The rest fall into a broad category called simply “men”, acquiescing with gang leaders, avoiding cooperating with guards and avoiding the abuses suffered by those at the bottom of the hierarchy. A system of rituals keeps the hierarchy intact. Men, for example, never share cutlery with degraded people.
Some former political prisoners manage to find a place in the system. Margolin, who was arrested in 2014 for his role in protests against the government, said he had successfully sought the help of criminal “authorities” to defend himself against an aggressive companion. Help was close, he said, in part because he was convicted of attacking a policeman in a protest.
“This was highly valued,” he said.
Oleg G. Sentsov, a Ukrainian filmmaker who spent five years in Russian prisons and in a Siberian penal colony before being released in a prisoner exchange with Ukraine, said in a telephone interview that prisoners from his high prison camp security, most of them murderers, respected him.
“They were not psychopaths,” said Sentsov of the killers he slept with. Most were victims of domestic violence. “They got drunk, maybe, and killed their wives with axes. But in prison it is different. It is seen differently. “
Navalny, he said, would do well because “he is brave”, he added. “I had no problems with the inmates, and I don’t think he will, either.”
Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, a former oil tycoon and once the richest man in Russia, who spent a decade in prison after funding the political opposition, was stabbed in the face by a prisoner holding a homemade knife. He suffered only a minor injury. The attacker said he tried to pluck out an eye.
However, Khodorkovsky said in a telephone interview, prisoners were generally not hostile to him as a political prisoner, and some said, “You are after the truth.”