Polina's Prison Bots

A political prisoner is not a victim, but a warrior.

It happens so often: you start working on something, or thinking about something, or being afraid of something—and that “something” suddenly starts intruding on your life from all sides. Recently, I started working on a long article about the uniform in women’s prisons as a distinct form of punishment that isn’t included in the criminal code. And right away—an exhibition of prison uniforms from various countries at Berlin Freedom Week. Among the exhibits is a hideous, garish pink floral dress worn by Polina Sharendo-Panasyuk. And the prison uniform of Venezuelan opposition figure Luis Somoza, from which the bloodstains could never be washed out.

Shortly before this exhibition, I interviewed Soviet dissident and former political prisoner Tatyana Osipova. Tatyana is a unique individual. She became a committed dissident as a teenager: at age 15, when Soviet troops entered Czechoslovakia, Tatyana demonstratively left the Komsomol. She later became secretary of the Moscow Helsinki Group. She was the one who went to the post office and sent registered letters to the embassies of Western countries documenting the repressions. Her arrest was only a matter of time. Tatyana Osipova knew this perfectly well. But she continued to go to the post office, and at home she set up something like a public reception office: people would come to her—both on foot and by car—and tell her what was happening to them.

Tatyana was arrested in 1980 for anti-Soviet agitation. She spent time both in the “small zone”—as the barracks for political prisoners on the grounds of the Mordovian women’s colony were called—and in a penal colony, where she was sent five years later for disobeying the administration’s orders. The USSR had its own equivalent of our Article 411 of the Criminal Code, but it was applied to female political prisoners extremely rarely. Tatyana resisted desperately, so they applied it to her. She told me about the Soviet-style uniforms the women in the colonies wore, and about the dreadful boots that were two or three sizes too big (for some reason, Soviet women’s camps only had extra-large sizes in stock), which made a monstrous slapping and squelching sound, and the prisoners called them “chto-ty-chto-ty,” imitating the sounds these shoes made. When I sent her a photo of Polina Sharendo-Panasyuk’s prison boots, Tatyana Semenovna exclaimed, “Those are them—our ‘what-you-what-you’!” Almost half a century has passed, yet the prison boots remain the same. And the political prisoners are still the same—brave, unyielding, and fighting.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, and soon after that of the Soviet Union, it seemed that there would be no more political prisoners at all. Independent states emerged in place of the USSR, but political prisoners reappeared in half of them. And their numbers are growing all over the world.

Yesterday I spoke with the curator of the exhibition of prison garments, the artist and dissident from Myanmar, Sai. His father, a minister in the democratic government, was sentenced to 16 years in a labor camp following the 2021 military coup and is now serving his sentence. Sai described how the military dictatorship in his country uses all sorts of cunning mechanisms to create the appearance of legitimacy: the military announces the release of political prisoners and lets them out of prison in front of TV cameras. But just around the corner, patrols are waiting to arrest them again and return the “freed” prisoners to jail. Doesn’t that remind you of anything?

Sai noted that in our time, it is no longer possible to limit oneself to one’s own country in the struggle to free it from totalitarianism. Dictators act as a brotherhood: they support one another at the UN, and buy and sell weapons and dual-use technologies from one another. They stand united and have each other’s backs. And in their repressions, too, they act by adopting one another’s “best practices.”

That is why the prison systems of dictatorships across all eras and continents are so similar: it is the result of their fraternal mutual aid. And that is why political prisoners from all regimes understand one another so well.

You can put a prison uniform on a person, shackle them, throw them into solitary confinement, and deprive them of letters. You can imprison them for decades, for life—you can even kill them. But it is impossible to hide their identity behind a uniform. A political prisoner is not a victim, but a warrior. He will prevail anyway.


Irina Khalip, exclusively for Charter97.org

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