“Why don’t I hear anyone? Why don’t I see anyone?” Life inside Lefortovo, the prison holding the WSJ's Evan Gershkovich, is engineered to make inmates feel abandoned and alone.
. They are isolated and there is no common time or communication between cells.In the prison’s roughly 9-by-12 foot cells, a light that shines during the day is made brighter at night. Translucent windows barely a foot long are set above eye level so inmates can only see the Moscow sky, according to recollections from former inmates, family and visitors to the prison. Two steel-framed beds with foam mattress pads lay alongside a stainless steel toilet.
Inmates receive a daily hour outside their cell, usually in one of the cell-sized courtyards on the roof, where they walk under a mesh of iron bars. The prisoners aren’t handcuffed, but asked to walk with hands crossed behind their backs. Guards, armed with automatic rifles, peer down from a gangway above.
Mr. Solzhenitsyn, the dissident author of the prison account “The Gulag Archipelago,” wrote of a black-painted cell lighted day and night by a dangling 25-watt bulb. Prisoners who complained would receive a “penalty kick” to the groin by one Col. Sidorov, he wrote. Others would be pushed into a cold and tiny “punishment cell.”
“I, too, was taken to Lefortovo, which has been used to house prisoners when Moscow wanted to make an example of them,” he wrote in a Journal opinion article on Tuesday. “To my fellow Russian correspondent Evan Gershkovich : Courage.” Former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan was held in Lefortovo before being dispatched to a prison colony in 2020 to serve a 16-year term for espionage.Sergei Skripal, a former colonel in Russian military intelligence, was held at Lefortovo until he was convicted in 2006 of passing secrets to Britain’s foreign intelligence service, MI6. Four years later, the Kremlin swapped him and three others for a group of Russians accused of operating in the U.S. for Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service.
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