I specially chose to monitor Russia’s presidential elections in March in a prison, yet I was slightly apprehensive of the experience given the notorious, Gulag-style reputation of Russian jails. So when I was leaving my passport at the front desk at Butyrka jail and putting my mobile phone in a locker, I didn’t expect to see anything positive. Yet election day in a macabre-looking building with high walls and viewing towers turned out to be a day of excitement, not only for me but for the inmates as well.

The observers were told that no photography or videoing was allowed on the grounds, and that limited our violation reporting powers right at the start. That, and the fact that prisoners don’t hold passports, makes it difficult to check that the people voting are the same people on the voting list and not random strangers.

The only prisoners allowed to vote are those on remand. Their passports get taken away from them as they come to jail and instead they have ID cards made in-house, which their wardens keep and which are in theory easy to fake or issue by the administration.

You get to leave your cell in the morning in a group of inmates accompanied by a guard and walk though a maze of long dark corridors into a bright and spacious room full of officers sitting behind desks. It was hard to tell what they wanted and why this was necessary, but most inmates were simply happy to take a stroll.

This was broadly the attitude most voters in Butyrka jail, also known as Sizo-2, had on March 18, the day of the presidential elections.

While no one had doubts as who was going to win and many liberal-minded Muscovites stayed at home following anti-corruption blogger and opposition activist Alexei Navalny’s appeal to boycott the elections, 1,606 remand prisoners out of a total of 1,607 chose to come to the polls.

When I first arrived at Butyrka, I thought this overwhelming number was suspicious and that probably the prisoners were forced to take part in the elections or had been brainwashed to vote for a specific candidate. Yet by the end of the day my observations led me to believe that it was the sheer novelty of the experience that drew inmates to the polling station.

“Observing elections in jail is boring because every move here is recorded on camera and because it’s a place that follows a strict regime. Typically observers don’t come back,” whispered the deputy head of the jail, a young and somewhat chubby guy, leaning in close and pointing out the nearest camera to me.

He followed my every step and every time I approached the table where the members of the election committee sat in their prison uniforms with books of lists of voters, or talked to a fellow observer, he jumped on me like a puma. He seemed anxious that I might discover something to file a complaint about. It wasn't clear why he even cared.

A tour of the prison

Many prominent Russian statesmen and writers served time in Butyrka from Yemelyan Pugachev, a pretender to the Russian throne and insurrectionist during the reign of Catherine II, the revolutionaries Leon Trotsky and his colleague Felix Dzerzhinski who founded the notorious Cheka secret police, to poets and writers including Marina Tsvetaeva, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Igor Guberman. The evil Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s henchman, had a study with his personal entrance to Butyrka. Not that it is proudly shown to visitors. Not surprisingly no records remain from before 1953, so much of the jail’s dark history is only rumoured.

This oldest and most famous Moscow jail located in the centre of town and built 250 years ago by Mikhail Kazakov, the same architect who built the Senate building of the Kremlin (the white classical building overlooking the river that you see on all the photographs), is heavily inspected and frequented by the members of different governmental and public human rights watch groups.

For them there is even a typical itinerary on offer. It starts with a walk through the ward of convicts who have a regular, not particularly strict, regime. They work in prison kitchens and do cleaning jobs around the prison. Their position is not prestigious in prison terms (they are called ‘kozli’ or ‘goats’ for their collaboration with the prison administration) but conditions are lighter.

Prisoners from Moscow are happy to stay here since it makes it easier for their families to visit them and bring parcels. The cells on the ward are basic and reminiscent of those in summer pioneer camps of the Soviet Union and house about 20 inmates. The cell we were shown had an aquarium with a tortoise in it. There is a public telephone in the corridor for calling your family with phone cards and unlimited access.

For important delegations the in-house bakery and the canteen prepare tasty lunches and dinners with alcohol served by the inmates and a friendly and charming head of jail making toasts and talking about his experiences of visiting jails in Norway with which Butyrka has sister contacts.

There is a prison museum, a Russian Orthodox chapel, a mosque and a synagogue to see for the discerning visitor.

The impressions

A flattering report about a Russian jail may sound strange to a reader who (like me) was expecting to see something utterly horrible. Yet despite being old and overcrowded, Butyrka is by every means a modern day prison where inmates are addressed as in the plural ‘Vy’, a polite form of address in the Russian language, and where inhabitants are not afraid of guards and staff members. They show no signs of abuse or ill health.

But the problems of the establishment are obvious: housing more than 2,500 people, the jail is 40% over its estimated occupancy rate. The inmates are crowded in small dingy cells in extremely basic conditions. The prisoners are only allowed to have a shower once a week. They are forced to take the clothes they just washed in a basin off the clothing rack when some outside inspection comes because there is no provision in the prison regulations as to where wet clothes are meant to be dried. Being Russia, clothes go come back on the clothing rope immediately once the inspection is gone. The inspections don’t want to see ropes in cells for obvious reasons but the prison management turns a blind eye to it for lack of an alternative.

Some 200 different nationalities occupy the prison. There is a noticeable dominance of ethnic diasporas. People get here for two reasons: they are either registered residents of Moscow or they committed their crime in Moscow. Butyrka is a male prison with a female psychiatric ward, which houses women from other Moscow jails. Men are here for drugs, robberies and fraud, while some of the women and teenage girls have committed murders, such as of their parents.

Like the rest of the city, in Butyrka all strata of Russian society are represented. Some inmates look clean and well-to-do while others match all the criminal stereotypes. 

An efficient process

Watching them cast their votes, it was hard not to notice the efficiency of the process. Unlike the last mayoral elections, where the voting process ended long after the official deadline of 8pm, for these elections, prisoners came in a steady flow of groups. The cells opened in an efficient manner, one after another, and the inmates marched to the polling station without any delay. By 2pm all prisoners and some 80 registered staff members on duty had already voted.

A large proportion of voters took their ballot papers but either left them blank or marked them so they became invalid. Yet it didn’t seem to be done out of protest, more of a lack of information and interest in the elections and their meaning. A significant number of voters walked past the ballot boxes with their bulletin in hand because they had no idea of the procedure. They had to be called to put their piece of paper into the transparent box otherwise they would just have walked straight past the box.

About 200 voters cast empty ballots, while another 200 spoiled them. The second most popular name on the ballot after the incumbent Vladimir Putin was Ksenia Sobchak, which surprised the administration. The favourite in previous years after Putin was Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who visited prisons a lot in previous times and made broad populist promises.

“It’s a male prison,” laughed one of the committee members, also a member of staff, when the votes were counted. “Of course they’d vote for a woman.”

“I love you, Sobchak!” was written across one the bulletins in bold letters, which the committee had to count as invalid.

Like the rest of society, prisoners also feel like their vote means nothing in today’s Russia. Voting for them is just a bit of fun. They don’t think that whoever they are going to vote for is going to affect their lives one way or the other.

The prison head looked like a descent guy, despite all my reservations. Being an ex-pilot, he retired early and this job offer came as a surprise.

‘We haven’t had a proper amnesty since Yeltsin’s times, and it’s not our decision who comes to us. We try to help prisoners write many appeals for early releases but they hardly ever come back with positive answers,” shared Butyrka’s warden.

“Come and work for us,” the warden said, looking me straight in the eye only half joking. “We are very understaffed and underpaid,” he added with a sigh.