In Ulan-Ud, dissatisfied residents were not allowed to attend public hearings on the construction of a giant correctional colony (IK) with 3 thousand places.
Just this March, the director of the Federal Penitentiary Service, Arkady Gostev, reported: by the end of 2023, 24 penal colonies were liquidated, and in 53 regions, filling limits were reduced: prisoners are regularly sent to the front. In our half-empty IK-6 Bezhetsk, the doors of the second detachment were boarded up. In other men’s zones of the Tver region, the contingent was halved.
And suddenly the reputable newspaper Vedomosti reports that the government has decided to increase funding for the Federal Penitentiary Service by a trillion rubles. That is, more than four times. This is more than for all housing and communal services and culture combined. In particular, it is planned to build mega colonies along with pre-trial detention centers in 29 regions of the country.
When I was the Head of the Serpukhov District, the Federal Penitentiary Service proposed to build a zone in the most remote corner of the municipality on the border with the Tula region, where jobs were tight. We had just published this proposal, without even mentioning public hearings, when our residents almost staged a revolution.
At that time I didn’t really understand such a violent reaction from the population, but now I can perfectly imagine the negative aura that was poisoning everything around me. About a thousand employees of the mega-colony will gain skills in humiliation and torture, extorting money from prisoners… They will absorb thieves’ slang and bring it to their families. Children will play guards and prisoners on the street. And in the event of political upheaval in the country, it is unlikely that the FSI will be able to stop the rebellious zone.
Like in the mid-1950s, when military units with tanks and planes could not stop the riots in many Gulag camps for months. Front-line convicts stood at the head of these uprisings. Needless to say, not so long ago we saw how a column of Wagner PMC, consisting of prisoners, was only saluted by police officers at their posts during the “March of Justice” to Moscow.
For the same reason, megacolonies were planned away from the capital and its region. In these two regions there is not even a single maximum security colony, let alone a concentration of 3000+ prisoners.
Against the backdrop of a doubling of spending on armaments, social services were cut, but once again money was found for concentration camps.
Let them build it in Rublyovka. It has the highest density of criminals. Deputy Minister of Defense Timur Ivanov is a small fish among sharks and whales with shadow capital exceeding the Russian budget.
“ВЧК ОГПУ”