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Art: Maria Tolstova \/ Mediazona<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The number of Russians who find themselves behind bars for opposing authorities who launched the war with Ukraine grows by day. There are hundreds of political prisoners in the country. We try to remind about these people every chance we get. Today, Mediazona\u2019s <\/em>Elizaveta Nesterova talks about Alexei Gorinov, a scientist, a city councillor and the first person to receive prison time for spreading \u201cfake news\u201d about the Russian army: after a provocation in a prison hospital, he will be doing a longer term in a more harsh penal colony.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u0427\u0438\u0442\u0430\u0442\u044c \u043d\u0430 \u0440\u0443\u0441\u0441\u043a\u043e\u043c<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n On August 1, 2024, the big prisoner exchange happened: 16 people were released from Russian prisons, foreign hostages and political prisoners. One of them, co-chair of the Memorial<\/em> human rights organisation Oleg Orlov, said back then that as soon as it became clear that it\u2019s an exchange, everyone who was brought to the Moscow airport asked themselves: \u201cWhere is Alexey Gorinov?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Alexey Gorinov was not on the exchange list. He remained in a penal colony to serve his sentence: almost 7 years for spreading \u201cfake news\u201d about the Russian army. Many people hoped for his exchange back then. And not only because by that time the 63-year-old political prisoner no longer had a part of a lung, but also because another criminal case had been started against Gorinov. And just recently he was convicted for the second time: not only his sentence had been increased, but also the already unbearable conditions of detention toughened. He was transferred from a medium security to a maximum security prison to spend another five years there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before the arrest, space engineer and satellite specialist Alexey Gorinov was a Moscow city councillor, a colleague of politician Ilya Yashin. On March 15, 2022 \u2014 in the first weeks of the war \u2014 at a regular meeting of the district council, a \u201cleisure plan\u201d was discussed: councillors had to vote on a drawing contest for Children\u2019s Day, and dances for Victory Day. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Gorinov called it savagery: \u201cTell me, please, how can we talk about a Children’s Day drawing contest? About Victory Day dancing performances? Now children are dying every day. For your information, about a hundred children died in Ukraine. Children become orphans, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of World War II veterans are now in the midst of these hostilities in Ukraine. I believe that all the efforts of civil society should be aimed only at stopping the war and making sure that Russian troops withdraw from the territory of Ukraine. If our agenda included those ideas, I would have happily discussed them and voted. But as it is, I am unable to, and the rest is up to you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n For these words, Gorinov received seven years in a penal colony. For the court hearings, he prepared anti-war posters. On them he wrote: \u201cI am against the war\u201d or \u201cDo you still need this war?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the time of the first conviction, Gorinov was 60 years old. In the pre-trial detention center in Moscow his health began to fail; a month after the conviction, he wrote that it was difficult for him to breathe, he could not eat because of constant coughing. But the prison doctors didn’t even examine him. Alexei is missing a part of his lung, which causes aggravation of lung diseases: pneumonia, bronchitis, even a common cold gives serious complications on the lungs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is totally impossible to treat yourself in pre-trial detention centers in Russia: without a local doctor’s examination, you have no access to medicines or even vitamins \u2014 each pill is authorized by a medical officer. But even with this authorization, it’s still a quest to get the drugs. In Moscow pre-trial detention centers, there are only two hours a week when someone can bring medicines to inmates from the outside. Many prisoners wait weeks or months for their prescribed medication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It got even worse for Alexei Gorinov in the penal colony. It\u2019s only a couple of hours\u2019 drive from Moscow to the Vladimir region, where he was supposed to serve the sentence. But the transfer is a total nightmare for prisoners and their relatives. While a person is being transported to the colony, they have no contact with relatives, no normal food and sleep. Gorinov\u2019s health deteriorated so drastically, that he was brought to the doctor in the colony by other prisoners. He simply could not go himself. But the doctors would not even examine him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This did not seem enough to the prison administration. Two months after Alexei Gorinov was transferred to the Vladimir penal colony, the guards began to deprive him of sleep \u2014 he was put on the register as \u201cprone to escape\u201d and \u201cchecked.\u201d The \u201cchecks\u201d look like this: every night a prison officer approaches a sleeping person, turns on the camera with a loud \u201cit\u2019s being recorded,\u201d and shines a light in his face.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After another month, the abuse reached a new level. The \u201corderly\u201d\u2014a prisoner who is given a little extra authority by the colony administration and usually brings letters from the censor to other inmates\u2014began to read aloud Alexei Gorinov\u2019s letters and discuss them with fellow inmates. It was only due to the public outcry that this was stopped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then the administration put into action a well-tried and reliable scheme of pressure on political prisoners: time after time Gorinov was sent to SHIZO, a stone solitary cell, where there are no personal belongings, no parcels, no relatives visits. You can\u2019t even stretch your legs there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the highlight of the program, of course, was the new criminal case. This is also a well-established scheme in Russia, and with Gorinov, it played out like clockwork.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In December 2022, Alexei Gorinov\u2019s defense managed to get him transferred to a prison hospital. He almost recovered when on December 31 he was put in a ward with recidivists \u2014 by the way, according to the law, a first-time convict must be shielded from such company. On January 1, a TV was brought into the ward and propaganda started to broadcast non-stop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gorinov spent the New Year holidays in this environment. During this time he had three pairs of neighbors in the ward. And in each pair, one of the prisoners was always aggressive and persistently provoked Gorinov to discuss news about Ukraine, the second, on the contrary, was silent \u2014 he had a wire hidden under his clothes. In Russian prison jargon, such characters are called \u201chens.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gorinov was recorded continuously for several weeks, even when the prisoners were taken to the toilet, but they were able to find only two phrases for the prosecution. \u201cWell, they blew it up\u2014so what? There\u2019s a war going on,\u201d Gorinov said about the attack on the Crimean bridge, and he replied to a cellmate\u2019s words about the Azov Brigade: \u201dWhy do you call them scum? This is the Armed Forces.\u201d According to Gorinov himself, he was not much of a wordsmith\u2014he was busy answering letters, and the conversations seemed suspicious to him, like \u201can interrogation with an investigator.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But even these two phrases were enough to accuse Gorinov of \u201cpublic justification of terrorism.\u201d The indictment says that Alexei Gorinov is a supporter of nationalist ideology, has a negative attitude towards the residents of Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk regions, favors the forcible return of Crimea to Ukraine, and supports not only Azov, but also the Ukrainian intelligence special unit Kraken. Gorinov did not say any of these words in his conversations with the \u201chens.\u201d When he pointed this out in a conversation with the investigator, the investigator was frank: if he had not put these words in the documents, the case could not have been opened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It should be said that even the \u201chens\u201d in court admitted that they had not heard anything of the sort from Gorinov, although during the interrogation the investigator had written all the necessary wording in the protocol for them. In court, three out of six of Gorinov\u2019s neighbors from the ward were questioned \u2014 those who had conversations with him. The neighbors who wore wires were not even summoned to court.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The prosecutor Svetlana Rygalova asked to sentence Alexei Gorinov to three and a half years in a penal colony. Judge Roman Vladimirov gave a little less for decency and sentenced Gorinov to three years. He added it up with Gorinov’s previous sentence for spreading \u201cfake news,\u201d and the result is five years in a maximum security prison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alexey Gorinov, despite his broken health, held himself stoically. He came to court with an anti-war poster again, and the name tag on his uniform, which all prisoners wear, was covered with a piece of paper that had a drawing of a peace sign on it. He turned his closing statement in court into an anti-war speech \u2014 very vivid, but Judge Vladimirov did not want to listen to it and in the middle of the speech simply left the courtroom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAn end to the war must be pursued,\u201d Alexei Gorinov said back then. \u201cI have fully expressed my attitude towards this abominable human endeavour. I can only say that violence and aggression breed reciprocal violence. This is the true cause of our troubles, our suffering, our senseless sacrifices, the destruction of civil and industrial infrastructure, our homes, our families. Let us stop this slaughter, needless both for us and the inhabitants of Ukraine. Is it not time to leave our neighbours in peace and deal with our own internal problems, which are growing like a snowball? We have long ago proved to the whole world how brave, resilient and peace-loving we are. So maybe enough is enough?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n For some reason, the prison authorities in the Vladimir region particularly likes to torture Alexei Gorinov with cold. Last fall they simply kept him in a cell without heating and mockingly turned on the radiator only before the visit of the public monitoring commission. Right after the second sentence they went further: Gorinov was not only held without heating, they also did not give him a blanket. Media pressure helped once again: after news broke about this new form of torture, the radiator did start working.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps, after my story, you\u2019ll want to ask why they\u2019re putting so much effort into torturing Gorinov. He has already been convicted. And Gorinov asks himself this very same question: \u201cI don\u2019t understand why they are picking on me, an ordinary person,\u201d he said before the first hearing of the new case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The truth is that I don’t know. Maybe it\u2019s simple inertia \u2014 they\u2019re just used to it. Maybe after the first verdict they wanted to break and gag him. But when that didn\u2019t play out, they sought revenge. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s really impossible to break Gorinov. Yes, I admit that in court, it was obvious that it was very hard for him. But he did not complain. Only when he saw journalists for the first time in almost three years, he said: \u201cI just have no chance to get medical treatment here,\u201d and that\u2019s all. Gorinov also commented stoically on the prisoner exchange, in which he was not included: \u201cI was happy for the guys, but this freedom is conditional \u2014 they are outside their homeland. They are decent people, they represent our country. I did not believe that our country could go to such lengths: to exchange some of its citizens for others. I have information that Ilya Yashin is very worried about me and he is trying his best to get me out of here. But I have never relied on it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I do not know if there will be more exchanges and if it will be possible to save Alexei Gorinov from prison. And I certainly think it is wrong to torture him with vain hopes for an exchange. But I definitely think it is right to give Gorinov as much support as we can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Please write him letters. But please, do it in Russian. It’s the only thing that distracts him in the colony from the gloom around him. And this is what reminds the administration of any colony that we remember about him, worry about his fate, and do not leave him alone with the system, no matter what those prison bastards come up with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Address:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 600021, \u0412\u043b\u0430\u0434\u0438\u043c\u0438\u0440\u0441\u043a\u0430\u044f \u043e\u0431\u043b\u0430\u0441\u0442\u044c, \u0433. \u0412\u043b\u0430\u0434\u0438\u043c\u0438\u0440, \u0443\u043b. 9 \u042f\u043d\u0432\u0430\u0440\u044f, \u0434. 5\u0410, \u0424\u041a\u0423 \u0421\u0418\u0417\u041e-1 \u0423\u0424\u0421\u0418\u041d \u0420\u043e\u0441\u0441\u0438\u0438. \u0413\u043e\u0440\u0438\u043d\u043e\u0432\u0443 \u0410\u043b\u0435\u043a\u0441\u0435\u044e \u0410\u043b\u0435\u043a\u0441\u0430\u043d\u0434\u0440\u043e\u0432\u0438\u0447\u0443 1961 \u0433\u043e\u0434\u0430 \u0440\u043e\u0436\u0434\u0435\u043d\u0438\u044f<\/p>\n\n\n\n Please write letters in Russian, otherwise the prison censors won’t let it through. You can send letters online via a special services called PrisonMail<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n You can also write in English, using sites Letters Across Borders<\/em><\/a> and Lifeline<\/em><\/a>, two projects by OVD<\/em>–Info<\/em>, a media and human rights defense group.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","class_list":["post-36367","news","type-news","status-publish","hentry","regions-vladimir-oblast"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n