in my permanent room, a household sponge bought from the prison shop. The bed, including the top bunk, which you don’t sleep on but do touch. A table. A bench. A shelf in four parts. A washbasin. Twelve white tiles above it, one of which has a small mirror set into it. A corner shelf above the washbasin. A stand for the drinking water jug. A coat hook — a metal bracket with four welded hooks. A radiator. Heating pipes. A ‘feed slot’ in the door.

When I was already in my permanent cell, friends passed me a large soft cloth for mopping the floor, and wet cleaning became easy. You have to run your hand over every single item, literally — to wash your own personal space with your own hands. This is part of that very feeling of cleanliness that helps you feel alright.

There are some oddities associated with keeping things clean. In the new cell, there was no plastic basin, which is necessary for washing and doing laundry. I was surprised, because there had been one in the quarantine cell — brand new, spotless, recently bought. At the very first morning roll call, I mentioned this to the staff. ‘No basin?’ they exclaimed in surprise and promised to find one. The next morning I repeated my request. At last, they brought me a basin. No doubt, it had once been the identical twin of that handsome specimen I’d been given in quarantine. But life had treated it harshly.

It’s impossible to guess what they’d done to it, but in three places on the outside, its red sides were dented inwards, as if it had been placed on a crooked, red-hot tripod. Perhaps the poor thing had been used for more than its intended purpose. The decorative inlays in the handles had been knocked out. From the outside, the wretched thing looked as though it had spent some time on a building site. It was impossible to imagine washing my hair (or even my feet) in this thing, let alone doing my laundry. At best, it was fit for mopping the floor.

Meanwhile, time was passing. I ordered a basin from the prison shop (it was on the price list). But it wasn’t in stock. I asked friends to send one in. But they refused to let the basin into the prison, treating it like an English spy — basins aren’t on the list of items permitted for delivery. It’s a paradox, of course: the basin is on the list of items that a prisoner must be provided with as a matter of course, but if it’s not in the cell, it cannot be passed from the outside to the prisoner — the Ministry of Justice’s instructions do not allow this.

During the deputy head’s rounds of the remand prison, I showed him the basin, bearing all the marks of its ordeal. ‘Well, it’s a good basin!’ said the deputy head of the remand prison. ‘There are no holes in it!’

There really were no holes in the basin. I told him about the results of my efforts to find a basin. The deputy head confirmed that the basin would not be allowed in a parcel. ‘What if we make a donation of property to the remand prison and have the basin sent here?’ I suggested what seemed to me to be a brilliant solution. The deputy head understood me instantly: ‘But then I’d have to set up a committee, put it on the balance sheet, appoint someone to be responsible for it…’ A look of genuine sadness crossed the deputy head’s face. “This is an LRDI — a low-value, rapidly depreciating item that can be written off the moment it’s put into service,” I said, pointedly demonstrating my knowledge of the balance sheet. But the deputy head didn’t react to this display of my accounting literacy and looked at the basin with undisguised confidence that it would work out with me. The basin stood modestly on the floor, its very presence suggesting that if I wanted to keep things clean, we were stuck with each other.

That very day I accepted reality; the basin was scrubbed several times in hot water with washing-up liquid and took its place in my household. Because cleanliness is the basis of order.

But I stubbornly included the basin in every order I placed with the prison shop. And on 20 January, my persistence paid off — they brought me a shiny, ultramarine-coloured plastic basin.

Work has become an important part of my life in prison. My main job here is writing letters. There will be a separate story about letters. Almost every day from 6.30 am I work — writing letters to friends and to people I had never met before, who wrote to me themselves after my imprisonment.

This daily intellectual work shapes my way of thinking in prison. I constantly have things to think about, words to find and writing to do – and this gives sense and meaning to my way of life in prison.

* Designated by the Russian authorities as a ‘foreign agent’.

Translated by RiR