Alexander Kuchma has long been known as the man who slashed Khodorkovsky’s face with a cobbler’s knife, claiming that “I wanted to cut his eye out, but my hand slipped.” At the time, the incident gave rise to speculation that Soviet-era tactics of recruiting mentally unstable prisoners to attack others were being employed against the jailed oligarch.

Indeed, on May 16, 2011, just months after finishing a seven-year sentence for armed robbery, Kuchma told Gazeta.ru that he had been forced to carry out the attack. He did not, however, name names. Shortly afterwards, an unnamed federal television channel paid Kuchma “a certain sum of money” and shot a ten-minute interview where he recounts the story of how he was made to carry out the attack – this time, complete with specific names and dates.

Kuchma was then told by an employee of the channel that the interview would not be aired because it had “caused alarm and was being reviewed by the general director.” A representative of the channel told Gazeta.ru that it may still be aired at a later time.

Fearing for his life, Kuchma again phoned Gazeta.ru and retold his story, complete with the details he’d given in the filmed interview. “After they taped the broadcast, I decided to tell you everything sooner than they could come crashing down on me,” Kuchma told editors. “What do they need me for if I’ve already told everything?”

In the interview with Gazeta.ru, published on Thursday, Kuchma explains how two law enforcement officers organized the 2006 attack on Khodorkovsky. The website stipulates that, in the spirit of innocent until proven guilty, they have changed the names and certain positions published in the article – but are prepared to release them in the case of an investigation. They also note that fact-checking has found that the people named by Kuchma indeed either worked or still work for the Federal Penitentiary System.

The incident began in March 2006, when Khodorkovsky and Kuchma were placed in disciplinary confinement as punishment for drinking tea. Shortly afterwards, two officers met Kuchma in a separate room and began beating him almost immediately. “They started saying I should take revenge on Khodorkovsky for supposedly getting me put in the disciplinary cell. They said that I should take a knife and stab him in the eye, like to stab it out. The plan was such that I needed to attack him in his sleep,” said the former prisoner. “I told them: ‘What are you getting at, guys? He’ll die.'”

“The first time I didn’t agree, they called me back, beat me again,” Kuchma went on. “They said that I already knew everything and if I didn’t agree they’d hang me in the disciplinary cell and say that I hung myself. The second time they convinced me that they’d kill me if I didn’t agree. I pretended to agree.”

Kuchma said the men, whose names he didn’t know, gave him a knife and that while they didn’t say directly to kill Khodorkovsky, “I understood that that’s what they meant. They said that they won’t add onto my sentence for it, that I’d live peacefully. That these were serious people from Moscow, that the government will defend me, very big people, that’s the sort of stuff they said.”

The ex-prisoner explained that he decided not to kill his cell mate, but just to slash him in the nose. “It was clear that there was more and more noise, that the bosses, lawyers, journalists had come running. I had hoped that those guys would leave me alone because of all this clamor,” he explained.

After attacking Khodorkovsky, Kuchma was put back in a disciplinary cell and the same plainclothes officers came back. “They beat me again and said: ‘what, you sleazeball, you didn’t do what we asked?!’ I apologized and said that I missed because I couldn’t see anything at night. They beat me some more.”

According to Gazeta.ru, representatives from the Federal Penitentiary Service refused to comment on Kuchma’s remarks. In addition, the editors have issued an open call for a criminal investigation.

Kuchma’s accusations come at a turbulent time in the Khodorkovsky case. The former oligarch’s extended prison term was upheld by a Moscow appeals court on Tuesday and he is now officially considered a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International. Next week, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg is set to rule on Khodorkovsky’s complaint against the Russian government about the legality of his arrest and conditions of his confinement.

Gazeta.ru’s full interview with Kuchma can be read in Russian here.

A group of prominent Russian human rights advocates have penned a letter to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev on the subject, asking him to take immediate action to put an end to the widespread use of torture in Russia’s detention facilities.

To the President of the Russian Federation
D.A. Medvedev

Message from members of public hearings dedicated to the problem of torture within law enforcement agencies and the penitentiary system

Respected Dmitri Anatolevich!

The prevalence of torture, physical and psychological, that happens in our country during both inquiries and investigations and also during detention has taken on a scale characteristic of a totalitarian society.

Medieval in nature, torture is used far and wide to obtain self-incriminating statements and statements incriminating others as well as for morally suppressing prisoners. Regardless of the changes in law and all reforms in law enforcement agencies, the practice of torture has been preserved and is even expanding.

We consider the current situation to be absolutely intolerable and feel that it demands joint action from both the state and civil society.

We are pinning our hopes on you, since it is precisely you who has repeatedly proclaimed that observing the principle of the supremacy of law is important and is the main guarantor of constitutional human rights and freedoms in our country.

We call upon you to issue a legislative initiative to change the Criminal Procedural Code of the Russian Federation so that it would preserve the testimony of accused persons given during preliminary investigations only in the case that it is later confirmed by the defendant in court. This would render the use of torture and forced testimony during inquiries and investigations pointless.

In addition, we call upon you to initiate changes to strip prison administrations of any motivation to use unlawful pressure against people in detention. With this goal in mind, limits on the actions of penal system operational staff should be introduced into the Penal Code of the Russian Federation. They should not have the authority to engage in illegal activities that are committed by persons outside of the given place of detention or which go beyond the punishment that the prisoner has been sentenced to. In this way, operatives will only work to prevent and put a stop to violations of the law that are planned or committed in these places of detention.

We call upon you to create a joint public and state commission to investigate incidents of torture and cruel and degrading treatment.

Such a commission should be created with the participation of representatives of state agencies and also the Presidential Council on the Development of Society and Human Rights, the Public Chamber of the RF, the Human Rights Ombudsman of the RF, a specialized committee of the State Duma of the RF, and specialized human rights organizations.

We members of the organizational committee for public hearings dedicated to the problem of torture in law enforcement agencies and the penitentiary system also feel it is very important to take part in the work of such a commission.

We are certain that, without your immediate interference, the problem of the expansion of the use of torture will definitively destroy the prestige of Russian justice and will undermind the faith of the Russian people in the law.

Hearing Organizational Committee:

L.M. Alexeyeva, representative of the Moscow Helsinki Group, representative of the head of the foundation In Defense of the Rights of Prisoners
V.V. Borshchev, member of the Moscow Helsinki Group
S.A. Kovalev, president of the Institute of Human Rights
L.A. Ponomarev, leader of For Human Rights
S.V. Belyak, lawyer
D.N. Dmitriev, lawyer

February 21, 2011
A.D. Sakharov Museum & Public Center

Krasheninnikov stressed that the suspects especially should have been released from the detention facilities (SIZOs) to allow for proper medical treatment because they presented no threat to society.

The statement comes a week after Russian President Dmitri Medvedev introduced a bill to reform how ill criminal suspects are treated by the country’s judicial system. If passed, a suspect or person charged with a crime found to have a life-threatening illness may be given alternative means of confinement to allow for proper medical care.

Russia is notorious for the deplorable conditions and corruption in its penitentiary system and the topic of the SIZOs has been a source of particular commotion over the past year. In November 2009, Hermitage Capital Management lawyer Sergei Magnitsky died in a Moscow SIZO after being held for a year without charge and after being denied necessary medical care. Then, this past April, Moscow businesswoman Vera Trifonova died in the same SIZO and also after being denied proper medical treatment.

Critics are skeptical that the president’s bill will do anything to improve the situation, as it essentially duplicates what’s already provided for in Russian law.

“The president isn’t proposing anything new; it’s written in the procedural codex that a judge should consider the condition of a sick person upon rendering a decision,” human rights advocate Pavel Chikov told the Kasparov.ru news portal.

According to Russian Federal Penitentiary Service representative Sergei Tsygankov, the 53-year-old Vera Trifonova died at 12:35 pm on April 30, 2010, in the intensive care unit of the hospital at the Matrosskaya Tishina criminal investigation detention facility (SIZO) in Moscow. Local police were called to the scene, established that there were no signs that the death has been violent, and have launched an investigation.

Trifonova’s lawyer, Vladimir Zherebenkov, told the rights organization Justice that his client was refused proper medical care to such an extent as to constitute an intent towards her “physical destruction.”

According to a press release from the organization, medics had diagnosed the businesswoman with severe diabetes and had determined that she had only one working kidney.

Zherebenkov explained that Trifonova’s health began to sharply declined when she was arrested in December 2009 and placed in Matrosskaya Tishina. When she complained that her lungs were filling with liquid, she was brushed off and told to “sleep standing up.” After demands by her lawyer, Trifonova was eventually moved to a Moscow city hospital, where she immediately recovered. Doctors at the hospital confirmed that Trifonova required specialized treatment that included regular cleansings of her blood – a procedure not possible at the detention facility.

At that point, says the lawyer, Investigator Sergei Pysin told Trifonova that she would get different accommodations if she plead guilty to the fraud she was charged with. The woman refused, and despite doctors’ orders that Trifonova not leave the hospital even for investigative proceedings, Pysin brought her back to Matrosskaya Tishina.

Zherebenkov believes that Pysin had at that point prepared a medical document from Matrosskaya Tishina doctors declaring Trifonova’s condition to be stable and fit for investigative proceedings. On the basis of that document, he says, Odintsovsky Court judge Olga Makarova turned down Trifonova’s April 16 request to be released on bail, and instead extended her detention for another three months.

That same day, the press release goes on, a decision was made to move Trifonova to a female penal colony in Mozhaysk, seventy miles west of Moscow. Officials at the penal colony refused to admit her, however, and she was taken to the Mozhaysk city hospital. According to Zherebenkov, doctors at the hospital did not know how to help the woman because they lacked the proper equipment to cleanse her blood, a procedure that she needed two to three times a week.

In the days that followed, the investigator repeatedly promised the Zherebenkov that they would find some way to move Trifonova to a hospital outfitted for her condition. But in the meantime, the businesswoman’s condition was quickly deteriorating. On April 26, the lawyer resorted to using an ambulance rented by Trifonova’s relatives to bring her to a local medical institute to undergo treatment.

Trifonova was finally brought back to Matrosskaya Tishina on April 29, and was supposed to have been brought back to the original hospital in Moscow today. As is now obvious, it was already too late.

“They purposefully destroyed her, and sent her to the Mozhaysk prison so that she would die there,” says Zherebenkov. He believes that the investigator “filled the order” of one of Trifonova’s business partners who owed her several million dollars.

According to RIA Novosti, officials from the Federal Penitentiary Service responded to the lawyer’s accusations that Trifonova was denied medical care by referring to the fact that the paperwork ordering her to undergo medical evaluation had needed to be signed by the investigator “who disappeared somewhere and we were unable to get in touch with him.”

Zherebenkov says he plans to file a criminal suit against Pysin and appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. “Vera Trifonova repeated the fate of Sergei Magnitsky, because our SIZOs are instruments of torture and a means to pressure people,” he said.

The press release from Justice, the main source of information for this article, is available in Russian by clicking here.

Russian prisons have a historically high rate of violence, in part resulting from the rare practice of housing convicts together without regard for the severity of their crimes. While the government has finally decided put that practice to an end, the deputy prosecutor general said that facility reviews ordered by President Dmitri Medvedev exposed a significant number of cases where prison guards have abused both their own authority and the rights of prisoners.

“In facilities in the Omskaya, Orenburgskaya, Sverdlovskaya, and Chelyabinskaya regions, as well as several others, personnel have been using physical force and tactical equipment in ways that are not always lawful or well-founded,” said Zabarchuk.

When asked about conditions regarding prisoners’ health, the deputy painted a grim picture of the situation: In 2009 alone, 4150 prisoners had died in Russian correctional facilities. “What’s worrying is not only the high rate of disease, but the depressing death rate among convicts,” he said. “This is a problem that I would particularly like to single out, since the basic prison contingent is not made up of very old men or young children, but able-bodied people who are, you could say, in the prime of their lives and strength. Nevertheless, many of them do not live out their sentences, or they leave disabled.”

One reason for the mortality rate was the failure of correctional facilities to provide prisoners with proper medical care. And even when they do, said Zabarchuk, medical equipment is outdated and medical personnel often lack the proper education for their jobs.

However, said Zabarchuk, a series of recent prison reforms have succeeded in decreasing the number of prisoners overall. This was a key task for the penal system’s management, as a sharp increase in female prisoners has recently contributed to the already overwhelming overcrowding of Russia’s facilities. A recent decision by the Russian Supreme Court regarding procedures for bail, house arrest, parole, and other lighter forms of punishment has allowed more convicts to carry out their sentences outside of correctional facilities. As a result, the number of prisoners in Russia was 861,687 prisoners as of Spring 2010 – 29 thousand less than a year ago. Zabarchuk said that the decrease can be credited to the fact that, for the first time ever, the problem of abuse in Russian correctional facilities was being dealt with at the highest levels of government, with president Medvedev in particular pushing for reform.

Even so, the situation in Russia’s prisons remains dire, and not all reforms necessarily have any chance of success. Zabarchuk blamed the Federal Penitentiary Service itself for “ineffectively exercising departmental control” over rampant corruption. “Therefore, the negative situation that has developed is not changing,” he concluded.

Russian prisoners themselves have made a number of recent attempts to draw attention to the conditions of their treatment. In January 2010, prisoners in the southern Rostovskaya region announced an indefinite hunger strike in response to what they said were irresponsible medical personnel and other rights abuses. In November 2009, five prisoners in the Chelyabinskaya region wrote a letter to law enforcement agencies alleging continuous beatings and psychological abuse from prison guards, and also went on hunger strike.

During a hearing on the lawyer’s death in the Russian Public Chamber on Thursday, Federal Penitentiary Service Deputy Director Aleksandr Smirnov stated that “We are by no means minimizing our guilt, which is obviously there.” He asked, however, that no definitive conclusions be made until the results of a review ordered by President Dmitri Medvedev were made available, which should be within two to three days.

Also during the hearing, chairman of the Public Chamber’s law enforcement committee Anatoly Kucherena requested that Prosecutor General Yury Chaika order a review of the accusations of denied medical treatment, which Magnitsky’s mother had blamed in his death in a message to the Public Chamber. Kucherena also asked that the results of the review be made available to the mother.

Sergei Magnitsky died on the night of November 17 in the Moscow criminal detention facility Matrosskaya Tishina. The cause of death was reported as a ruptured pancreas and acute cardiovascular failure. On November 19, an inter-regional prosecutorial investigative committee in Moscow refused to order a repeated forensic examination. After an international outcry from human rights groups, President Dmitri Medvedev ordered a review into the death on November 24.

Materials written by Magnitsky and published after his death show that the lawyer had requested medical attention on numerous occasions. Prior to his arrest, the lawyer had been working with the British investment firm Hermitage Capital Management, which was once Russia’s largest investment firm but has campaigned against numerous corrupt Russian bureaucrats and politicians. He was later arrested on allegations of tax evasion, but never charged. Colleague Bill Browder directly blames the prison system for Magnitsky’s death. “He was their hostage and they killed their hostage by denying him medical attention,” he told the BBC.

Shaigalimov, 52, was on the seventh month of a five-year sentence for hitting a police officer with a flagpole during a demonstration, a charge he repeatedly denied.

The Russian Public Prosecutor’s Office has launched an inquiry, which has already described Shaigalimov as a problem prisoner prone to suicide.

According to the inquiry, Shaigalimov died on the way to the hospital after he jumped from the fourth story window of a high-security building.  Prison officials said that the suicide was caught on a surveillance system camera.

The activist’s wife, Lyudmila Shaigalimova, told the Kasparov.ru online newspaper that her husband never had suicidal tendencies, and that he had feared for his life in prison.  She believes he may have been killed, and is pressing for an independent investigation.  She also asserted that Shaigalimov’s body showed signs of injury not related to his fall.

“It was absolutely clear that the death was caused by suffocation,” she told Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty.

Shaigalimov, a former opera singer and photographer, had taken part in more than 100 opposition demonstrations, some of them solitary pickets.  He was a member of the Other Russia coalition, and a one-time deputy to the organization’s alternative parliament, the National Assembly.

Bakhmina’s case has received wide public attention, with public figures like human rights defender Yelena Bonner and former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev calling for her release. The complete petition follows below.

To read more about Bakhmina’s story, read an account by journalist Grigory Pasko.

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Help Svetlana Bakhmina

Dear friends. Svetlana Bakhmina, a Yukos attorney, was recently refused parole for the last of many times. Svetlana has served four years in a Mordovian [prison] colony, which is more than half of the term she received under articles 160 and 198 of the Russian Criminal Code. She has left two boys at home: seven-year-old Fedya and eleven-year old Grisha. Svetlana is now pregnant, in her seventh month. Usually, even our own court, which isn’t always the most humane, agrees to parole in such cases or grants a postponement of the sentence until the children reach the age of majority. This time, something has broken. Reason, conscience, mercy have either bumped into the consecrated “Yukos affair,” or else these ideas simply aren’t frequent guests in the Zubovo-Polyanky court of Mordovia.

We can mourn, railing against the inhuman system in our kitchens, then just shrug our shoulders and continue living our lives, bringing up our children, working, having fun and just living with this. Or we can do something.

Let’s appeal to the president with a letter. Even if you didn’t vote for Dmitri Medvedev– he is the president of our country, and he has the constitutional right to pardon Svetlana.

An Appeal to the President of the Russian Federation

Esteemed Dmitri Anatolyevich!

We ask you to get involved in the situation which former Yukos lawyer Svetlana Bakhmina, convicted for six and a half years incarceration, has ended up in.

Half of Bakhmina’s sentence was concluded as far back as May. This means she now has the right to parole. Those in the [prison] colony agree that she has earned it –and it’s written in her personal record. She only had reprimands at the very start of her term, and they have since been lifted. In their place there are commendations. Recently, the colony’s administration even granted her a leave.

Svetlana has two sons –one of them is seven, the other eleven. Also, she is pregnant and due to give birth in December. She is currently in the prison hospital. A court has twice refused to grant her parole…

Dmitri Anatolyevich, we understand that you cannot put pressure on the court. But you do have the right to pardon recorded in the Russian Constitution.

We, the undersigned, ask you to use this right.

You recently said, completely correctly, that signals are important in our country. We ask you, and this is very important, to pardon Svetlana, and give us the signal, to the whole country — “Citizens of Russia, civil servants, judges: be merciful, and don’t forget a person behind the letter of the law!”

The appeal can be signed on www.bakhmina.ru.

translation by theotherrussia.org

Prison authorities allege the Khodorkovsky broke the rules of receiving and exchanging letters, and claim that these violations allowed Esquire to publish a discussion between Khodorkovsky and author Boris Akunin.

Khodorkovsky’s defense, meanwhile, came out with a statement claiming the charges are false.  “Mikhail Khodorkovsky did not write or receive any “illegal” letters,” their statement reads, “so there is not a scrap of proof that he violated this ban [on letters].”

The legal team added that prisoners have a right to speak with their legal defenders.  Attorneys are allowed to read any documents to the prisoner, and write down what they consider important for the defense from the inmate’s responses.  Authorities from Russia’s prison service publicly admitted that this is the case as recently as 2004, and dozens of similarly published articles have appeared since then, the attorneys said.

In the coming week, Khodorkovsky was due to appear at an appeals trial to protest a decision to deny him early release on parole.  His defense thought the upcoming trial may have more to do with his isolation than any interview:  “Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s punishment over non-existent violations on the eve of a court session on the matter of his parole has already become an unkind tradition created by the prison administration,” his lawyers said.

The attorneys said they were considering launching a lawsuit against prison officials for “a series of similar suspicious and discriminatory acts relating to Khodorkovsky.”

In December 2006, new charges were filed against Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his partner Platon Lebedev.  The two were then transferred from the penal colony they was serving in to the China pre-trail detention center.  The second criminal case against the businessmen alleges that they laundered 450 billion rubles and 7.5 billion dollars in the period from 1998 to 2004.  “According to the investigation’s version of events, they stole all the oil extracted by Yukos,” said Yury Shmidt, one of Khodorkovsky’s lawyers.

Both Lebedev and Khodorkovsky maintain their innocence.

A group of the Yukos executive’s supporters have started a hunger strike (Rus) to protest his isolation.

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In south-central Ural city of Chelyabinsk, four inmates died of their wounds on May 31st, after they were severely beaten by prison guards. As the ITAR-TASS news agency reported, officials said the prisoners attacked guards during a morning exercise walk, and prison authorities retaliated with rubber batons. The prisoners were put in separate cells, and were beyond saving when medical personnel were called in later that evening. A criminal investigation has been started, but the head of Russia’s prison service, Yury Kalinin, said the use of force was justified.

“Maintaining discipline is the top-most priority of the penal system’s workers,” he said in a press-release, as quoted by RIA Novosti, “and that’s why they were forced to use clubs. Furthermore, the inmates weren’t unarmed themselves.”

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In the northern Arkhangelsk oblast, around 50 prisoners went on hunger strike on June 1st, according to the Regnum news agency. The inmates, held in a prison medical facility for tuberculosis patients, complained of substandard food, improper medical care, and treatment they said was becoming more severe. Prison officials said that everything was in order and said the inmates simply wanted to avoid serving their sentences. A majority have since called off their protest.

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In a maximum-security penal colony in the central Ural Sverdlovsk oblast, prisoners staged a mass hunger strike on June 3rd to demand better access to the prison store. As RIA Novosti reports, the inmates are currently limited in how much they can spend there. Aside from purchasing items at the store, inmates of maximum-security facilities are allowed to receive one package and one small postal parcel each year. Local officials called the protest illegal.

Prisoners at another penal colony in the city of Dimitrovgrad, Ulyanovsk oblast also went on hunger strike. According to the Sobkor®ru news agency, the protest started on May 29th, and was already in its sixth day as of June 3rd. The inmates, part of a special unit for former militsiya officers, say authorities have withheld parcels and items sent by family.

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The head of the security division of penal colony in the Republic of Mordovia was sentenced to four years behind bars, after he was found guilty of beating two inmates. As the Sobkor®ru news agency reported on June 4th, Yevgeny Oshkin invited the two prisoners into his office one at a time, and stuck them repeatedly with a club. In addition to jail time, Oshkin is barred from working in any capacity with prisoners for two years.

The Republic’s regional prison administration is currently experiencing a workforce shortage in its 17 penal colonies and 3 pretrial detention centers. As a consequence, some 60 percent of prison guards in the Republic are women.