My brother Alexei Navalny fights against corrupt russian officials, trying to make people's lives better. The officials in their turn try to make Alexei’s life worse.
A good old practice from the USSR times — to persecute those in opposition to the regime and their family members. Not that surprising though, considering the fact that the country is now ruled by KGB people.
Actually, that's why I'm trapped in prison.
Such a treat, I must admit. No facebook or instagram. The food is shit, guard dogs are barking at nights and steel doors are clapping. A lot of fences and barbed wire, not a lot of basic human rights.
Awful Russian prison.
I've read in a newspaper that US are preparing a mission to Mars, and that Chinese are looking at Jupiter. Meanwhile in Russia, like in old days, hundreds of political prisoners are in camps. Thousands of entrepreneurs are behind the bars, because cops or security service guys took a fancy to their businesses. Tens of thousands of unknown people are imprisoned, only because the police needed good statistics, and the courts play the role of mutes. Do you know what percent of sentences here are convictions? 99.7%.
Maintenance of a convict costs the state several euros per day. The use of tortures in penitentiary system is the norm. Chief’s will in a prison is like supreme law.
This is what Russian prison looks like, in general terms.
Some people see some kind of romantics in all this prison life. I can’t say about romantics, but I can definitely say that this hell, where any person can be tortured with a shocker and raped with a shovel shank, just should not exist. Especially in 21st century.
Just think about it: hundreds of thousands of people live in atmosphere of extreme lawlessness, but in the name of the Law.
Why does this happen? Because all those, who haven’t yet been affected by this outrage, prefer to act like it doesn’t exist. It’s better to watch cats online. At the same time everybody is too afraid to go to prison. Not only because their freedom will be deprived, but also because all their humanness can be taken away.
Nobody wins from demolition of humanness in prison hell: neither prisoners (no matter whether they’re real criminals or convicted by accident), nor all other people.
Prisoners have different forms of protests from despotism: hunger strikes, cutting of veins on hands and neck, opening the abdomen with extraction of intestines. It’s not like I’m opening some secret now — you can find a lot of prison stories with different level of cruelty just by googling.
At the same time ordinary people, I think, have lack of forms of solidarity against outrage, that anyone can be affected by one day.
So I propose such a form, an art-form — to make a tattoo.
It’s not about inking Stalin on a chest or stuff like that — a cat on an ankle can be fine. I draw completely different sketches. So if principles of humanism are close to you, you can turn those sketches into tattoos on your bodies no matter what part of the world you are in. In any way you want it. Or you can write me and ask to draw something specific.
By inking some of my sketches you will get a Tattoo from Russian Prison (or ‘partak’, as we call it here).
To make it means to not forget one simple thing. The progress of humankind is not only about artificial intelligence or Mars exploration. It’s also about when here, on Earth people are not tortured in dungeons, having their human shape deprived — because solidarity of people just not let this hell happen.