Vladimir Pereverzin is a former businessman from Russia. He was imprisoned for seven years in some of Russia'’s most notorious jails and penal colonies on fabricated charges of embezzlement and fraud.
Pereverzin tells Business Insider about life in Russian jails and prisons, including details about police interrogations, solitary confinement, and forced labor. He describes the conditions in prison camps and discusses his time behind bars at several of the penal colonies that also held the Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny.
Pereverzin worked in Cyprus for Yukos, an oil company owned by the billionaire businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In 2005, Khodorkovsky was sentenced on charges of fraud, which were widely considered to be politically motivated. Russian prosecutors accused other Yukos executives alongside Khodorkovsky, Pereverzin among them.
Pereverzin's book about his experiences, "The Prisoner: Behind Bars in Putin's Russia," was published in English in March 2024.
Find his book here:
www.amazon.com/Prisoner-Behind-Bars-Putins-Russia/dp/1802472517
Pereverzin tells Business Insider about life in Russian jails and prisons, including details about police interrogations, solitary confinement, and forced labor. He describes the conditions in prison camps and discusses his time behind bars at several of the penal colonies that also held the Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny.
Pereverzin worked in Cyprus for Yukos, an oil company owned by the billionaire businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In 2005, Khodorkovsky was sentenced on charges of fraud, which were widely considered to be politically motivated. Russian prosecutors accused other Yukos executives alongside Khodorkovsky, Pereverzin among them.
Pereverzin's book about his experiences, "The Prisoner: Behind Bars in Putin's Russia," was published in English in March 2024.
Find his book here:
www.amazon.com/Prisoner-Behind-Bars-Putins-Russia/dp/1802472517
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TechTranscript
00:00 My name is Vladimir Pervyazin.
00:02 I was sentenced to 11 years in Russian prison
00:05 for the crime I never commit.
00:07 This is how crime works.
00:09 Russian prison system is just an instrument
00:14 to manipulate people.
00:16 Human rights and living condition
00:19 are just unbearable.
00:21 This is nonsense.
00:22 It cannot be in a civilized country.
00:24 Like in Navalny case,
00:26 a person can disappear for two weeks
00:28 and nobody knows where he is.
00:30 I was arrested in 2004.
00:40 I was placed under surveillance
00:43 and I was followed by a secret agent.
00:45 They made me a phone call to my mobile phone
00:48 and asked me to come to the general prosecutor's office
00:51 for 20 minutes.
00:52 So I was taken to some police department.
00:55 It was a night interrogation without any lawyers.
00:59 I did not understand and didn't realize
01:03 what I was being accused of for several months.
01:08 I left the Yukos Oil Company two years before my arrest.
01:15 Yukos Oil Company was one of the biggest oil companies in Russia.
01:20 Very well organized.
01:22 Khodorkovsky was one of the main owners of the company
01:26 and general manager of this company.
01:28 It was a politically motivated case
01:31 because he claimed that the Russian government
01:34 made corruption schemes.
01:36 The goal of this process was just taking the company
01:40 from the owner.
01:42 They were using me for stealing crude oil.
01:45 I did not realize the sense of this acquisition
01:51 because every single gram of oil
01:56 and every single cent was on the balance of the company.
02:01 I wasn't a high-profile employee of Yukos.
02:04 I didn't have any shares.
02:06 I didn't believe that I was arrested.
02:09 I made a phone call to my wife.
02:11 She thought that we were pranking her.
02:16 [whirring]
02:22 I was transferred from Butylka to Matrovskaya Tishina.
02:25 Matrovskaya Tishina is a prison in the center of Moscow.
02:29 It consists of several barracks
02:32 where I was kept for approximately the first 10 days.
02:36 It was overcrowded with terrible conditions.
02:39 There were just 10 iron banks and about 25 prisoners.
02:44 So I didn't sleep for several days.
02:46 One moment I felt something crawling on me and tickling.
02:52 I just took out my T-shirt and saw body lices.
02:56 I never seen them before, but I was sure it was lices.
03:01 Dozens, dozens.
03:04 You cannot understand what is going on with you,
03:07 where you are, so just like a dream, a bad dream.
03:12 I was transferred to a more secure cell.
03:16 I was placed together with contract killers and gang leaders.
03:22 You are being watched by jailers every single minute.
03:26 I was sure that every 10 or 15 minutes,
03:30 the jailers look through special "glazok," peephole.
03:35 I spent in Moscow jails two and a half years.
03:41 Everybody always moved.
03:43 So jailers just called you, you pick up your stuff,
03:48 and you're removed to another.
03:50 It's some kind of pressure to force me to confess to crimes
03:54 which never exist.
03:55 Every court hearing, special guards bring you to the court.
04:00 I was sure that I would be released.
04:02 My innocence was so obvious for everybody.
04:05 I was sentenced for stealing $13 billion US dollars
04:11 and for stealing all crude oil produced
04:15 by one of the largest Russian oil companies.
04:19 I do understand this sounds ridiculous,
04:23 just like nonsense, but for this nonsense,
04:26 I was sentenced to 11 years imprisonment.
04:29 [whirring]
04:35 The first colony I was transferred was a strict colony
04:41 in a small village, Melikhovo.
04:45 We were transferred to Vladimir Prison,
04:48 and the next day we were transferred to Melikhovo.
04:51 Transferring from prison to colony
04:54 is the most dangerous moment for every prisoner
04:58 because the prisoners disappeared,
05:01 and nobody except jailers knows where the prisoners is.
05:07 My transferring took three or four days.
05:12 Ordinary training takes about a couple of hours,
05:16 but in our case, 24 hours,
05:19 because we were placed in a stallipan wagon.
05:22 Originally, this carriage is for four persons,
05:27 but we were about 10 or 15 persons in this carriage
05:31 with our staff.
05:33 I stopped eating and stopped drinking
05:36 because the jailers will not let you go to the toilet.
05:40 It's common practice to beat prisoners.
05:43 I was beaten by rubber buttons, but not very severe.
05:47 The previous group of prisoners, they beat quite severe.
05:51 [whirring]
05:56 I was sent to strict penal colony number 6.
06:02 Strict regime means that according to the law,
06:06 only prisoners who are sentenced for serious crime
06:11 could be sent to this colony
06:13 and who are sentenced not the first time.
06:16 There is a special dress code,
06:19 and the prisoner gave you shoes
06:22 you should wear all year round for several years.
06:25 Jacket doesn't make any warmth.
06:28 Everything was made to make prisoners feel not comfortable.
06:34 When group of prisoners arrived from the prison,
06:38 they placed to quarantine separate barrack
06:41 where the prisoners are being investigated by jailers.
06:46 And according to the law, they are allowed to be kept 10 days,
06:51 but the jailers have ways to keep them for as much as they want.
06:59 It was the worst condition in this camp.
07:05 You can imagine, there is big room,
07:08 let's say 32-story iron beds close to each other.
07:12 You have to sleep face to face with another man.
07:16 It was not just toilet, it was just hole on the floor.
07:20 It's called "sparasha."
07:22 You can go to the shower once a week.
07:25 There is one shower from the cell.
07:28 Six or five prisoners should manage to wash themselves for 15 minutes.
07:37 Wash themselves and their clothes.
07:40 Most of prisoners, not most, all of them,
07:44 are dreaming to be moved to another building.
07:49 I was the only prisoner who spent so much time in this barrack.
07:58 In three months, I was transferred to another barrack
08:02 for the most dangerous criminals.
08:13 Originally, there were two types of camps in Russia,
08:19 red and black.
08:21 The red colony was completely managed by jailers.
08:26 There was a strict regime, no telephones, no drugs, no alcohol.
08:31 But in the black colony, the law was established by the criminal code.
08:38 The safe code means just like a law for all prisoners.
08:44 Criminal code or safe code forbids violence between criminals.
08:49 So if you beat someone, you would be punished by prisoners.
08:55 In the black colony, prisoners should follow this code.
09:03 In the black colony, there is always someone in charge
09:08 who reports to the criminal gangs outside.
09:12 So there is a special criminal tattoo,
09:15 some kind of label that someone belongs to the highest criminality
09:20 and is recognized as a thief.
09:22 There is a thief star tattoo on the shoulder and on the knees.
09:28 There is a chapter in my book about Untouchables.
09:34 It's a group of prisoners, ordinary prisoners,
09:39 who cannot touch, cannot shake hands, cannot sit where they are sitting.
09:48 They used separate dishes, spoons, tables,
09:55 and they did work like cleaning the toilet.
10:00 They sent them to this group of people, for example,
10:05 for terrible crime among prisoners.
10:09 Melikhovo, the first colony, they have several production areas.
10:22 They produce uniforms for jailers, shoes for jailers, and bricks.
10:29 I was keen to learn myself sewing.
10:32 Then I worked as a person packing hats.
10:37 I was admitted to the group of people who produced bricks.
10:43 I woke up at 5 o'clock and we did some physical exercise.
10:49 According to the regime, everyone should go and make morning exercise.
10:56 And then we went to the canteen, had breakfast,
11:00 and then we go to the production area where we did these bricks.
11:06 And it was real slavery.
11:10 Unloading trucks with cement hacks,
11:15 then we bring these hacks into the machine to make cement.
11:23 We mixed and then we make some bricks.
11:28 There were some special ingredients which make this cement more strong.
11:33 There was some poison.
11:35 Definitely some of this dust comes to our lungs.
11:40 So it's--but we didn't have any choice.
11:43 But I'm still alive and can talk to you.
11:48 So the administration and jailers are profiting from this production
11:53 because they use it for their personal needs.
11:56 Generally, I got for this about $20 or $30 per month.
12:03 But I worked about 10 hours, so it was unbelievably hard work.
12:13 [machine whirring]
12:17 Gulag, it's a prison camp system which existed from the Soviet Union,
12:25 and a lot of people were innocent and sentenced to imprisonment.
12:30 Famous writer wrote books about the system,
12:35 like Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov, Evgeny Ginzburg, for example,
12:39 common practice in Gulag system.
12:42 A lot of people died from hunger.
12:45 The keystone of the Gulag and modern prison system in Russia,
12:50 prisoner is not a human.
12:52 The most important feature of Gulag system
12:55 is that innocent people were imprisoned.
12:59 [machine whirring]
13:05 When you are in prison, you realize that the jailers can do whatever they want.
13:13 It's usual and common practice to torture prisoners
13:17 and force them to confess to crimes they didn't commit.
13:23 They knew exactly if I saw someone being beaten by jailers,
13:32 I would make a complaint to my lawyer.
13:36 So that is why they keep eyes on me and never did it just when I was near.
13:44 I was punished when jailers found some kind of knife, not really a knife.
13:50 You know, when you buy some stuff in a shop, you have to have something to cut.
13:56 And I was immediately placed to a chisel.
14:02 A chisel is for punishment a small iron bed fixed to the wall.
14:09 There is some small table and small iron bench fixed to the floor.
14:15 So narrow that you cannot sit comfortably.
14:19 I'm sure that the width of this bench was calculated by someone in jailers' institute system
14:31 just to make person not comfortable to sit but not fall down.
14:37 I heard some strange noise and I saw rats.
14:43 And they're coming from where?
14:45 They're coming from the hole for toilet.
14:48 People must put something to close this hole in the floor to prevent rats coming out.
14:56 When you come to this place, there was a special suit on your back.
15:05 They placed big letters, big white letters "Shizo"
15:09 and there is a special group of jailers who are responsible for guarding the colony from outside
15:19 to try to escape from prison. I think it's impossible.
15:23 I know one guy personally who was trying to escape from the colony, from Melikhovo.
15:31 And this guy was sentenced 24 years for murder and for robbery.
15:39 During night he managed to escape.
15:44 He was caught by jailers quickly but he was free maybe 15 minutes.
15:54 I saw him from distance. He was beaten, placed in Shizo.
16:01 They didn't make him additional years for escape attempt.
16:08 They keep in silence to save their reputation.
16:12 Jailers can recognize you as a regime violator very easily.
16:17 Like in Navalny case, they gave him a suit, smaller in several sizes.
16:24 He was recognized as regime violator for just one button.
16:29 But if you have a small prison jacket, you cannot do it another way.
16:34 Who is responsible for this violation?
16:37 This violation let other jailers put him in Shizo.
16:42 It's completely their responsibility.
16:45 They pressed him every minute.
16:48 Russian prisons have much less rights.
16:53 You cannot sue the jailers.
16:57 Extremely rare cases where you can initiate trial against jailers.
17:06 Because in Russia they have much more instruments to influence on prisoners.
17:16 US is more free society, much more than Russia.
17:29 When I came to another colony with officially more easy regime, Vladimir.
17:40 It's colony general regime.
17:42 Toughest day during my imprisonment.
17:48 They make me violator of regime.
17:53 I didn't agree and I sent a complaint to the court.
17:58 I was placed in more isolated barrack.
18:04 And they tried to press me.
18:07 I started writing complaints for administration colony.
18:13 And when I sent my complaints, jailers stopped allowing other prisoners to sleep.
18:21 And other prisoners came to me and asked, "You place own interest higher than ours interest."
18:29 "So because of you, most of prisoners from our barracks suffered."
18:36 "So what should I do?"
18:38 "There is way to go to another colony or another barrack."
18:44 So I knew that the only way I just had intention to just injure myself and go to the hospital.
18:55 Maybe five or four other prisoners jumped on me.
19:00 And there was some kind of a little fight between us.
19:06 But anyway I managed to cut myself, not severe as I planned.
19:14 But I remember this moment very well.
19:19 I cried, "Freedom to political prisoners!"
19:24 Thanks to this accident, I was free.
19:30 Because jailers scared to deal with me.
19:33 They knew that you can do something serious.
19:39 And then they sent me to Pokrov.
19:42 When I came to this colony, the deputy came to me and told me,
19:47 "Look, how are you going to stay with us? Are you going to complain or what do you want?"
19:54 He scared me.
19:56 And he didn't want to have problems with injury and scandal with lawyers, etc.
20:06 So we made some kind of agreement.
20:09 I stopped complaining and he didn't press on me.
20:16 My sentence was reduced.
20:25 I didn't believe that I could be released.
20:29 My terms came to an end suddenly for me.
20:37 Every prisoner was released about 10 o'clock.
20:41 My son, my wife, my friends were supposed to come by 10 o'clock to the colony.
20:49 And I was going to make some kind of farewell party to other prisoners.
20:55 It's a criminal tradition.
20:58 So I bought some tea, some sweets in the shop.
21:02 It's a real celebration.
21:04 But I was woken up before the general wake-up.
21:09 They gave me my belongings.
21:12 I was released about 6 o'clock before other prisoners wake up.
21:18 Because they were scared.
21:20 They were scared of the press conference.
21:24 When you were released, they gave you some certificate of release, some money from your personal account.
21:32 I received everything, every document, all my stuff, money, all documents, and came out from the prison.
21:40 I was really scared.
21:42 There was one car standing near the exit from the colony.
21:48 And some unknown people were standing.
21:54 From my previous experience, I knew they could do whatever they wanted.
21:59 They could kill me and nobody would find my body.
22:04 They drove me to Vladimir bus station.
22:08 I got out of the car.
22:11 I thought, "What should I do?"
22:14 But I had some money from my account, 1000 rubles.
22:18 And I went to the cafe in the bus station.
22:25 I bought ice cream and coffee.
22:30 My relatives were thinking that I would be released about 10 o'clock.
22:36 They were on the way from Moscow in a private car.
22:40 I took a taxi driver and asked him to make a phone call to my wife.
22:47 I was surprised to remember the number because it was not so easy.
22:54 I made a phone call and asked them that I was on the way.
22:58 It was like a dream.
23:00 We drank champagne.
23:02 We burned my belongings, my suit.
23:05 It's tradition.
23:07 And we came home.
23:11 I was lucky.
23:13 I was enjoying simple things.
23:16 I was sitting on the chair and lying on the sofa.
23:21 I enjoyed every moment in freedom.
23:24 Before prison, I didn't pay attention to wearing comfortable shoes.
23:32 You can stay in a hot shower as long as you want.
23:38 I didn't feel angry.
23:44 I wanted to be apologized.
23:47 I didn't want any revenge.
23:51 I wanted official acquisition.
24:01 The number of political prisoners increased tremendously.
24:06 I was released in 2012.
24:09 I was almost the only one.
24:13 But now a lot of people are sentenced for nothing.
24:18 Every political prisoner is in danger.
24:21 Vladimir Karamurza is in danger.
24:25 It's terrible what happened to Alexey Navalny.
24:29 He was murdered by jailers.
24:33 The first colony Navalny was held, it was Pokrov.
24:37 Then he was transferred to Melikhovo.
24:40 And then he was transferred to Kharp, where he was murdered.
24:46 I was in shock.
24:48 But I wasn't surprised.
24:51 Vladimir Putin was trying to threaten all his opponents.
24:55 Navalny was isolated from other prisoners.
24:57 And the jailers kept an eye on him for 24 hours.
25:01 Every jailer had a video register.
25:04 And definitely something happened.
25:08 What authorities are trying to hide.
25:11 Where are all these records?
25:13 Why don't they publish these records?
25:17 It's terrible when such obvious innocent people are in prison.
25:24 It's terrible that we're coming back to the Gulag times.
25:27 I would prefer my book wouldn't be topical at the moment.
25:33 Because my personal story is nothing compared to other stories.
25:41 My book is called "The Prisoner".
25:45 This is my personal experience.
25:47 I would like to share with everybody.
25:49 To understand who they are dealing with.
25:53 It's a story of a personal ordinary man like me.
25:59 So it happens to anyone in Russia.
26:04 [The Prisoner]
26:10 [The Prisoner]
26:16 [The Prisoner]
26:21 [The Prisoner]