In 2001, I found the corpse of a man by the banks of the river. I didn’t even know it was a corpse. I called an ambulance and they pronounced him dead. After 10 days, they came and put me under investigation. Six days later, I was arrested. I was 21 years old.
For two years there were court hearings and investigations and in 2003 I was sentenced to 12½ years. I was sent to the Shakhovsky women’s prison colony in the Orlov region.
I was in shock from the moment I entered. There were women there from all the regions of Russia. For me, it was wild. I had never met such women before. They didn’t even seem like women, but like real men. Tattooed, no teeth, very short hair.
There were around 100 women in each unit. There were bunk beds – the women who proved their authority got the bottom beds. There was a television and even a DVD player, but we were allowed to watch only on weekends.
For me, as a woman who was serving time for the first time, it was hard to understand jail politics.
Wake-up came at 6am. Then exercise and breakfast. We were usually served porridge made from water. At 7.20am it was time to go to work. We sewed uniforms for soldiers, uniforms for police, uniforms for court guards.
According to the law, we were meant to work for eight hours a day, but sometimes we worked for 12. We worked from 7.30 to noon then had 20 minutes for lunch. Then it was back to work. Work was meant to last until 3.30pm, according to the law, but often it lasted until 7pm. If work ended at 3.30pm, you could go to your unit and wash and wait for dinner. There was time then for yourself – to write letters, read newspapers, watch TV. But that was very rare. Usually after work they made us clean the territory of the prison. Dinner came at 6.30pm and lights out at 10pm.
For two years, I couldn’t adapt at all. It was very difficult for me to understand everything. I remember once I went to the library and found an art book in French. I went back to the unit and told the women: Can you believe it? I found an art book in French! In the prison library! They all looked at me like I was an idiot. Then I understood I was a little different. Maybe because I was not guilty, maybe because I was raised differently.
But after a while, a person gets used to everything. I got used to them, they got used to me. Our prison colony was a so-called “model prison” so it was more or less normal, more or less clean. As far as I know, all the other colonies are total chaos.
It’s a bad life. A person can go in totally normal and come out not a person at all. I saw it happen many times – a woman comes in under a “light” charge, like theft, eventually goes free and after a while comes back on a “hard” charge like murder. It breaks you as an individual. People don’t go in there to be fixed, but to be broken further.
I was let out on 27 July 2012, after writing official letters to everyone – to members of parliament, to the president, to the head of the supreme court and the regional court, to all levels of justice. It finally worked. They let me out with two years and two months left to serve.
Now I work at a factory and have been accepted to the law faculty. I want to be a lawyer. I want to protect people who, like me, got into this system when they were not guilty.
Our justice system doesn’t try people according to the law, but uses its own internal beliefs, which is totally illegal.
Now people write to me all the time, asking for help. I try to help anyone I can, with whatever strength I have. That’s the goal of my life – to achieve justice.