Let me tell you a great story about prison psychology and character-building. Prison camps and inmates are controlled by many factors, but three are the main ones: 1) the threat of being killed / beaten / raped; 2) tobacco; 3) food. The last one is used as widely as possible. It’s a simple and very effective method. An inmate—in 90% of cases, a young man—is always hungry. The standard ration isn’t enough, and often it’s not even edible. So almost no one lives on the ration alone. There’s the prison kiosk, food parcels from home, paid meals—everyone finds some way to get by, and access to extra food is a huge lever for the administration. If you’re in the SHIZO (punishment cell), everything is forbidden. There are no options there—you just sit hungry. If you’re in the PKT (cell-type detention unit), you’re allowed to buy food for up to 5,000 rubles a month (about $55 / €50). By law, you can also spend your wages, and buy prepared food in the cafeteria with no spending cap. But none of that applied to me anymore; the law no longer applied to me. They said: “5,000 a month, period.” So what do you do? You take a piece of paper and do the math. Set aside 1,000 for soap, razors, and basic hygiene items. Divide the remaining 4,000 by 31 days. That comes to 129 rubles a day for food (about $1.40 / €1.30). In the cafeteria, that buys two boiled eggs and a few boiled potatoes. On weekends, boiled rice. Buckwheat is already out of reach. But even that is still a tremendous improvement in the quality of your diet. Give me a boiled egg to crumble into my balanda (thin prison gruel), and I’ll feel like I’m in a Michelin-starred restaurant. And then comes the exquisite trick. They made us buy food a month in advance. But what are you supposed to do if you spend half the month in SHIZO, where everything is forbidden? There used to be a rule for that: if an inmate couldn’t receive the food he had paid for (for example, because he had gone for a long family visit), he would file a request and they simply wouldn’t prepare it. They used to just refund me the money for the days I spent in SHIZO too. But then the FSIN (Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service) got offended that we exposed how they steal money in vegetable procurement, and came up with something brilliant. Under the new rules, people in SHIZO are still supposed to receive food, but instead of giving it to them, they just show it to them, and then throw it away once it expires. It looks like this. The door opens... _______ There’s a guard with a package: “Navalny, here are the groceries you bought. Okay, boiled eggs—sign here. We’re throwing them out, they’re about to expire. Look, you still have potatoes and rice—we’ll dispose of those too, they’ll go bad tomorrow. Oh! Is that a bun? Bought it for a holiday? Living the high life, I see. Sign here for receiving the bun, and here for its destruction. Perishable product!” I take my hat off to whoever came up with this. You didn’t just spend all your money and get nothing—you also had to look at the food you didn’t receive. First you get angry and point to the law, then you appeal to conscience, then you yell at the guards. And then your character hardens. And you begin to understand the “wisdom” of prison rules that condemn excessive interest in food (it’s called gluttony). And then, with complete indifference, you just tell the guards: “Alright, where do I sign for you eating my potatoes?” But you still feel hungry 😃