Videos alleging to show incidents of torture within the Russian prison system are being investigated by authorities. What follows is a report by RT’s Gabriel Gavin. But first, Fred Weir, long-time Russia correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor commented on Facebook:

It’s clear that the Russian state has sanctioned this, and that the sudden wave of media attention on horrific prison conditions is not spontaneous. But it’s hard to argue that green-lighting a media campaign like this is a bad way to handle this. I’ve often observed that — for better or worse — meaningful change in Russia often comes from the only agency within this system with the authority to implement it, ie. the Kremlin. Think perestroika.

Advocates for prison reform have labored in the shadows for years, fighting cases of individual prisoner abuse in the courts, sometimes successfully, but often getting pressured by authorities or even blackballed as “foreign agents” for their efforts. Now, suddenly, a signal from above has clearly been given that it’s time to clean things up. A lot of critics will sneer that it’s all window dressing, arguing that authoritarian states can’t reform themselves, etc. But we have seen an awful lot of positive, evolutionary, change in Russia over past decades, to the extent that today’s Russia is a totally different planet from the USSR. A much more livable one in many ways. So, two cheers for this.

Barbarism behind bars: Rape & torture in Russia’s prisons laid bare by thousands of leaked videos, human rights activists tell RT

By Gabriel Gavin, RT, 10/8/21

A chilling archive of footage purportedly showing the abuse of inmates in Russian prison colonies has already sparked a probe and cost several officers their jobs. The group behind the leak tells RT there’s still more to come.

A decade ago, Vladimir Osechkin was sentenced to seven years behind bars over fraud allegations brought by the daughter of an influential Moscow politician. Released quickly on parole, he left the country as soon as travel restrictions imposed upon him were relaxed and is still reportedly wanted for questioning on a number of charges. Now, though, as the founder of human rights group Gulagu.net, he has managed to upend the country’s penal system from afar.

Earlier this week, a tranche of videos that Osechkin and his colleagues say were taken by officers inside a prison hospital in Russia’s Saratov region have caused shock and outrage in the country. In one, a man believed to be an inmate at the tuberculosis facility can be seen laying strapped to a bed and screaming while staff repeatedly violate him with a stick in a horrifying minutes-long ordeal.

Other clips released by Gulagu.net claim to show prisoners being urinated on and forced to perform sexual acts in front of the camera. The outcry in the wake of their publication has even reached the Kremlin, with President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, saying that, “if the authenticity of these materials is confirmed, then of course it is a pretext for a serious investigation.”

However, the director of the country’s federal prison services, Alexander Kalashnikov, has quickly moved to dismiss four officers from the region over the incident. After the clips were released on Wednesday, the top penal boss fired Pavel Gatsenko, the head of the Saratov hospital where the incidents were alleged to have taken place, as well as a number of senior officials. Kalashnikov has apparently also moved to sack the overall head of Saratov’s prison service, Colonel Alexey Fedotov, “for serious miscalculations in operational and service activities.”

Read full article here.