Inmate Revolts Highlight Failings and Miseries of Russian Prisons

After four knife-wielding inmates claiming to be aligned with the Islamic State instigated a mutiny in a Russian prison last week, resulting in the deaths of 13 people, even the Kremlin’s most loyal lieutenants raised critical questions about how it could have happened.

“Where did the prisoners get knives, flags and mobile phones in a maximum-security colony?” Aleksander E. Khinshtein, an arch-conservative member of Parliament from the ruling United Russia party, asked on his Telegram channel.

Only two months earlier, he noted, a similar revolt had taken place in another penitentiary, in the city of Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia.

“Why, given the relevance of the terrorist threat and the sad Rostov experience, has the work on preventing extremism and the spread of destructive ideas in the penal system not been brought to the proper level?” Mr. Khinshtein continued.

The uprising last week in the Volgograd region, in which all the instigators were killed, was the latest in a series of violent episodes in Russia in which Islamic extremists either claimed credit or were blamed by Russian authorities.

In the Rostov incident, in June, six detainees accused of terrorism violently took control of a detention center before all but one of them were killed. One week later, gunmen in the predominantly Muslim Russian region of Dagestan simultaneously attacked Christian and Jewish places of worship, killing 22.

And in March, a Moscow concert hall became the site of Russia’s deadliest terror attack in two decades when terrorists killed 145 people and injured 550 more. U.S. officials said a branch of the Islamic State was responsible for the attack.

The questions about why these attacks keep happening pose a challenge to President Vladimir V. Putin, given the size and power of the Russian security services he oversees.

Officials, human rights activists, scholars and former inmates say the reasons behind the prison uprisings are systemic.

From the Tsarist days to the Soviet Gulag system through to today, Russian prisons have been notorious for harsh conditions, poor treatment, brutality and corruption. Wretched conditions were among the factors that pushed tens of thousands of convicts to agree to fight for Russia after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Experts say that the knock-on effects of the war in Ukraine have exacerbated existing problems in many Russian prisons: lack of personnel, deteriorating conditions that feed grievances, and anti-Muslim prejudices.

“The most banal reason is that there is a shortage of staff,” Anna Karetnikova, an exiled human rights defender and a former senior prison official in the Moscow region, said in an interview.

Almost one in five jobs in the federal penitentiary service, known as FSIN, are vacant. At a meeting of the service’s board in March, the director, Arkady Gostev, lamented the low salaries, which he said lagged behind other law enforcement agencies. He called for “urgent measures” at the central government level that would encourage more applicants, according to the Interfax news agency.

Job postings for the prison that was attacked last week in the Volgograd Region, known as IK-19, advertise monthly salaries of 35,000 rubles, about $380, for junior inspectors. Mark Galeotti, a scholar focused on Russia’s security sector, suggested after the IK-19 mutiny that the low salaries have prompted prison employees to sign up for jobs with the Russian military that pay much more.

Another factor in prison unrest, experts say: the miserable conditions, which make them incubators for unrest. One former IK-19 inmate named Dmitri said prison life was so unpleasant that he decided fighting in Ukraine would be better.

“The room is two steps to the side, two steps forward and back. And that’s for two people, said Dmitri, 28, in a phone interview. He spent half a year in prison under investigation for fraud. Like some others inside Russia who were interviewed, his last name is being withheld because he feared repercussions.

“The ventilation doesn’t work, so when it’s hot, you can barely breathe,” he said. “We complained several times, but nothing changed. The water is another story — it stinks terribly, it’s impossible to drink it.”

Addressing the very question raised by Mr. Khinshtein, the lawmaker, Dmitri said that if an inmate had money, he could smuggle anything into the colony, including phones and drugs.

“And many people have knives, they make them at the workshop inside the prison,” he said.

Dmitri said he did not sense any hostility or hierarchy among prisoners of different faiths. But he said that other inmates had told him that after the June mutiny in the Rostov prison, the IK-19 administration “became fixated on Islam,” confiscating prayer rugs and forcing prisoners to shave off their beards.

None of the hostage takers at IK-19 were in prison on terrorism charges. But during the uprising, they mentioned that they wanted “revenge for the fact that the beards of believers in the colony were shaved, and that holy books and prayer rugs were confiscated,” according to a Russian newspaper, Kommersant.

The poor conditions led many inmates, including non-Muslims, into prison groups known as “jamaats,” for protection, said Vera Mironova, a scholar at Harvard University and the author of a recent book on how power structures in prisons have evolved in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Nominally Muslim, the groups have little real connection to the tenets of Islam, she said, but have evolved into bodies that challenge the prison authorities and invoke the name of the Islamic State to instill fear.

Igor Nagavkin, a human rights defender specializing in the rights of prisoners in the Volgograd region, said he began receiving complaints from the penal colony in the spring of this year.

“The head of prison security threatened some prisoners with sexualized and physical violence,” Mr. Nagavkin said in a phone interview from the Volgograd region. He provided a copy of an official complaint he filed to the head of the FSIN department in the Volgograd region.

Referring to a 1999 comment by Mr. Putin, Mr. Nagavkin noted that the Russian president had said that terrorists should be “rubbed out in the outhouse.”

So there were officers who took his words to heart, Mr. Nagavkin said, and used them as an excuse to mistreat inmates.

According to Mr. Nagavkin’s complaint, two prisoners cut their veins and four went on hunger strike because of the administration’s threats. The authorities at IK-19 did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Signs of discrimination were also noticed by Russia’s best known political prisoner, Aleksei A. Navalny, “Our prison system, a large organization, has found a new enemy,” he said the month before his death in February. “This new enemy is called Muslims.” ​​

A 2023 report by the Civic Assistance Committee, a human rights watchdog, mentioned several instances in which Russian prison administrators destroyed prisoners’ Qurans, restricted access to prayer rooms and beat Muslim prisoners while voicing “statements of religious and national hatred.”

Both Ms. Mironova, the Harvard scholar, and Ms. Karetnikova, the former Moscow prison official, said conditions are ripe for more mutinies like the ones in Rostov and Volgograd.

“After the first seizure of the prison in Rostov, when I was asked about how this could happen, I concluded that it is actually strange that it has not yet been repeated throughout the country,” Ms. Karetnikova said, “because there are a lot of conditions and pre-requisites for such attacks, and they are increasing,”

Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.