Pussy Riot member describes what Griner can expect in penal colony

Maria Alyokhina, who spent nearly two years in a colony, previously known as gulag, following a protest performance in a Moscow church as a member of the feminist punk collective Pussy Riot, says jailed WNBA Brittney Griner can expect an experience that is more aligned with the Soviet Union’s past than most Americans’ current ideas of criminal justice.

“If jail is possible to imagine, then a penal colony, you can only imagine reading dissidents’ books,” said Alyokhina.

Alyokhina suggests reading Soviet writers like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who indelibly captured the grim cruelty of the Soviet camps in his work The Gulag Archipelago.

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“Of course, it has a bit better condition than [the] original gulag system from the 1950s,” she added. “But the sense is the same. It is a labor camp.”

Aloykhina said while most Americans imagine prison cells with bars, Griner can expect to live in “the zone” — a set of barracks with 80 to 100 women sleeping to a room and few, if any, amenities.

“For 100 women, there are like three toilets and no hot water,” says Alyokhina. Bathing is a once-a-week occurrence.

Most importantly, she says, in Russian prison colonies, all prisoners must perform forced labor.