“GRU officers do time for drugs, the police for protection rackets”: Inside Russia’s prison colony for crooked cops and spooks

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I ended up in prison over a completely stupid situation. I was building a dacha and had hired a crew. We agreed on the timeline and price. When the construction was almost done and they were finishing up with the interior, the foreman suddenly demanded more money. I refused. Then I came by one day and found the whole crew drunk, and the tiles and expensive paint were gone. I called some friends. A showdown followed. I locked the foreman in the basement and demanded my money back. The workers got into a fight. I hit one of them, he fell, hit his head on a step, and died. That’s how I ended up in prison. I spent the whole sentence sewing masks and linings for workwear. Now, from what I hear, they’ve set up production of door seals for Lada cars.

Church and porridge with butter

The main building in the colony is a five-story block where all the units are housed. Around a thousand people live there — twelve units, each with just over a hundred inmates. Across the yard, there’s a three-story building. That’s where the infirmary is, along with the operations office — the place snitches run to. A little farther off are the bathhouse-laundry complex and the library. That’s where the Borsky Etap band rehearses. I remember once they searched the saxophone player and found a stash of phones and a signal booster. It turned out he was one of the snitches.

There’s even an auto repair shop in the colony that restores cars on order. Closer to the main building are the so-called VIP barracks. One of them houses those convicted of espionage and treason. Cameras are everywhere. Wake-up is at 5:30 a.m., breakfast at 6:20, lunch at 11:30, lights out at ten. Breakfast is usually porridge and a small piece of butter; for lunch they serve soup and a cutlet with a side dish. On Sundays we’d get eggs and white bread, and on holidays — buns from the prison bakery.

I remember one time the fridge broke, the meat spoiled, and they threw it out. But some trash pickers found it, sold it to a cafeteria, and people there got food poisoning. It caused a huge stir — they were even talking about opening a criminal case, but in the end, it all went quiet.

There’s a small Orthodox church on the grounds, and the Muslim inmates have their own prayer room. I remember one guy — a former investigator who got time for murder — was brought in. At first he just walked around quietly, watching everyone. Then one day he converted to Islam. He figured the Muslim guys would take care of him, share food or whatever. But they saw right through him. He didn’t last long — switched back to Orthodoxy.

Once a rabbi came to visit. The administration scrambled to round up some “Jews” from the different units just for show. In reality, they were just regular Russian cops doing time. The staff told them, “You’re Rabinovich, you’re Lipkin, and you’re Eidelman now.” I’m pretty sure the rabbi realized he was being played and left.

Money, extortion, and the FSB's slush fund

In the colony, everyone is housed together: FSB, cops, FSO officers, prosecutors, judges, and even military generals who were recruited by FSB military counterintelligence back in their youth. The main rule is: don’t talk too much about yourself, and even less about others. Don’t trust anyone. If you stick to that, you’ll be fine.

Those who have wealthy relatives on the outside try to cut deals with the prison administration and come up with “arrangements.” My former colleagues from FSB headquarters on Lubyanka are doing alright. Most of them are in for protection rackets, large-scale fraud, or extortion. Their bosses made arrangements with the colony leadership in advance, and those guys were placed in a quiet, stable unit.

Other inmates might cycle through three or four different units over the course of their sentence, but these ones stay put. And that’s a big deal — to have your own bunk. One that’s not next to the door, with no psychos nearby, not too hot in summer or freezing in winter. To have a working TV, newspaper subscriptions, space in the fridge for your food, the unit supply manager or day-duty guys also being “your people.”

At first, you can’t tell where someone’s from. You figure people out by how they talk, how they act. I remember this one guy — very quiet, kept to himself. I saw him reading a Spanish magazine. We got to talking, and he said he’d been to dozens of countries, then gave this sly little smile. Turned out he’d worked for the SVR, then landed a cushy government job, and made a killing on bribes before getting caught.

The GRU officers — serious guys — were in for kidnappings and large-scale extortion. But most of the GRU inmates were from special forces units. They’d been supplying drugs to military bases. Those places are full of thrill-seekers, and after combat, some of them needed to smoke something or sniff a line just to take the edge off.

One GRU guy figured out a formula and started making some kind of powder at home — I don’t know the details, but half the base was on it, including staff officers. FSO guys were also busted for drugs — they used escort vehicles to deliver that crap to classified sites.

FSB department heads have special “slush funds” set aside for convicted officers — money from them gets wired into the colony for phones, cigarettes, food — whatever’s needed. Of course, that only applies if the officer didn’t rat out their boss during the investigation. It’s a way for the leadership to send a message to the rest: don’t be afraid to make money -– for us and for yourselves. And if you end up behind bars, you won’t be left to rot.

I didn’t have wealthy relatives, and I’d had a falling-out with my boss, so I did my time in an ordinary unit, alongside ex-cops. I can also say for sure that a quarter of the people sent to this colony have nothing to do with operational service. They’re former informants or agents who were once embedded in criminal groups. They get hidden in the colony under fake names and cover stories.

Prison guards have their own system of bribes and extortions. In 2020, the FSB arrested a big shot from the Nizhny Novgorod Federal Penitentiary Service named Gudkov. He was extorting money from his subordinates. We were eagerly waiting for him in the prison, but he got just one year of probation. Trying to extort money from me was pointless, especially since I was under strict surveillance and refused to cooperate on principle.

I wouldn’t say people talk much. What’s there to talk about? That they screwed up and lost almost everything? It’s every man for himself there, like on the front lines.

Like in any prison, the main currency is tea and cigarettes. But generals, colonels, and judges with good pensions are especially valued. Each one has five or six freeloaders hanging around them. Every barracks manager tried to recruit as many of these pensioners as possible to their unit because they could always get extra goods from the prison store through them. In short, very useful people.

Pedophiles and corrupt cops

I remember one colonel with a hefty pension — an old guy, he was friends with the deputy head of the Moscow police headquarters. He raped his underage grandchildren. It came to light because he had chronic syphilis and infected his grandkids. He lived with us in the same unit — wasn’t segregated — and we used the same washbasin in the bathhouse. He received a good pension, so hangers-on flocked around him. There were about ten such rapists and pedophiles in every unit.

There was this guy in our unit, some dude from Moscow who started out in the KGB back in the day. Once he retired, he’d throw on regular clothes and go around flashing women and kids. Total creep. In the prison, he’d always stroll into the bathhouse last, slamming the door like a show-off so everyone would turn and see him buck naked. They ended up shipping him off to another joint eventually. Look, in a “red” prison like this — where the guards run a tight ship — nobody gives a damn what you’re in for. Murder, robbery, pedophilia, whatever. All that matters is if you’ve got cash or connections on the outside.

I heard about this firefighter from Ossetia in another unit, locked up for being a pedophile. The guy tried to sue the colony for 17 million rubles (around $200,000), claiming they humiliated him, banned him from the prison club, and forced him to stash his food in a toilet tank. Sounds like a stretch to me. Guys like that, with serious issues, were usually kept in a separate unit, away from the rest of us.

Oh, and I ran into some of those “werewolves in uniform“ from Moscow’s Criminal Investigation Department (MUR) — the corrupt cops. Back in the mid-2000s, some journalist named Hinshtein spilled all the dirt on them in Moskovsky Komsomolets, on orders from General Romodanovsky. He painted them as a hardcore extortion crew — said all their property was stolen — and justice was served. Their ringleader, Evgeny Taratorin, was here — he used to be deputy head of MUR’s organized crime squad. The guy built a little stone chapel and a sauna in the prison. At night, the guards would party there with their wives, and he was the one running the sauna like some big shot. Even the prison’s smotryashchy — the inmate who keeps things in line — would swing by to steam. That guy was a Kadyrov loyalist, some Chechen special forces dude who was in for torture and murder, I think. He’d step in to sort out fights, thefts, or whatever drama popped off in the units.

Fights and deaths

There were plenty of conflicts — lots of people in there were unstable, aggressive, or just completely off the rails. I remember once a former OMON officer and a former prosecutor were playing chess. Suddenly, the OMON guy stood up and broke the prosecutor’s jaw with a single punch. Incidents like that never make it into the official reports — no one wants to mess up the stats. Afterward, the smotryashchiy will get involved and smooth things over. One hothead even tried to start a revolution — wanted to replace the smotryashchiy, crack down on the snitches, started calling for a full-blown uprising. One morning, we all lined up for roll call — and he just wasn’t there. No one asked what happened to him.

The loudest killing happened in 2010, when FSB colonel Oleg Yefremov from Nizhny Novgorod was beaten to death. He’d been covering for some scam fund that conned a bunch of generals and prosecutors. Even before the trial, he was thrown in solitary. They strung him up from the ceiling and beat him with batons, trying to force him to say where he’d hidden the money. They broke every bone in his body. Two guards were convicted for the murder — they did time in the same colony, only in a separate unit. But the brass behind it all — those with stripes on their trousers — hid out back at Lubyanka.

In general, deaths are common, especially in the summer when the heat hits. Most die from chronic illnesses: heart attacks, strokes, diabetes. There were also a lot of food poisonings. Each unit of a hundred people had just two fridges. Food would spoil in boxes, and guys would end up in the infirmary. COVID hit hard. The guards brought it in from the outside, and it circulated from one unit to another for close to two years. I personally caught it three times — thought I wouldn’t make it. One time I was shaking all over with fever, completely out of it, when suddenly they gave the order: out for roll call. Some idiot had called in a bomb threat to the colony.

There were plenty of suicides too, of course. In 2021, Mikhail Maksimenko, former head of the Internal Security Directorate of the Investigative Committee, took his own life. He had taken a bribe from the crime boss Shakro Molodyi to help free his henchman — “The Italian” — and got 13 years in a high-security colony for it. He kept filing complaints, demanding a retrial. Then something snapped. He lost his mind and was sent to the prison psych ward. One day, he went into a utility room and hanged himself with his shoelaces.

There was another guy in our unit — used to be my colleague in the FSB. An interesting person. Then out of nowhere he started slipping. They’d call him out for morning roll call, and he’d just look around blankly, checking under the bunks. Then one day, quietly, he slit his wrists. Another one — also a former colleague, from a southern regional FSB branch — had been keeping to himself. Then one morning he turned up at the gatehouse with his things and said, “I’ve been acquitted — open the gate.” They took him to the infirmary, and two days later he hanged himself.

There were a lot who just lost it. Picture this: morning roll call, and suddenly this former operative steps out to the center of the yard and starts reciting poetry: “Black sun in America, red sun in Russia.” After that he started fasting. Two months later, he looked like a skeleton. They gave him early release for health reasons and sent him off to a psych hospital. Another one, an operative from the Caucasus, lost his mind after about three years inside. They granted him early release too. His family came to pick him up, but he disappeared. The police swept the whole city looking for him, and finally found him hiding in a well.

Snitches

There’s never a shortage of people willing to snitch inside. Out in the world, they acted like patriots, standing guard for the Motherland. But once behind bars, a lot of them would sell their own mother for a can of stew, a pack of smokes, a little privilege or an extra care package. No shame, no conscience.

I had a bunkmate once, a border service guy. I used to share food from home with him, thought he was solid. One night he asked to borrow my phone to call his wife. I was listening to music and ended up falling asleep with my headphones in. In the morning I head to the infirmary to get some meds — and he's there too. I ask, “Semyonych, what’s up, feeling sick?” He panics: “Yeah, my tooth started acting up last night.” Then bolts upstairs to the ops office. Sure enough, they took my phone and tossed me in the hole.

There was another one — real weasel — went by the nickname Mentov [“beat cop”]. He lived to snitch. Someone sits on their bunk before lights out? He’s already halfway to the office. Sees a phone at night? Runs to report it first thing in the morning. He was in for murdering his boss from economic crimes. That boss was supposed to get a hefty bribe from some businessman, but Mentov found out and, together with some Azerbaijani buddy, took the guy out. Only the bribe hadn’t been paid that day, so they got nothing. He ended up getting released early, but he was too scared to go back home. Now he drives a cab in Bor.

There was another guy, a different kind of rat. He’d pull this move in the bathhouse — offer guys sex, show them porn, then run to the ops: “They raped me!” The authorities would open a case and tack on more time to someone’s sentence. Before prison, this guy had served somewhere in the Urals and had been involved in a few murders of gay men.

Skripal and the “VIP barracks” for spies

Sergei Skripal and other spies were kept in a separate “VIP barracks” left over from Soviet times. It was a model unit with relaxed conditions: apple trees grew on the grounds, there was a small fountain, and even a fitness yard. Also housed there was Alexander Zaporozhsky, a former SVR officer turned CIA asset who was later exchanged alongside Skripal. He was sentenced to 18 years for treason and given the job of managing the canteen — positions like that aren’t handed out for nothing in prison.

A lot of people dreamed of getting into that spy unit — although I personally saw someone being carried out of that barracks on a stretcher once, and another time an ambulance came by. Among us were police officers convicted of spying for the CIA and Ukraine. One, as I recall, was from Moscow, another from Rostov, and the third worked in Kursk. One of them had been disowned by his family — never got any parcels, so I quietly shared food with him.

There were Ukrainians too, accused of espionage by Russia. They mostly kept to themselves, and few interacted with them — it could land you in trouble. In general, we didn’t talk about the war in Ukraine. Too many snitches with their ears perked up.

Prigozhin and the recruitment drive

Prigozhin himself never showed up at our colony — instead, it was Alexander Kuznetsov who came, the number-three man in Wagner. His call sign was “Ratibor.” He sat in the headquarters, they brought him the personal files of inmates, and he called people in for interviews. He recruited around sixty men in the first wave. From what we heard, about ten of them came back in zinc coffins. During Prigozhin’s mutiny, Ratibor led the takeover of Rostov-on-Don, and later switched sides to join Kadyrov’s Akhmat forces.

In our unit there was this guy Gosha Siukaev, from South Ossetia — a total scumbag. Back in 2015 he was sent to Donbas, where he and his crew killed their own commander.

He went on the run, was caught, sentenced, and ended up in our colony. When the war in Ukraine started, he signed up with Wagner. Six months later, he came back home with a medal, boasting everywhere about his heroism. Not long after, he stabbed a man with cerebral palsy to death in Tskhinvali. I later read online that, as a “special military operation” veteran, he only got four years for it. He’ll probably sign up again and get the rest wiped clean too.