![]() In prison, they don’t work, they perform no official duties, and they administer the obshchak (“common fund”), collected from the other inmates. Referring to themselves as “the black suit,” they’re usually professional criminals and recidivists. Proper blatnye (“thieves”) are effectively unofficial prison administrators. Human rights activists told Meduza that there are few prisons in Russia today that are purely “red” or “black.” More often, the administrators and crime bosses reach some kind of agreement about what orders the inmates will actually obey. The leaders of this movement called themselves guardians of Russia’s pre-revolutionary criminal traditions. This system apparently emerged in the 1930s, when criminals in the Soviet Union’s suddenly booming prison population organized an apolitical resistance campaign against the guards and administrators. This was his first brush with the “white suit,” and it wasn’t long before he joined the gang himself.Ī rough dichotomy divides Russia’s prisons between “red” colonies (where the wardens are in direct control) and “black” colonies (where crime bosses and prison administrators collaborate according to informal agreements). I knew he was being nice to me because I’m a right-winger, too, and he became one in prison,” Artem says. “This meeting had a powerful effect on me. The friend gave him a mobile phone, so he could call his mother and girlfriend, and provided him with a package that contained “loose-fitting” socks and underwear, shaving razors, a big piece of sausage, cigarettes, tea, coffee, cookies, candies, and some homebrew, which Artem accepted “in solidarity,” even though he didn’t drink back then. Behind bars, this friend had managed to transform himself from an “ordinary drug addict” into an “associate.” “He showed me his swastika tattoo and said he didn’t work and said he was always fighting ,” Artem recalls. In quarantine, where Artem spent his first two weeks in prison, he found a genuinely pleasant surprise: an old friend was waiting for him. After a search, they made me wash the floors near the bunks, to keep me from meeting with the criminal world people.” (Russia’s prison culture hierarchy forbids blatnye - “thieves” - from performing any cleaning tasks, including washing the floors.) Then they ran me through the isolation ward, through a wall of cops, and they all hit me as I ran by. His welcome at prison wasn’t any easier: “Guys in masks and Spetsnaz uniforms started beating me up the moment I stepped off the prison bus. ![]() ![]() “I had a rough youth, and everybody in town knew I was a devout skinhead,” Artem says. Artem has six tattoos with Nazi symbols and, like so many young men in Moscow today, the sides of his head are shaved.Īrtem’s story begins in 2012, when he set fire to a police station and got two and a half years in prison for disorderly conduct, property destruction, and the illegal manufacture of weapons. His tray was loaded with a burger and fries, and he was dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a black hoodie imprinted with the word “M8L8TKh” (the name of a Tver-based Nationalist Socialist black metal band). Twenty-six-year-old Artem (he refused to tell me his surname) told me this while sitting together at a food court in a Moscow shopping mall. Before I even got to pretrial detention, everybody knew that a dangerous ‘extremist and terrorist’ had been arrested.” ![]() “When I got to prison, I was bald and in a bomber jacket and tactical boots.
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