No Booze But Lots of Tea for New Year's

By Carl Schreck
Staff Writer

Russian tradition has it that how you celebrate New Year's will dictate the course of the next 12 months. This New Year's Eve, hundreds of thousands of people will hope for a better 2006 as they welcome the New Year behind bars.

What the country's most famous inmate, Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky, has planned for Saturday night is something of a mystery. But National Bolshevik Party leader Eduard Limonov, who was once the best-known prisoner, says any festivities are dependent on the goodwill of the warden.

Federal Prison Service head Yury Kalinin announced earlier in December that the number of people in the country's prisons and detention centers jumped by more than 45,000 this year, meaning that more than 800,000 will be incarcerated for New Year's and Orthodox Christmas on Jan. 7.

A late-arriving prisoner might be former Nuclear Power Minister Yevgeny Adamov, whom Swiss authorities agreed to extradite to Russia according to a court ruling made public Thursday.

Thanks to local charity organizations across the country and a little rule-bending by prison authorities, the holidays have become more bearable, said Valery Abramkin, head of the Moscow Center for Prison Reform, a think tank.

"Luckily, compared with 10 years ago, local communities have started to think more about prisoners," said Abramkin, a former dissident who

spent six years in Soviet-era jails. "They send care packages and letters. In general, you could say citizens have become more sympathetic to the plight of prisoners."

Since 1993, Abramkin's organization has been conducting a holiday program whereby it delivers presents and supplies to juvenile and women's prisons in western Russia. This year, the organization is visiting about 10 prisons, delivering envelopes, notebooks and postcards, as well as fruit and chocolates, Abramkin said.

"The visits will run into February," he said. "We can't make it to all of the prisons by Christmas."

Officially, no alcohol is permitted, even as part of New Year's festivities, while lights out is at 10 p.m. on Dec. 31 and reveille is as usual at 6 a.m. on New Year's Day, a Federal Prison Service spokeswoman said. "If they want to watch New Year's Eve television shows, including the presidential address, they can watch a video recording the next day," said the spokeswoman, who declined to give her name.

It was unclear whether Khodorkovsky and his fellow inmates would have a chance to celebrate.

Khodorkovsky's lawyer Anton Drel, who returned to Moscow after visiting his client in the Krasnokamensk prison, near the Chinese border, on Wednesday, said the two had not had enough time to discuss New Year's preparations.

Maxim Dbar, a spokesman for Khodorkovsky's press center, said it was up to the prison administration to decide whether to allow inmates to stay up until midnight.

Prison officials could not be reached for comment Thursday.

While alcohol is taboo, Limonov said the administration of the Saratov region detention facility, where he was held during his trial on charges of illegal arms possession and terrorism, turned a blind eye to the 10 p.m. bed call on Dec. 31, 2002.

"I returned from court and ate smoked chicken and drank chifir with my comrades," Limonov said, referring to a strong brew of tea that gives an extreme caffeine buzz. "Then everyone was allowed to watch television until 6 a.m. -- the only night they didn't make us go to bed at 10 p.m."

Limonov said that during his detention in Moscow's Lefortovo prison in 2001, the prison warden wished the inmates a happy New Year shortly after midnight, while prison guards could be heard drinking and playing cards in the hallway.

"There was no alcohol for us. We were in a red prison," Limonov said, referring to a prison that is controlled by the camp administration, as opposed to so-called black prisons, which are regulated and enforced by jailed crime bosses.

Despite prison dry laws, procuring booze for New Year's toasts should not be a problem for many prisoners, said Naum Nim, editor of the magazine Nevolye, which deals with prison life.

"These days, you can get anything you want in prison, especially if you have money," said Nim, a Soviet-era dissident who twice spent New Year's behind bars -- in 1985 and 1986 -- before his release in 1987.

Nim's assessment echoed the words of Deputy Prosecutor General Sergei Fridinsky, who vented his frustrations at a Dec. 16 news conference. He said that for a price, many prison staff provided inmates with alcohol, cigarettes and cell phones.

Guards at one detention center allowed a suspect to meet with a woman and then drank vodka with him, Fridinsky said, Rossiiskaya Gazeta reported.

According to Nim, celebrating New Year's in prison with alcohol was unthinkable during Soviet times. Tea was the object of desire.

"Usually, it was almost impossible to get any tea," Nim said. "But for New Year's, we would get tea, cake and cigarettes. But it wasn't a typical cake.

"There are more goods now and prisoners have access to tea and baked goods. But we would make our own pastry out of sukhariki with sweetened condensed milk," he said, referring to the dried bread snack.

The prison service spokeswoman confirmed that the administration in each prison would decide what kinds of New Year's festivities, if any, they would allow. "In many prisons, the inmates themselves organize concerts and perform skits, anything to raise their spirits," she said.

Prisoners may have a special menu for New Year's Eve, including pastries and salads, and some prisons are spruced up with holiday decorations, including New Year's trees, she said.

Prison officials often cut inmates some slack on New Year's so they can enjoy their own celebrations, Nim said.

"They want to get to the table themselves to eat and drink," Nim said.

Overzealous partying by prison guards could provide the more restless inmates with a window of opportunity, according to an essay by St. Petersburg journalist Yury Gavryuchenkov posted on the Zhurnal Samizdat web site.

Describing his New Year's Eve on Dec. 31, 1997, in a St. Petersburg detention facility, Gavryuchenkov wrote that the guards fell asleep at about 3 a.m. "If we had been able to open the cell door, we could have gone directly to Finlandsky Station to pick up some beer. But we couldn't get to the lock, so we just kept watching television."

In the most daring New Year's jailbreak in recent memory, Yevgeny Pechyonkin crawled to freedom through an 85-meter tunnel he had constructed at the UF-91/3 prison colony in Novosibirsk on Dec. 31, 2000.

Prison guards noticed he was missing only on New Year's Day. Police eventually caught up with Pechyonkin, a convicted conman and an engineer by trade, two years later.

Other holiday season escapes have been less successful. Eighteen teenagers wanting to go home for the holidays fled a prison colony near St. Petersburg on Dec. 23, 2002. Most of them were captured within a few hours, and the rest were rounded up a week later.

Staff Writer Anatoly Medetsky contributed to this report.

The Moscow Times, 12.30.2005