– What is it?»

– These are sentences, they ask you to write complaints about them. You need to untie it and put it in your room, or they’ll take it away during the search. On the road you stay, your task is to write a complaint – said to me Chaihana. So my life in prison began.

How I now regret that I was carried away by work, study, and myself. Forgive me, my dears, for paying so little attention to you. I didn’t even know how to use appliances. And prison is a cruel world for survival, intrigues from all sides, in order to break and humiliate a person. Here is a completely different layer of the population, who do not understand and do not explain the whole essence of the terrible accusation, just as I do not understand others, everyone has their own pain.

Today is December 15. A week after my arrest, you had a stroke and your legs gave out. My daughter had to take a sabbatical. All the care of you and my parents has fallen on her, my poor girl.

Oh, how my heart aches, it’s impossible to breathe, my heart breaks. I can’t breathe. Calmly, we must live, we must breathe, breathe. A woman is sitting across from me, and I mentally ask her to look at me, and she does.

– What’s the matter with you? I’ll get some water.

I repeat in my mind: breathe, breathe, everything is fine. Dad, what was that, an attack?! You know I’ve been born with a weak heart. I’ve never had such pain. A year later, my cardiologist told me that I had suffered a microinfarction.

During my first time in prison, I was internally judgmental of prisoners for their crimes. I thought that we accidentally «wandered» here, they will soon sort it out and let us go, after all, we do not live in the years of repression. Prisoners of Stalin’s repression probably thought the same. The history of the state, like karma, repeats itself. It is hard to believe that all this lawlessness is happening in modern democratic Russia, or rather, in the Republic that is part of Russia.

Thanks to my legal education, Anya and I helped others in the investigation and appeal of the sentence, some of them reduced the term, changed the qualification of the crime to a more lenient one, and some were released or acquitted. The real professionalism of investigators and judges is falling. Of course, it is much easier to beat out a confession and fabricate evidence, the authorities will cover up, as the statistics of disclosure improve. Thus, I got to know the unknown life of another layer of the population, I got to know all the rot and arrogance of law enforcement agencies that take advantage of a person’s legal ignorance to raise the detection rate of crimes and get a promotion for successfully solving a case for a more serious crime.

After a month, we were fed rotten fish, and instead of bread, we were given spoiled army cookies, the batteries were barely warm. They were saved by broadcasts from home, but this was very little, since most of the prisoners are beggars. As usual, criminal offences are mostly committed by the lower class of the population. They did not take off their outer clothing, and went to bed with shoes on, two people on the same bed to keep each other warm.

Now we have three mentally ill women in our cell. Olya arrived from the court, was sentenced to a medical term. This young beautiful girl stabbed a friend with whom she lived in the same room in a boarding school for the mentally ill.

Tanya and Sveta came to the party (this is when they are kicked out of the cell or the operative will mix it up) from other cells. They have no confirmation of mental illness. Tanya is under investigation, beat a drunk neighbor to death. Sveta was sentenced to 15 years, stabbed two sleeping friends who abused her. Psychological examination due to the lack of data in the file of mentally ill people found them sane. I found out that these two were in the category of patients who had to visit a psychiatric hospital on their own once a year and undergo inpatient treatment. If such patients did not come to the hospital for a year, they were removed from the register of mental patients, and outpatient records were sent to the archive.