Russia: prison torture victim 'brought back to life four times'

Former inmate Yevgeny Makarov describes how guards choked him with a towel and poured water into his mouth to suffocate him.

Yaroslavl Pretrial Detention Centre No.1 is a bleak brick building crowned with barbed wire on the banks of Russia’s River Volga.

We’re there to meet a former inmate, Yevgeny Makarov.

He had just spent six years and eight months inside - here and at another of Yaroslavl’s insalubrious jails. The prison guards don’t want us to film. Not missing a beat, Mr Makarov thrusts his mobile phone camera in their faces and demands to know what their problem is. He won’t let up. Eventually they leave.

It’s plucky from a man who 18 months earlier was lying handcuffed to a table, stripped from the waist down with a roomful of guards taking turns to beat him.

“They punched me on my feet, in my face, choked me with a towel, they poured water into my mouth so that I suffocated. I died four times because of that and they brought me back to life four times,” he says.

They didn’t beat the spirit out of him.

We know all this because there’s a video. Torture in Russian jails is nothing new. Seeing the brutal evidence of it is.

It is a hard watch. Mr Makarov’s telling of it is unpleasant enough but he doesn’t describe how he yelled.

His case caused a public outcry but only because the video was leaked - the publicity shaming Russia’s prisons service into carrying out nationwide inspections and prosecuting the guards involved.

Thirteen of the guards now sit behind bars awaiting trial. Another is under house arrest. Mr Makarov points out their windows. “I hope, I deeply hope that these sadists are punished,” he says.

Mr Makarov’s lawyer, Irina Biryukova, from the human rights group Public Verdict, had been busy long before the video came out.

She had complained to prison authorities that Mr Makarov and others were being beaten. She had brought their case to the European Court of Human Rights which had ordered authorities to look into it.

The video was leaked one year later. Only then was there a response.

It’s thrown the spotlight on a culture of torture and abuse in Russia’s jails. Ms Biryukova says the publicity from the video has emboldened others to speak out.

He said: “We’re receiving a very big number of reports from convicted people from other prisons from all over Russia.

“We started to work with them. This shows us that people stopped being scared and began to talk about the problem of torture.”

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