A short visit sucks. You talk from about three meters away, the whole conversation is filmed by some guy with a video camera, and touching is forbidden—even shaking hands.
A long visit is wonderful. They give you a fairly decent-looking room for three days, like a Soviet-era business-travel hotel. Two beds, one of them a double. A fridge, a TV, a DVD player. The kitchen, shower, and toilet are shared among ten similar little rooms, but everything is quite clean and respectable.
You can bring DVD discs with greetings and all sorts of videos from family at home, but they screen them first: - To make sure there’s nothing prohibited. - And what’s prohibited? - Well... sex.
You can bring a huge amount of food to a long visit. Everyone does it—hauling enormous bags like shuttle traders (small-scale cross-border merchants common in the 1990s). The prison colony administration is fine with it, because the inmate can’t take anything back to his barracks afterward and feed the others. Whatever isn’t eaten in three days has to be thrown away—or taken back with you.
You sit there with the person in ordinary clothes, eating some KFC wings (in general, I’ve noticed that McDonald’s and KFC are very popular requests from inmates), and for a moment you barely notice it’s a prison.
Then, when it turns out that you can’t even leave the floor with those nice little rooms—you can only be let out—you snap back to reality pretty fast_._
Needless to say, I wasn’t there for three days, just four hours, and then I left, leaving Oleg with his wife.
The administration strongly asks you not to photograph anything, even from outside (and from inside you couldn’t anyway—you have to hand everything over). It’s not entirely clear why there’s so much secrecy. It’s a fence, it’s barbed wire. Probably it’s the general mindset of everyone who works in a "secure facility"—just in case, nothing is allowed.
- Can the barracks unit number be published as part of the mailing address? - Better not. - Why? - It’s not allowed. The letter will get there anyway.
Oleg sends his regards to everyone and thanks them for the birthday wishes. He also asked me to pass along a special hello to the newlyweds, Sasha and Alina, who sent him an amazing letter all the way from Goa that really boosted his spirits in Butyrka (a well-known Moscow prison). Hello, newlyweds.