Prisoners In Russian Jails Living In Squalor

MOSCOW - In the jail known as Sailor's Rest, every detainee looks exhausted.

Every dim cell is a dormitory crammed with bunk beds, each bed shared by up to four men. They sleep fitfully, in shifts, while others must stand. Cigarette smoke and clotheslines full of graying underwear add to the dank, unbearable closeness. The toilet, behind the curtain in the corner, is a hole in the floor, fueling the stench. Only the cockroaches thrive.

"I see everything as through a fog. Most of the time I am not sure whether I am asleep or awake," says Vladimir Kopylov, on trial after 4 1/2 years in Sailor's Rest for allegedly defaulting on a Soviet bank loan. "We breathe like fish out of water. For lack of oxygen, it's sometimes hard to light a match.

"My reserves of endurance are gone," the frail, 47-year-old businessman adds in a courtroom interview. "I cannot imagine I will ever leave this hell."

Kopylov is one of nearly a quarter-million people in Russia who are imprisoned but not proven guilty, and their ranks are swelling as overworked police and judges wage a crude uphill battle against crime. Officials acknowledge that the long wait for trial and the nightmarish conditions behind bars are the most widespread human-rights abuses of Russia's post-Soviet era.

Visits to two pretrial prisons, in Moscow and Tula, offered a look at the overcrowding and its effects: spreading disease, shortages of food and medicine, the suffocating stench. Officials in both prisons said they feel powerless to improve things and fear a summer of unrest.

In interviews elsewhere, former inmates and prisoners-rights advocates described frequent, if not systematic, beatings by guards. They said many inmates are disciplined by being stripped to their underwear in cold isolation cells, where there is even less food and no bedding.

Physical punishment is also reported in Russia's labor camps, which hold about 650,000 sentenced convicts. Labor is still compulsory, but camp conditions have improved since Soviet times; they are less crowded and more humane than pretrial prisons - so much so that some detainees confess to crimes they didn't commit just to move from hell to purgatory.

Russia's treatment of prisoners is not exceptional on a global scale. It cannot be compared to the terrors of Stalin or the abuses in many countries run by dictators or brutalized by war. Some jurisdictions in the United States and Western Europe also impose harsher conditions on suspects before trial than on convicted criminals.

But Russia has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, and the lot of its prisoners is a volatile, if hidden, indicator of progress from Soviet dictatorship to the rule of law. By its own measure, President Boris Yeltsin's government is faltering.

"To be quite frank, the conditions of our pretrial detention centers, by international standards, may be classified as torture," Maj. Gen. Yuri Kalinin, the Interior Ministry official who oversees most of Russia's prisons, said in an interview. "It is deprivation of sleep, air, space.

"In fact," he added, "there isn't a single detention center in the country with the elementary conditions required by our law."

Few go free before their trials

Yeltsin's 1993 constitution proclaims that a person is innocent until proven guilty. But post-Soviet legal reform has barely touched the country's 164 pretrial prisons. The simplest of cases can drag up to 18 months before trial and a year or more in court. The prosecutor or judge during that time may deny visitation rights to a suspect's lawyer or family.

Few suspects go free before trial. The collapse of the omnipresent Soviet state has made judges reluctant to release prisoners to the custody of an employer or social organization. A bail system exists, but capitalist ownership rights are not entrenched, so the use of private property for bail is limited.

As a result, pretrial prison populations are growing. By law, a cell must have at least three square yards of space for each inmate; by that measure, the limit for all 164 prisons is 165,000 inmates. As of March 1, they held 240,657. Sailor's Rest, with a limit of 3,050, holds about 6,200 inmates, 2,000 more than a year ago.

Buildings from the 19th century

Part of the crowding problem is that many pretrial prisons were abolished in the late 1950s, after Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev declared that a crimeless, classless society was at hand. About two-thirds of the prisons remaining in Russia were built before 1900.

"This was built as a prison in 1751 under Czarina Elizabeth," Col. Yevgeny Mityayev informs visitors to his dungeon in Tula, 125 miles south of Moscow. "It hasn't changed much since."

Here, too, the cells are dark and overcrowded, but the strongest impression is the putrid odor. Prisoners get a shower once a week and fresh air one hour a day, in rooftop "exercise" cages just big enough to pace around in. There is one light touch: Mityayev allows pet cats.

As Russia grapples with organized crime, the colonel struggles to guard, feed and care for 2,100 criminal suspects, mostly the disorganized kind. Nikolai Nizhelsky, 32, landed here after the drunken January evening when he encountered a stranger and helped him lock a pig in a shed. The pig, it turns out, had been stolen.

"I didn't steal anything. I'm not pleading guilty," Nizhelsky protested. But justice is slow, and he's suffering heartburn and a skin rash he never had before. Asked why Nizhelsky cannot go free on bail, the colonel shrugged: "All he owns is a pair of trousers."

At labor colony, things are better

If he were to plead guilty, Nizhelsky could move to Tula's labor colony, a short walk and a world away.

There he might serve up to five years, but at least he would get more sunlight through bigger windows and his own bed. He would walk from classroom to lunchroom to factory, assembling electric heaters for a modest wage. If he behaved, he could go home for periodic 12-day visits.

All prison officials deny beating inmates. But Alexander Dmitrichenko, 16, interviewed in a juvenile labor camp, said he and his cellmates were often clubbed at random by drunken guards in the Tula dungeon until his 1993 conviction for stealing food.

Vil Mirzayanov, the dissident chemist who spent 27 days this year in Sailor's Rest, said he watched similar, pointless beatings. Kopylov, the businessman held in the same prison, told of being clubbed for refusing to share a cell with dysentery sufferers.

Scabies, tuberculosis rampant

Summer brings scabies, a skin rash spread by parasitic mites. Tuberculosis, incurable in damp cells, infects and kills prisoners at many times the rate in Russia as a whole, says Natalia Vezhnina, a prison doctor in Siberia's Keremovo region.

"Every day I pray for bad weather, because when it's too hot, epidemics and deaths are unavoidable," Col. Gennady Oreshkin, then director of Moscow's Butyrskaya pretrial prison, told the Moscow City Council last year.

No relief in sight

There is no relief in sight.

Parliament in February voted an amnesty that by autumn will free about 26,000 teenage, elderly, female, ailing and white-collar criminal suspects. But by then, prison officials estimate, 60,000 new suspects will be behind bars - the flotsam of Russia's rising crime wave.

Issues familiar in the West are just emerging here: Prison directors fault judges and judges fault police for piling on too many cases. Everyone blames Parliament for not voting enough money to fight crime. Police want more jails. Reformers want swifter trials and easier conditions for pretrial release.

Under enormous political pressure to catch criminals, police often forgo real investigation, beat prisoners into signing Soviet-style confessions, throw them in jail and hope the charges stick, according to judges and other officials.

Perhaps the most promising improvement so far is the gradual opening of the system to outside scrutiny. Kalinin, the national prison chief, cooperates with human-rights advocates. Letters from inmates denouncing abuses are read on radio and printed in newspapers, even if they are not acted upon.

But many who ran the Soviet gulag are still on the job - "jailers accustomed to total freedom from control by the outside," says Sergei Sirotkin, deputy chairman of Yeltsin's Human Rights Commission.

For now, the immediate problem is keeping all those crowded prisons from exploding. Thousands of inmates in Yekaterinburg and Orenburg have staged hunger strikes in recent months to protest harsh conditions, and Deputy Interior Minister Pyotr Mishchenkov warns that "a tiny spark could turn a trivial conflict into an outbreak of rioting."