‘Your Magomedov disappeared somewhere’ The lives of Russian-speaking inmates in Berlin’s prisons

Just over half of the prisoners in Berlin are foreign nationals. And while there are no exact statistics on Russian-speaking inmates, they include people from every former Soviet country. They’re connected by their knowledge of the Russian language, and their relationships are often built on that basis. Some organizations in Berlin which help prisoners also offer services in Russian. For Schön, journalist Xenia Maximova, who has worked with Berliner AIDS-Hilfe for many years, tells us about her experience in Berlin prisons. Meduza in English is publishing a translation with her permission.

The first time I visited Berlin's Tegel Prison for men was many years ago, when I came from Moscow for an internship. I was writing a piece about the German penal system. What I remember most about that time were the heavy seemingly-impenetrable doors after the screening checkpoint, and that at the bottom there was a cat-door.

Around the same time, I visited a teenage prison in northern Germany. The first thing I saw when I walked in was young kids with criminal records lying on the couch in front of the TV, smoking. “Wow, they can smoke!” I marveled at the time. “Actually, no,” the warden stammered, “but, what are you going to do, they're kids!”

I started spending a lot of time in prisons. When I moved to Berlin, I started volunteering with a local HIV service organization, and before long, they offered me the chance to work in prisons. There are many Russian-speaking inmates in the city’s in prisons, and thus counselors from Berliner AIDS-Hilfe are not always able to find a common language with them. In general, prisoners from former Soviet countries do not speak German or English and, more importantly, they have a completely different way of thinking. I was curious to see what life was like behind bars, so I agreed. 

I’m in Tegel the most, which is known as the strictest men's prison, but also the pre-trial detention center near the Berlin Central Station, the Plötzensee prison hospital, and sometimes the women's prison in Lichtenberg.

What does Berliner AIDS-Hilfe do in prisons?

Berliner AIDS-Hilfe is an organization that provides comprehensive support for people with HIV and hepatitis C. Anyone can ask for help. Daniela Staack, an experienced social worker, works in Berlin prisons, and I go with her when she meets with Russian-speaking prisoners.

Inmates learn about the offer from the brochures we leave in prisons, from prison staff, doctors, and other inmates. By the way, in Berlin it is not obligatory to disclose one’s HIV status during arrest. Unlike, for example, in Bavaria, where it is mandatory to test every prisoner on the first day. In Berlin, when a prisoner is “admitted” to prison, they undergo a medical examination and a conversation with a doctor, during which it is possible (but not mandatory) to disclose their HIV status. It’s important that the prisoner receives all the medication they need, including life-saving antiretroviral therapy (ART), as soon as their sentence begins.

The cost is borne by the prison. At a meeting, one of my clients, a tall, large man from Russia, said of the German system: “I stole four packs of cigarettes. I got locked up. On the outside, I have neither documents nor health insurance. But I have HIV, hepatitis B and C, a drug addiction, and a sick stomach. I went straight to the prison hospital. While I’ve been sitting here, Merkel has spent 190,000 euros on my treatment. I wish she’d built some fucking houses for kids.”

Who speaks Russian in prison?

Only 48 percent of all Berlin prisoners are German citizens; the rest are foreigners and undocumented persons. Our Russian-speaking clients come from all over the former Soviet Union, mostly from Lithuania and Latvia. As E.U. citizens, they’re free to come to Germany, and many come in search of economic opportunity. 

There are also a lot of Chechens in Germany as refugees. Ten years ago, Russians were the top filers of asylum applications in Germany, and most applicants were from Chechnya and Ingushetia.

There are also Georgians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and others. Language connects them behind bars, because most of them speak almost no German. That means that any Russian-speaker automatically becomes a “friend,” or at least a neighbor with whom you can discuss prison rules and solve everyday problems.

‘Your Magomedov disappeared somewhere’

Representatives from various organizations and lawyers use a separate entrance in Tegel. Visitors enter through another gate. The rules are stricter for us: unlike relatives and friends, we’re not allowed to bring anything in for prisoners, nor can we buy them tobacco or anything from the vending machines. In front of “our” entrance there are storage rooms where you have to leave your bags and phones.

Once during a consultation I was fiddling with my pass, which attracted the attention of a client, an old prisoner from Latvia. He asked to see it, laughed for a long time, and told me it’d take three minutes to forge it.

The severity of your examination to enter depends on the duty officer’s mood. Sometimes they come out with a metal detector and check what’s in your pockets. Other times they cheerfully ask: “Did you take out your forbidden items? Well, good, come on in.”

It's not indiscretion. They trust us and understand that we’re not going to break the rules and spoil the trust between the prison and our organization, which has been carefully built over the years. And this concept is difficult to explain to my Russian-speaking clients who refuse to understand why I “can’t just bring tobacco.”

After the inspection I usually go to a separate cell to wait for one of the prison officers to pick me up and take me where I’m supposed to go.

We usually go to a guard post and tell them which prisoner we want to talk to. We’re escorted to a room and our client’s name is announced over the loudspeaker: “Mr. Ivanov, to the central room, please!”

Once, in the second house — the toughest ward in Tegel — a funny thing happened. We invited a client, a Chechen drug dealer, and sat down to wait. A loudspeaker blared through the old building: “Herr Magomedov, they’re expecting you!” Twenty minutes later, instead of our Chechen client, the duty officer came in and apologized: “Your Magomedov disappeared, we can’t find him anywhere.”

And no, our client had not made an elaborate escape. At the next consultation, he laughed: “What a bunch of useless cops they are here! I'm either in my cell or at a friend's!” Soon Magomedov, by the way, found himself in a punishment cell, where we can also provide counseling. He came to the meeting as happy as a clam: he said that in a couple of days in the punishment cell he had made a month's turnover from selling heroin. And he winked at me: “The Germans don't realize that I'm not a sucker, but a professional dealer.”

In the meeting room, we’re left alone with the client. There is a panic button inside, but Daniela has never used it in the 12 years she’s been working.

If there’s an emergency, an alarm goes off throughout the prison. This happens, for example, in the case of a large fight or death by suicide. Then the alarm system starts howling and everyone — visitors and inmates alike — is locked in whatever room they’re in at that moment. Unfortunately, death by suicide in Tegel is a regular occurrance, and it’s usually taken very hard by the other inmates.

It’s easy to get lost within the walls of the detention center in Moabit. It’s an ancient building with branching corridors. You could make a movie about medieval prisoners there. Once I wandered alone for a long time between locked cells, trying to find a way out. “I'd like to get out,” I told a staff member who finally got me. “Everybody wants to get out!” he cackled. It's a common joke in Moabit.

Everyone’s entitled to their personal privacy

Every cell in Berlin is a single room, because everyone has the right to their own personal space. One of my Russian-speaking clients refused to accept the situation. He had spent many years in Russian prisons, and to be left alone was torture for him.

For these “social” prisoners, for whom isolation is worse than death, as an exception, the Moabit pre-trial detention center has several double cells, which are single rooms connected by a door through which you can get to your neighbor’s cell.

The prison day starts early. After checking that everyone is in place and alive, prisoners go either to work or to “school.” For foreigners, that means a German language course. At school, cultural disagreements are especially common: “Some Romanians, Turks, and Bulgarians got together in class and called Merkel a prostitute. And I told them: if it wasn’t for her, you wouldn’t be sitting here!” said one of my clients.

He complained about the new teacher: “He can't explain the rules of German grammar. The old one was good. Too bad they kicked him out — he was smuggling heroin.”

Every day also includes free time, when prisoners can take a walk, play table tennis, or otherwise stretch their muscles. This is in addition to “open hours,” when cell doors are unlocked inside the ward and prisoners can visit each other, watch TV together, play chess, or cook in the prison kitchen. There are also many organizations and volunteers that organize different classes and activities— from self-help groups for drug addicts to yoga and guitar. 

One of my clients from Belarus complained that he hadn’t been given a job yet, and that it’s terribly boring to just sit around. That is why he goes to all the classes. Dissatisfied, he says: “I signed up for drawing, I didn’t like the teacher. She hung our drawings on the wall, sat us in a semicircle (like in a madhouse!) and asked why I drew such tall grass. What do you care, bitch? I saw it on TV and drew it! I quit drawing, went to occupational therapy. I didn’t like the teacher again. She wouldn’t give me an extra bead, she keeps her scissors under lock and key. I quit. Tomorrow I’m going to go to a spiritual care class in Russian. I don’t have the nerves to sit in this prison.”

Everyone usually wants to work, everyone needs money for commissary goods, for tobacco and coffee, to rent a TV set in the cell (17 euros a month), to pay debts (many prisoners are in prison for outstanding fines, and if they have money, they’re eligible for early release), and to make phone calls. Their wages are minimal: they can earn a maximum of 16 euros for a full day's work. Those who cannot work or those who study are given pocket money from the prison, usually about 50 euros a month.   

There are penalties for disorderly conduct. One of my clients was caught with a cell phone. The client was deprived of their free time and TV for two weeks. But that's good, he told me philosophically, because during that time he read two “smart” books.

“What were they?” I asked.

“A dream book and a dictionary of prison lingo,” he said.

The men’s prison needs cosmetics

We often have to deal with everyday problems that aren’t HIV-related.

In Plötzensee Prison, a young transgender woman, Victoria, came for counseling. In preparation for our meeting, she had her hair done (in Kyiv she worked as a stylist), shaved her legs, and put on makeup. She complained that she had to spit in dried mascara because there were no cosmetics in the commissary catalog in the men's prison.

Daniela promised that she’d contact the prison authorities to resolve the issue. In this case it’s not a matter of bliss, but of personal dignity: it’s important for a person to express their gender in certain ways, and have their own gender markers. 

Victoria said with pride that both the staff and her cellmates treat her well, that a Berlin counseling center for transgender people had already come to her and promised to help her transition when she’s released, and that she had met her true love in the cell next door, “a native German who was ready to marry her.” And also that her Moldovan grandmother had calmly accepted that her grandson had become a granddaughter, and had even sent her money to help her pay off the fine to get out of prison early.

However, I’ve learned to treat such stories with caution. The fact is that many of our clients often have serious mental disorders. At our first meeting, Victoria was euphoric, and on other days she saw everything in a much darker light. Studies show that up to 80% of prisoners have mental health issues ranging from mild depression to serious illness.

Victoria had a light sentence, was released quickly, and snapped in the first hours. She overdosed on heroin, and then had a conflict with some new acquaintances that ended in a fight with serious consequences. She died soon after, unable to cope with life on the outside.

Another of my clients, Jurgis, a Lithuanian, is a real authority on prisons, having served long sentences in Soviet prisons. He has a “by the book” attitude to life, and the ability to adapt quickly to the “comfortable” conditions inside a Berlin prison. Although he had one complaint: the social worker took away his guitar and so he couldn’t finish his new song. Jurgis asked if we could help with the guitar. We could: Daniela says that it’s important for the prison guards to keep the prisoners placated, and if a man sits in his cell and does nothing but strum quietly, everyone is better off. 

Jurgis laments: “I’ve lived to see it! I have to ask a woman for such a small thing. If I had been on the outside, I would have taken this social worker at gunpoint and that would have been the end of the conversation!

His guitar was returned.

Prison as an opportunity to live

It turns out that not all prisoners in Germany dream of release. And for some of our clients, we’re very supportive of staying behind bars longer. 

First, in the cold season, prison is an opportunity to sleep in a warm room and eat regularly. Many Russian-speaking Berliners with HIV and drug addiction are the early candidates to join the ranks of the homeless. Life on the street is hard, and doubly so when you have both of these illnesses. Some people deliberately commit a minor crime in the fall in order to spend the winter in a cell. 

Second, it’s an opportunity to get medical treatment. Many Russian-speaking prisoners in Berlin are in Germany illegally. That means that they have no medical insurance on the outside. But often they do have HIV, which requires regular treatment for the rest of their lives. There’s also drug addiction, usually opioid addiction, which can be dealt with by receiving substitution therapy from a doctor. There’s hepatitis C, which can be cured, but it costs about 40 thousand euros. If a person with hepatitis C ends up behind bars, they’ve gotten lucky. The prison hospital provides this therapy and absorbs the costs.

Third, it’s an opportunity to stay in Germany. However, it used to be easier for Berliner AIDS-Hilfe to defend its Russian-speaking clients facing deportation. Arguments that there was no good treatment in the countries of origin or that people with HIV were stigmatized were effective. In the last few years, migration policy has changed, and German authorities are trying to get rid of newcomers with criminal records. Sometimes it's very sad. I remember when we were sending home a client, Andrey, with AIDS, cancer (which often develops when HIV is left untreated), severe drug addiction, a completely broken psyche, scars on his veins from suicide attempts, but yet with a big, kind heart. He was not allowed to stay in Germany on humanitarian grounds, and it was clear that he would not survive in his native country.

Prison doctors are sympathetic to those who are threatened with deportation to countries that are not very favorable in terms of medical support, and if possible, they give these prisoners medicine to take with them. 

The aforementioned authority Jurgis wanted to go home himself. After serving two-thirds of the sentence, a prisoner can do the rest in their home country. A German prison is like a resort compared to a Lithuanian one, he said, but his elderly mother is in Lithuania. At our last meeting, the former prisoner told me about his preparations: “Okay, I have a big suitcase. I will put a blanket in, a plasma TV from my cell, and a down jacket on top —of so it won’t break! I’ve bought coffee, I’ve saved up Subotex (a substitution therapy drug for opioid addiction) for two months, otherwise I won’t be able to sit there on fumes. I got my ART. And most importantly, I got a flu shot — otherwise you’ll catch a cold, God forbid, in the very beginning!”

Fourth (and this is ideal, but it does happen!), prison can give one a chance to get back on their feet. They can learn German (all prisons offer courses for foreign convicts) or they can learn a trade. Some clients do manage to take advantage of their chance.