One of Russia's two jailed Pussy Riot punk band members said Wednesday she was fighting against the "slave mentality" in her prison camp and received death threats because of her activism.
In an interview with opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta that details her first months at Corrective Labor Colony No. 28 in the Perm region, Maria Alyokhina, 24, described how hard it was to see what the country's penitentiary system did to inmates.
"The hardest thing? It's to realize how this system works, how it forms a slave mentality in people, how people fall into line," she said in the interview published on Wednesday.
"These are not isolated incidents, these are mass incidents and there are practically no exceptions," she said.
"Rudeness, cowardice, treachery and denunciations, this is the norm."
Alyokhina, a slight figure with curly hair, said she had requested a meeting with a regional rights ombudsman and told him that female prisoners had to wash themselves with cold water while their boots and head scarves were not warm enough to withstand the temperatures of minus 30 degrees Celsius.
In an interview with opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta that details her first months at Corrective Labor Colony No. 28 in the Perm region, Maria Alyokhina, 24, described how hard it was to see what the country's penitentiary system did to inmates.
"The hardest thing? It's to realize how this system works, how it forms a slave mentality in people, how people fall into line," she said in the interview published on Wednesday.
"These are not isolated incidents, these are mass incidents and there are practically no exceptions," she said.
"Rudeness, cowardice, treachery and denunciations, this is the norm."
Alyokhina, a slight figure with curly hair, said she had requested a meeting with a regional rights ombudsman and told him that female prisoners had to wash themselves with cold water while their boots and head scarves were not warm enough to withstand the temperatures of minus 30 degrees Celsius.
