The Sunday Times, August 6, 2000

LIVING HELL OF RUSSIA'S DEATH ROW

Mark Franchetti, Lozva

AT FIRST, penal colony number 56 in Lozva, more than 1,500 miles northeast of Moscow, looks like any other Russian prison. Its perimeter is encircled by two walls and four fences lined with hundreds of yards of barbed wire. Armed guards look down from rickety wooden watchtowers. Soldiers patrol with Kalashnikovs and snarling dogs.

But behind the high metal gate is a nightmarish world. All 277 inmates are convicted murderers. Most are serving sentences of up to 25 years. Sixty-eight will never leave ward five in a decaying two-storey building deep inside the compound.

These men were all sentenced to death. For years they waited for the moment when a special unit would drag them outside in shackles to execute them with a single shot to the back of the neck. Then some had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment by Boris Yeltsin, the former president; and last year the Kremlin banned executions.

At first, most inmates welcomed life instead of death. But the conditions in ward five are so bad that many now want to be executed.

Last week, when The Sunday Times became the first western newspaper to be granted access to colony 56, several inmates said they would rather be shot than face the rest of their days there.

The colony is one of two special prisons to which former death row inmates have been transferred. The other, on an island in Vologda, 300 miles north of Moscow, houses 196 men, some of whom are reported to have written to the Russian state prosecutor formally requesting execution.

Prisoners in Lozva share the view that they would be better off dead. "At first I was relieved when I was spared," said Vitaly Zazonov, 52, who was sentenced to death in 1990 after killing three people with a knife in a drunken argument.

"Death row was very stressful. I spent years waiting to be killed. I never slept at night - that's when they came for people without warning. They would take a prisoner out of his cell and execute him.

"But then I was moved here. It's been six years and now I have no doubt that it would have been better if they had put a bullet in my head. Better to get it over and done with. We are left to waste away like animals. What's the point?"

To enter ward five in Lozva is to step back into the 19th century. Fourteen cells line a long, eerie corridor. Faded black and white photographs of the inmates and a short description of their crimes hang from each cell door, confirming that these are among the most dangerous men in Russia.

There are six prisoners to a cell measuring four yards by four and built for two.

They spend their days in grey and black striped uniforms, sitting on metal bunk beds, staring into space. The air is a sickening pall of sweat and faeces. Inmates are supplied with a communal bucket or wooden box that is slopped out every 24 hours.

No natural light penetrates the cells. A naked light bulb is kept on day and night. There is no running water. Drinking water is brought by truck from the closest village one hour away down a dirt road. Inmates are allowed to wash in a decaying sauna once every 10 days. The budget allows 14p a day to feed each man.

The meals consist of two ladles of buckwheat and one of tea three times a day, plus a loaf of bread per cell. Prisoners are rarely fed meat but sometimes receive a tin bowl of fish entrails mixed with water.

While other prisoners serving lesser sentences are allowed to roam the compound freely most of the time, those held in ward five are let out of their cells for only 90 minutes a day.

They are handcuffed through an opening in their cell's metal bars and then searched by prison guards. They emerge carrying their makeshift toilet, ghostly figures with sunken eyes and grey faces. Many are sick with tuberculosis.

Once outside, they pace up and down in tiny open-air cells that are covered with metal netting, like animals in a zoo cage.

Some have to think before remembering how old they are. Others have lost all sense of time.

Prisoners who break the rules are held in solitary confinement for up to six months in a cell barely large enough for a bed. A 22-year-old convicted murderer hanged himself there last year during his first week in the colony.

"They say that hope dies last. Well, my hope died a long time ago," said Alexander Gerasimov, 30, who murdered two people and was placed in solitary confinement last week.

"I turned down my life sentence when it came but they still didn't execute me," he says. "Why? I'll never be let out, never. So why not kill me now?"

Lozva's remoteness compounds the deprivation. Built on the site of a Soviet gulag colony used for logging, it is a 40-hour train journey from Moscow. Winters amid the hundreds of miles of thick pine forests last for nine months, with temperatures dropping to -45F. In the summer, cells are infested with mosquitoes.

Prisoners are allowed two four-hour visits a year, but the length and cost of the journey deter most relatives. Zazonov, for example, has not received one visit in six years.

Seeking to improve conditions, the prison administration recently used public donations to add a black and white television set to most cells. But tension on ward five is expected to rise this winter as long power cuts loom: the colony cannot afford to pay its electricity bills.

Russia's ban on executions has worsened overcrowding in prisons. Interior ministry officials expect that in the next five years they will need 4,000 new places for "lifers".

"I don't see much point in keeping someone in these conditions for the rest of his life," said Supkhan Dadashev, the director of Lozva's colony.

"Either execute them or give them a real chance to come out after a long sentence. This way we are hardly going to improve them. We do our best to provide better conditions, but there is no money.

"The first year is always the hardest for inmates. That's when they have to try to come to terms with the fact that they will be here for the rest of their lives. That's when they start losing it."