A member of the Pussy Riot Russian punk band who is currently jailed has announced she would start a hunger strike Monday. She is protesting what she calls the “slave labor” that takes place in the penal colony she is in. She also said a senior official at her prison had given her a death threat.
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova received a sentence of two years in prison in August of 2012. She was sentenced after she took part in a punk prayer inside a cathedral in Moscow. The prayer was in protest against Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia.
Her announcement said she would start her hunger strike on Monday September 23 and would refuse to participate in the colony’s slave labor as well. She said her strike would continue until the laws are obeyed by the administration and it stops treating women who are incarcerated like cattle.
The band member is in the Mordovia region in Penal Colony 14, located to the southeast of Moscow. She and her fellow inmates have been forced to work 17 hours daily sewing uniforms for police.
She said the workers sleep for no more than four hours each night and that officials at the prison used some senior inmates to maintain order, in what is reminiscent of the Gulags during the Soviet era, which were nothing more that forced labor camps.
She said increasing quotas for production, collective punishment and violence against those failing to deliver were commonplace inside the colony, where she described their living conditions as failing to meet the standards of human rights and the laws in Russia.
Tolokonnikova has asked the federal arm of the prisons, to investigate a death threat she says she received from a senior official in the prison.
Her accusation did not provoke any comments from administrators at the penal colony and regional officials for Mordovia were not immediately available for comment.
Deborah Campbell
