Aid to the Church in Need: Siberian Nightmare

Siberian Nightmare - Russian Prison Camps

Posted by Information Report on 1/8/2002, 11:48 am

Siberian Nightmare
Neville Kyrke-Smith, National Director of Aid to the Church in Need UK
reports from Russian Prison Camps (July 2001)
Jurij is serving 20 years for murder. He was a seminarian, his father is an Orthodox priest and his mother an opera singer. Now he is inside a tight security prison with 2,000 other convicted murderers at Niznij Tagil, north of Ekaterinburg in Siberia. Jurij told me: "The chapel here makes a real difference. It is the only thing of beauty and the only place where prisoners and guards are all the same.” He is the sacristan, and sings superbly when the Commandant orders him, "Sing for us, now." The Orthodox chapel was built by the prisoners and offers some hope in a camp which is as grey and colourless as the faces of incarcerated prisoners who endure a strict regime, where physical beatings are commonplace.

Looking into a courtyard from the chapel window I see over one hundred inmates being lined up in the dust of a barbed wire quad, under a watchtower. As I go outside the chapel, a voice from behind a caged grill, at the top end of one block, shouts out over the wall "Hi - who are you?" I see faces peering out through the mesh and I tell the guy I am from England and that I work for a charity. "What's your name?" I ask. "Mikhail, Michael," he replies, as I remember. "Are you here for twenty years?" I ask. "Twenty-five" came the reply. "Was it murder?" "Yes, sure - murder." Just then the Assistant Commandant, in his army fatigue, comes out, looks at me - laughs and then the Commandant joins him signalling the prisoners away from the window, and shouting, "What do you want? Trouble? Get the hell away from that window or I will sort you bastards out." Later, over vodka toasts with the Commandant I ask if anyone ever tries to escape. The Orthodox chaplain smiles weakly, whilst the guards roar with laughter and keep banging the table – ‘Nyet! Nyet! Nyet!’ they repeat, at the best joke they have heard for a long time. I find out later that if anyone ever tries to escape all the inmates are beaten with club truncheons.
This is Russia today – with over one million people imprisoned. Approximately every one man in five, aged between 18 and 45 years, is in jail. There are 53 prisons in the Sverdlovsk oblast alone, with more than 44,000 inmates, that is over 1% of the population of this region. One female prison officer, Lydia, spoke to me in her office, which bizarrely had a copy of a video on Jesus on a shelf just next to a biography on Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the KGB. Lydia has worked for over twenty years at the largest women’s prison in Russia, - with over 2,000 inmates – and she told me: "Yes, it was good we moved to democracy, but it made life more difficult for us here. We had an amnesty last year for many prisoners; nearly 1,000 were released, but many - perhaps 35% - have returned and we are full again. Many of the girls are HIV positive and the majority of the young women are here because of drug addiction.” In fact, from guards and chaplains I heard estimates that between half to two thirds of young people in the Sverdlovsk region are heroin users, with drugs being transported through the Central Asian Republics. 10% of all prisoners have an incurable TB and life expectancy both inside and outside prison is falling, due also to pollution, alcohol abuse and poverty.
Yet, in this dumping ground of humanity – where the little Tsars of the mafia run each town and city – it is not just the continuation of gulag prisons from Solzhenitsyn’s days that haunt one. Industrial accidents and pollution have been terrible in this area. In a nuclear accident in 1957 (Chelyabinsk-65) a nuclear tank exploded contaminating an area 8 by 100 kms. Twenty-three villages were bulldozed and about 10,000 people moved out, although the accident was not admitted for decades. Five out of the ten Soviet 'nuclear archipelago ' secret cities were in this region. Dumping of radioactive wastes in the River Techa and Lake Karachy led to grave health problems in the area. An anthrax leak from Sverdlovsk-17 also killed 64 people in 1979. Just last month the Russian army displayed some biological warheads, which it is using western money to destroy, but meanwhile some of the frightening two million warheads are simply padlocked away in rusty silos here in the Ural Mountains. Another recent agreement has been made that Russia will take radioactive waste here in the Urals for recycling, in an agreement worth about $20million. If there are dollars involved then it is worth doing, whatever the human or environmental cost. The pollution is partly from the nuclear sites, but also from industry and mining; many of the small ponds and hundreds of trees look damaged and polluted. At 7.8 roubles (20p) a litre, petrol (leaded of course) is cheap and there seems no concern for the environment or the impact on the health of the people. One priest told me, “ If you do go to hospital you have to take your own sheets and food, and buy any medicines you need. Just about all babies are born unhealthy or weak, many with asthma and some with cancer.”

However, there is some hope. It may be surprising for some people to learn that the Orthodox are involved in pastoral work and social teaching; it is really encouraging to see some of the work going on in orphanages, prisons and drug centres. Fr Foma Abel is an Orthodox priest in charge of prison chaplaincy and a drug rehabilitation project in the Sverdlovsk diocese. He told me: "My work is to bring hope and my main task is to help those people who are looking for salvation in Christ to start from where they are now. A parish inside prison should be like a parish outside - a place of freedom. For as Our Lord said if you look for the truth then the truth will set you free. As the Gospel tells us, there is no servant and master - and so it is also good that the administration partake. In the chapel the faithful are all together and there is no separation.” His ministry stems from the Liturgy, for as he tells me in the prison chapel: "We remember any intentions at the Liturgy here - a piece of the bread is offered in the name of a wife, mother or friend - and this really helps. Prayers are offered and many people open their hearts to Christ." Now Aid to the Church in Need is considering a further project to help fund a chapel truck – a mobile chapel – which could reach the isolated outlying prisons in the north, when they are accessible across the swampy wastes in the frozen winter months.
In Lepley, in the republic of Mordovia, Father Phillip Andrews, a young Catholic priest – originally from Ireland – works in the pastoral care of prisoners; there are over 400 foreigners mainly from African countries, but some also from Vietnam, USA, Germany and the former East European states. Most of these prisoners are Catholics and have been caught drug smuggling through Russia - whilst others were students from the Soviet ‘fraternal countries’ who ended up turning to drugs to fund the continuation of their studies after the fall of the Soviet Union. Here the Catholic Church also offers hope -through the work of Fr Phillip who has excellent relations with the Orthodox. On the 13th May last year Bishop Clemens Pickel consecrated a chapel dedicated to the Holy Family; this Catholic chapel was partly funded by Aid to the Church in Need and was the first ever consecration of a Catholic church inside a prison camp in Russian history.
In one prison in Niznij Tagil I met Vladimir who was sentenced to 10 years for major embezzlement – apparently he worked for the Secret Service. Now he is the Sacristan in the chapel built by the prisoners themselves. Vladimir told me: "The church makes a big change by being here. The church is always open, and our library also, from 6am until 9pm everyday. Prisoners come simply to stand and pray in the chapel, often burdened with concerns about their family. As I am here all day they talk to me and some mates joke with me, saying that I am a priest. I have even been asked by one of the Muslims how he should set about organising a Muslim community! There have been baptisms, weddings and even a funeral liturgy - without the body - for an old prisoner who died. This is a real parish church!" Here on the edge of Siberia ('sleeping land') it must seem that God slept during the sufferings and deaths of over 20 million people in the gulag camps last century. The people and prisoners still suffer, but at least there is now some Christian hope in a frozen spiritual wasteland where humanity was so nearly crushed.

Neville Kyrke-Smith
National Director
Aid to the Church in Need UK

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