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Every Wednesday evening, an artsy Moscow café bursts with middle-aged women who look like accountants or mid-level managers. At least that is what they would do if they were not spending all their time working to get their husbands out of prison.
Wednesday is the night that Rus Sidyashchaya (Russia Behind Bars) meets. The organisation was founded by Olga Romanova, a journalist-turned-prisoners’ rights activist. “I’ve told the men,” another of the group’s leaders says to me, “If you don’t make a monument to Romanova out of solid gold, then you are worthless.”
Romanova’s husband, Alexei Kozlov, was jailed in 2008 and sentenced the following year to eight years in prison for fraud. Romanova tried everything to get him out. The usual route, bribery, did not work, so she launched her own investigation, turning up evidence that her husband’s conviction was based on forged documents. She got the case to the Russian supreme court, which overturned Kozlov’s sentence twice (the first time did not work), and, a few months ago, she travelled to a distant prison colony to pick up her husband. The video of their reunion went viral in Russia.
Romanova, 45, heavy-set and with dyed-red hair, walks over to a bespectacled woman. “What are you here for?” she asks. The woman’s answer is inaudible. “159! Fraud!” Romanova booms. “We are all here because of Article 159. Come join in!”
Human rights activists estimate that 15 per cent of Russian inmates are entrepreneurs jailed as a result of business disputes. Article 159 is the most common vehicle, and most cases are initiated by a partner seeking to take over another’s shares in a business. Then it is a matter of forging documents and bribing and pressuring judges. In the bespectacled woman’s case, though, it’s a Moscow apartment that was at stake: Yelena says her husband was recently sentenced to four years in prison on charges stemming from the purchase of the couple’s property. “The investigator told me he’d drop the charges if we just signed the apartment over,” she says.
A group forms in the centre of the room. Their relatives are in jail under Article 228: drugs. At first glance this seems a different story, but the narrative is chillingly similar: forged documents, disregard for judicial procedure. A woman tells of her son, sentenced to six years for possession of 13g of hashish with intent to distribute. She says she has found dozens of other families whose trials mirrored her son’s: the same buyer, the same two witnesses and identical wording in the verdict. The people gathered around her nod vigorously. The alleged crimes may be different, but a single truth unites these people: once your loved one is snatched by the Russian criminal-justice system, you have little hope.
A striking blonde in her mid-thirties is lecturing a slight, pale woman. “Don’t tell him he’ll get out soon,” she says. “Don’t tell him it will be all right, because it probably won’t be.” The younger woman nods, tears in her eyes.
Her 22-year-old boyfriend, a Russian-nationalist activist, is facing two years’ imprisonment for throwing water in a prosecutor’s face following the trial of two of his friends.“I feel guilty,” Ira, the younger woman, says, “because some days I don’t think about him at all.”
“Ha!” the blonde woman will have none of this. “I used to feel guilty. For a year and a half, I couldn’t eat, because what did he have to eat in prison? I got anorexic. What use am I to my three kids, or to him, if I’m starving myself to death? Be human. In the end, either you’ll wait for him, or you won’t.”
The blonde’s name is Yulia Roshchina, and her husband’s story is the classic business-partner-against-business-partner. The 36-year-old importer was arrested three years ago and sentenced to 18 years in maximum security prison for contraband and money laundering. An appeal court later knocked 10 years off his sentence, ruling the money-laundering charges unfounded. On December 7, the same day as this meeting, President Dmitry Medvedev signed penal-code reform into law that decriminalised what used to be called contraband. “I was driving and I heard on the radio that he signed this, and I cried,” Roshchina tells me.
“And I thought, ‘Why am I crying? It’s just a piece of paper.’” There is no guarantee that her husband will now be released.
“There are so many of us,” Roshchina continues. “A million people behind bars in Russia, and at least 700,000 of them are innocent – I’m judging by all the people my husband has shared cells with. That’s a revolution!”
A revolution is brewing just outside the door as we talk. Over the first two days of protests more than 500 people have been jailed – with all sorts of procedural and legal violations. Any way you look at it, the new Russian revolution will turn on those who are behind bars.
