Nastya! If you decide to publish information about what is happening to me, please try to spread it as widely as possible. That will increase my chances of staying alive. Know that Penal Colony IK-7 is run by a whole mafia involving the entire administration of the facility: the colony chief, Major of the Internal Service Sergei Leonidovich Kossiev, and the overwhelming majority of the staff, including the doctors.
From the moment I arrived at the colony on September 10, 2016, they immediately took almost all my belongings, planted two razor blades on me, and then “found” them during a search. This is common practice here—it is used to make sure new arrivals are thrown into SHIZO (a punitive isolation cell) so they immediately understand what kind of hell they have entered. I was sent to the punishment cell without any formal order, and they took all my things, including soap, a toothbrush, toothpaste, and even toilet paper. In response to these illegal actions, I went on a hunger strike.
On September 11, 2016, colony chief Kossiev came to see me with three officers. Together they began beating me. Over the course of that day, I was beaten four times in total, by groups of 10 to 12 men at once, who kicked me. After the third beating, they shoved my head into the toilet right there in the SHIZO cell.
12 September 2016, officers came, cuffed my hands behind my back, and suspended me by the handcuffs. This kind of suspension causes terrible pain in the wrists; it also twists the elbow joints and causes excruciating pain in the back. I hung like that for half an hour. Then they pulled off my underwear and said they were about to bring in another prisoner who would rape me if I did not agree to end my hunger strike. After that, they took me to Kossiev’s office, where, in the presence of other staff, he said: “You still haven’t been beaten enough. If I give the order, the officers will beat you much harder. Try to complain, and you’ll be killed and buried behind the fence.” After that, they beat me regularly, several times a day. Constant beatings, abuse, humiliation, insults, unbearable detention conditions—all of this is happening to other prisoners as well.
All subsequent disciplinary penalties and transfers to SHIZO were fabricated and based on outright lies. All the video recordings in which disciplinary measures were announced to me were staged: before filming, they told me how to behave and what to do—not to argue, not to object, and to look at the floor. Otherwise, they said, they would kill me, and no one would ever know, because no one even knows where I am. I cannot send letters without them going through the administration, and the administration promised to kill me if I wrote complaints. Nastya, in my first letter from IK-7 I wrote to you about the ECHR (European Court of Human Rights) in order to get around censorship and give at least the slightest hint that something was wrong and that I needed help (not a single one of Ildar’s letters from the colony ever reached me. — note by Anastasia Zotova).
I am asking you to publish this letter, because there is a real information blockade in this colony, and I see no other way to break through it. I am not asking to be gotten out of here and transferred to another colony: I have repeatedly seen and heard other inmates being beaten, so my conscience will not allow me to escape from this place—I intend to fight in order to help the others. I am not afraid of death; what I fear most is not enduring the torture and giving in.
If the Committee Against Torture has not yet been destroyed in Russia, I ask them to help secure the right to life and safety for me and the other prisoners. I ask that information be made public showing that Major Kossiev is directly threatening to kill anyone who tries to complain about what is happening. I would be glad if you could find a lawyer who could stay in Segezha and provide ongoing legal support.
Time is working against me. Surveillance camera footage would prove both the torture and the beatings, but the chances that it has been preserved are growing smaller and smaller. If I am subjected again now to torture, beatings, and rape, I am unlikely to last more than a week. If I die suddenly in the near future, they may tell you it was suicide, an accident, a shooting during an escape attempt, or a fight with another prisoner—but that will be a lie. It will be a murder planned by the administration in order to eliminate a witness and victim of torture.
I love you and hope to see you again someday. Yours, Ildar.
This is a letter from political prisoner Ildar Dadin to his wife.
The same Dadin who became the first person in Russia to be sent to prison for a one-person protest picket.
For standing in a square like this:
The ACF will immediately send a demand to open an investigation into the reported crimes described in the media.
P.S. Here is the person organizing the torture: