The Moscow Times : Khodorkovsky's Prison Kept a Secret

By Nabi Abdullaev
Staff Writer

The whereabouts of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev were kept a secret by the authorities through Tuesday, stirring speculation that they had been sent to serve out their eight-year sentences in the country's most remote prisons.

The Federal Prison Service said Tuesday that there may be no word on Khodorkovsky or Lebedev for up to two weeks, depending on which prison they had been sent to.

Campaigners for prison reform who are themselves former prisoners said that, based on their experience, the days spent traveling would be difficult for the two former tycoons, as prisoners are often treated badly during transfers.

It was not clear how well Lebedev, who has suffered from poor health during the two years he has spent in detention, would cope during the journey.

"We have no information about Khodorkovsky's location," prison service spokeswoman Svetlana Silvanovich said Tuesday.

She dismissed as unrealistic a report by Interfax on Tuesday morning that Khodorkovsky could have been sent to a labor camp on the Yamal Peninsula near the Arctic Circle, and that Lebedev had been sent to a prison camp in the Far East region of Chita. The Interfax report had cited a source close to Khodorkovsky's family.


An aide to Anatoly Zamsha, the head of the prison service in the Yamal-Nenets autonomous district, said by telephone Tuesday that she knew nothing about Khodorkovsky coming to serve out his term in one of the region's prisons.

Other prisons named in the Russian press as possible recipients of Khodorkovsky included ones in the Saratov, Perm and Sverdlovsk regions.

Khodorkovsky and Lebedev were moved from Moscow's Matrosskaya Tishina detention center over the weekend, their lawyers said Monday, citing the prison's warden, Fikret Tagiyev.

The two men were convicted of fraud and tax evasion in May, and last month had their nine-year sentences reduced on appeal to eight years.

"By law, Khodorkovsky and Lebedev should have been transferred to a prison camp in the region where they used to live or where they were convicted," Khodorkovsky's defense lawyer Yury Shmidt said by telephone Tuesday.

But Igor Trunov, a lawyer with no connection to Khodorkovsky and Lebedev's case, said Tuesday that the rule did not apply to people convicted in Moscow or St. Petersburg, as these cities did not have labor camps.

The two medium-security labor camps closest to Moscow are in the Moscow region towns of Zelenograd and Kolomna.

The law does not specify the means of transportation for a convict's transfer, the maximum time it should take or whether it should be by the shortest route, Shmidt said.

"Khodorkovsky and Lebedev could end up in a prison camp in the Moscow region -- but after a monthlong train journey to Magadan, in the Far East, and back," he said.

The law says that a convict's relatives should be notified about his whereabouts only after he arrives at his final destination. Officials are not allowed to give out information about a convict while he is en route or awaiting a further transfer at a transit detention center, said Silvanovich, the prison service spokeswoman.

She said the most remote prison camp someone convicted in Moscow could be sent to was in the Chelyabinsk region.

"Usually, it takes seven days for a convict to get there by train," she said. "Then add on the same amount of time for a letter from the prison administration there to reach the convict's relatives in Moscow."

Trunov and the head of the nongovernmental organization Moscow Center for Prison Reform, Valery Abramkin, who both served time in Soviet prisons, said that Khodorkovsky and Lebedev were now probably undergoing the toughest ordeal of their jail time.

"It has been like this since Stalin's time. After following a semblance of order during the trial, the system outdoes itself in cruelty in the transfer of convicts, with the only aim being to shock them and break their spirit," Trunov said.

A six-berth sleeping compartment in a platskartny vagon, the most basic railroad car with bunks on either side of an open corridor, can be crammed full with 20 prisoners sitting side by side on the bunks, Abramkin said.

"At stops, the guards pull people out and make them lie down or kneel down in the dirt and snow for hours, clubbing them and setting dogs on them," Abramkin said.

Guards extort money from convicts to allow them to use the restroom, or just rob them blind, Abramkin and Trunov said. Trunov added that most convicts had to use plastic bags to relieve themselves and then throw the bags out of the window.

"As the guards change all the time, they cannot be traced. So they are extremely violent with the convicts and take every opportunity to steal their belongings," Trunov said.

The media spotlight on Khodorkovsky's case may spare him some of the horrors of the transfer, Abramkin said.

"Senior prison service officials care about their reputation and do not need the notoriety that may come from the Khodorkovsky case," Abramkin said. He added, however, that prison officials did not care much about improving transfer conditions for most ordinary convicts, including teenagers.

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Igor Sutyagin, a former scholar at Moscow's respected USA and Canada Institute who is serving a 15-year prison sentence for espionage, has been told he will be transferred from a high-security prison camp in the Udmurtia region to a prison in the Moscow region, his lawyer Anna Stavitskaya said Tuesday.

"He has gotten accustomed to the environment in the Udmurtia prison, he even produced a newsletter there. I don't know why he has to be transferred now," she said. "Also, the transfer is something extremely fearful."

Stavitskaya said the decision to move Sutyagin could have resulted from the Sept. 20-22 visit to Moscow by Christos Pourgourides, a rapporteur for the Council of Europe. Pourgourides had asked Russian officials why Sutyagin was sent to serve his sentence in Udmurtia and not in the Moscow region, where he was sentenced, or in the Kaluga region, where he lived, Stavitskaya said.

The Moscow Times, 10.12.2005