Putin's prisoner

As early as February 2022, Oleg Orlov, co-chairman of the Center for the Protection of Human Rights in Russia Memorial, of which he was one of the founders in the late 1980s and which was banned in Russia in 2021, publicly opposes Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine.

In 2023, he was arrested for his recurrent denunciations of the war and, in his own words, of the "fascism" of Vladimir Putin's regime.

In February 2024, aged 70, he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for "discrediting" the Russian army. On August 1, 2024, he was freed in a historic prisoner exchange. Against his will, he was exfiltrated from his prison to Turkey, then to Germany, on board a special plane, along with a group of Russian political prisoners and several foreign citizens hitherto also incarcerated in Russia. They will be exchanged for murderers, spies and other Russian criminals arrested all over Europe and the USA. He now lives in Germany. He recently agreed to join the fifteen-member delegation representing the Russian opposition at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, along with a number of other personalities including Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Garry Kasparov and Vladimir Kara-Mourza.

S. K.

Sasha Kulaeva - You spent "only" six months in detention, but you've nevertheless been in several prisons, in several cities. Did you feel you were treated differently from other prisoners because of your notoriety, Memorial having been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022?

Oleg Orlov - It's true that my stay in prison was relatively short, and that my conditions of detention were rather light compared with those experienced by many other political prisoners in Russia. The situation varied from place to place, and even from cell to cell within the same establishment. On the whole, for everyone, the conditions were harsh, humiliating and harmful to health. But unlike many other people incarcerated for political reasons, I was not confronted with what is known as "bespredel". I don't know if there's an adequate translation of this word in French. Bespredel" is a situation where there are no limits, no brakes on violence.

This illegal violence can come either from the state - i.e. prison staff - or from fellow inmates.

In the first case, an inmate can be sent again and again to solitary confinement, or to a disciplinary cell - which amounts to much the same thing. Officially, for breaking prison regulations. But many political prisoners are repeatedly sent there without any legal basis: they are locked up for a fortnight, then a fortnight, then, after a short break, another fortnight, and on and on and on... It's total isolation in a narrow cell, with severe restrictions on food and clothing, no visits, no parcels, no letters, no possibility of activity - no books, no newspapers. During the day, it is forbidden to lie down: you can only sit on an uncomfortable chair fixed to the floor. The window is tiny. In winter, it's often very cold; in summer, it's a furnace.

But it's even worse when guards deliberately pit fellow inmates against a political prisoner, or place him in a "pressure cell" with inmates collaborating with the administration. In such cases, there may be physical violence or unbearable psychological pressure.

Fortunately, none of this has happened to me. Having said that, being immersed in the Russian penitentiary system is in itself an extremely heavy ordeal.

Strangely enough, the hardest place for me was one of Moscow's pre-trial detention centers. Imagine a cell about five by five meters, with ten bunk beds, a table and benches fixed to the floor, and, in the same space, a toilet separated by a partition, as well as a sink with only cold water. Twelve people are crammed into ten beds, which means we take turns sleeping. Smoking also takes turns under a ceiling vent, but ventilation is poor and the smoke stagnates. There's only one water heater for everyone, as the tap water is icy cold.

The food is sometimes decent and sometimes simply inedible, so it's flushed down the toilet. But it has to be said that the situation in remand centers has improved compared with ten or fifteen years …