Then they threw me into that same transit cell several more times. Altogether, I spent 45 days there, and those were 45 days of hell. That cell has no insulation. If it’s minus 10 degrees Celsius outside, it’s the same inside. And they give you only one prison uniform, while taking away all your personal belongings, so there’s no way to warm up. At night I lay under a blanket, shivering with cold-induced convulsions, thinking only about holding out for at least a week. I dreamed about food — in the first few days I went on a hunger strike, then they forced me to give it up, but still kept me half-starved. I had brought food ration standards from the pretrial detention center (SIZO), based on the internal regulations, but they took those away from me. I tried to recall them from memory and compare — it came out that the portions had been cut by about half. You can endure torture by cold and hunger for a day or two, but when it goes on constantly, and you don’t know when it will end — it’s simply unbearable.
...
While they were beating me, they pulled a fur hat with earflaps over my head like a sack to cover my eyes. I thought they were about to kill me and that it would all be over — and I smiled. That only made them angrier; someone said, “Look, he’s even smiling.” They started beating me even harder and demanded that I apologize to [IK-7 warden Sergei] Kossiev for my behavior. After that they forced me onto my knees and began mockingly quoting passages from my letter to my wife — about how I was ready to kneel only before the woman I loved — while insulting me. Then they pulled down my pants, and with my pants down and the hat still over my head, they carried me somewhere. Through a narrow slit between the hat and my face, I saw that they had taken me into the exercise yard. Four men lifted my arms, already cuffed, and hooked them onto something, but I was still able to stand. Then one of them said, “No, that won’t do” — so they unhooked me and raised me higher so that I could no longer stand. The pain was excruciating, and I could feel tears, mucus, saliva starting to run — and with all my strength I just tried not to scream. They took off my underwear, and one of them said, “Now you’re going to be raped, call for…” — either Venya or Benya. Another got angry, saying, why are you using names. The first replied, “What difference does it make? He won’t see anything anyway.” Someone went to get this Venya. A couple of minutes later they told me there was one last chance to avoid rape — if I agreed to end my hunger strike. I agreed, but they said I would still have to hang there, and that they would take me down from this rack only after a call from the administration.
It is hard to imagine what happens to ordinary people if even those with access to the media and human rights defenders are tortured like this. IK-7 in Karelia is, after all, a penal colony for “high-profile inmates”:
Russia’s penitentiary system is essentially the Gulag preserved almost untouched. Torture camps. And, importantly, it is pointless — it does not achieve its main goal, rehabilitation. There, criminals are turned into even worse criminals, while innocent people like Dadin are simply tortured because “that’s how it’s done.”
It needs to be dismantled completely and rebuilt from scratch as a normal system. It is beyond reform.