Guess who holds the championship title for listening to Putin’s speeches? Who listens to them for hours and falls asleep to them? Me, of course. A long time ago, in some spy thriller, I read about a form of torture used on prisoners: they blasted Mao Zedong’s poems at them at enormous volume. Apparently, someone in our prison system read that book too. After we published a story about how money is stolen in the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) through vegetable procurement for prisoners, the administration of my penal colony unleashed its own “plagues of Egypt” on me. They won’t let me write letters, they destroy my food, they threw a “bum” into my cell — I’ve written about all that already. But their most creative punishment is that every evening now they blast Putin’s speeches at full volume. Those few speeches and addresses he gave after the start of the war with Ukraine. You can switch off the radio point in the cell, but that doesn’t help at all, because speakers hang all along the long corridor of the SHIZO/PKT (punishment/isolation cell units), and Putin bellows through them so loudly there’s nowhere to escape. In theory, in the evening I have “personal time” (1 hour), and then “getting ready for sleep” (that is, the bunks are lowered in the cell, you get your mattress, and so on). By law, regular radio is supposed to be playing at that time. But this little piece of malice has been devised and approved instead, so every evening you can watch the comic scene of prisoners dragging mattresses into their cells while Putin loudly informs them that the West wants to make Russian citizens suffer. Honestly, it’s all a bit too loud and it makes reading difficult, but three things reconcile me to this “Putin torture.” First: the prison authorities have, by their actions, admitted that listening to Putin’s speeches is a punishment. They made a list of nasty things to make life miserable, and on it were: — not letting him write letters to his family; — eating his food; — throwing an unwashed inmate into his cell; — playing Putin’s speeches for him every evening. There’s a certain justice in the fact that the prison administration has equated Putin’s speeches with stench in terms of impact. _____________________ Second: the guards themselves (not the heads, but the ordinary ones) are forced to listen to this along with me, and it’s even worse for them—they walk down the corridor right under these loudspeakers. When I jokingly ask them which speech they like more, they stay silent—any word will be recorded and reported to their superiors. But their facial expressions and the way they roll their eyes—that’s a reward in itself. And third. Quite often it happens that a fragment from one of Putin’s speeches—where he says: “It wasn’t us who started the war, it was them; we are trying to stop it”—comes on exactly at the moment when I’ve already lain down, pulled the blanket up to my chin and closed my eyes. And every time at that moment I can’t help it—I shake my head at the sheer audacity of such obvious lies and think: I did everything right; it’s better to sit in prison than to submit to a власть like this. After that, I fall asleep happily 😉