A SHIZO (punishment isolation cell) is a small room with a toilet and sink, a door, and a little window (with bars on both the door and the window—naturally, it’s a prison). In the Oryol SHIZO, the floors are wooden, which is much better than concrete.
They wake you up at 4:30 a.m. and put you to bed at 8:30 p.m.
You might ask: where’s the bed in SHIZO? Well, in SHIZO the bed is fastened up against the wall from 4:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. But there is a little stool and a table, so during the day you can sleep in ridiculous positions while sitting at the table, or in any position on the floor, with a moderate risk of chilling your kidneys—though the wooden floors help.
I was very lucky that before ending up in SHIZO, I read the book *Convict Conditioning*, where an 80-level inmate from America explains how to work out in a tiny cell using your own body weight. So I do push-ups off benches, the end of the bed, the sink, the floor, and the walls, and I’m now considering how to start doing push-ups off the ceiling.
All in all, SHIZO is tolerable. Well, until the administration starts provoking you. The administration of Penal Colony No. 5 really knows how to do that—it’s practically their specialty. For example, when they put me in isolation, they didn’t give me my glasses, contact lenses, religious literature, or subscription publications. Not exactly a lavish list, but it is what I’m entitled to by law. On the second day, when I was already preparing to move on to protest actions, they gave me everything; the next morning they unexpectedly even handed out vitamins and raised the temperature in the cells. I immediately sensed a catch. Everything became clear when the local Oryol ONK (Public Monitoring Commission) arrived—the same one that says, “Everything is very good in IK-5.” After my speech about my unlawful detention in SHIZO, about violations in the colony, and so on, the woman heading the commission said: “Well, you know how it is in our country—people steal, and the colony doesn’t have the money to do everything according to the law.” I could almost see how hard she was trying to resist, in a burst of maternal tenderness, gently stroking the crimson face of the colony representative.
As she was leaving, she said: “I hope that after serving your sentence, you’ll come out a true patriot, like me.”
A couple of days after my “speech” at the rally, three security officers came up to the unit area (I was exercising at the time), then left. The next morning I was summoned to the operations department and told to explain where I got the mobile phone they had supposedly found in my bed.
When I naturally asked what phone they were talking about and why it was supposedly mine, they told me that my brother’s number was stored on the SIM card.
No one seemed bothered by the fact that the body camera all officers have was not switched on during the search, or by the fact that 50 people live in the barracks.
On October 18, I was summoned to the operations unit for a meeting with my lawyer. Instead, I found myself in a swift drumhead court-martial, was taken to SHIZO, and told that I had been transferred to SUON as a persistent violator.
This is a letter from Oleg, passed along entirely legally. By the way, he has a Facebook now—add him and like the page.
And please write letters too—it matters. Many thanks to Tatyana Felgengauer, Sasha Plushev, and Echo for organizing this letter-writing campaign.
Just keep in mind that right now he won’t be able to reply to everyone quickly. In SHIZO, they give you a pencil and paper for correspondence for only 15 minutes a day.
People