This is how cabbage and 21 rubles 50 kopecks motivate people! You can curse Putin in the strongest possible terms here, and they’ll just smirk knowingly. But touch that 21 rubles, and they come at you with full ferocity. I got out of the SHIZO (punishment cell) on Friday evening, and on Monday — yesterday, that is — I was given another 15 days. At the same time, they restricted my ability to buy food (we have new rules now), moved my walk to 7 a.m. (which matters, because if you walk during the day, you can at least stand in a little patch of sunlight if you’re lucky), almost completely took away my time for letters, and on top of that set up a personal sewing workshop for me. They turned the neighboring cell into a “work” cell — that is, they put a sewing machine in there. It’s hard enough sitting in a stifling kennel of a cell, let alone sewing in it too. What do cabbage and 21 rubles have to do with this? See for yourself. The wholesale price of cabbage this summer was 6 rubles per kilogram (about 0.45 kg, shown in the carousel). At the very same time, the FSIN (Russian Federal Penitentiary Service) was buying it for 27 rubles 50 kopecks in unimaginable quantities. There are 400,000 prisoners in the country, and cabbage is a staple of their diet. Pretty much all the other food is procured the same way. So this is golden cabbage. Everyone gets their cut: from FSIN chief Gostev, who carefully pretends not to notice the insane prices, down to the prison colony management. That’s why, as soon as my colleagues published an investigation into these merry cabbage stories, they threw me into the SHIZO the very next day, immediately started setting up the “work cell,” changed the daily schedule to make it go from hellish to super-hellish, and adopted completely illegal rules forbidding me to buy food even with money I had earned. And then there’s a whole pile of other nasty little things that would simply make no sense to a free person. They’re protecting their precious cabbage! “Hands off — this is what feeds us!” That’s why I always talk about the importance of fighting corruption. The entire Putin system, absurdly disguising itself as conservatism and spirituality, exists for one reason only: to steal off cabbage. And it doesn’t matter what plays the role of cabbage: oil refineries, budget money, Siberian timber, tanks, or actual cabbage. The system will steal at every level, because that is its whole purpose.