A couple of days ago I accidentally bumped into an acolyte of the GULAG, or, in more contemporary parlance – FSIN (the Federal Service for the Execution of Punishment).

He’s been serving there for a long time, such an impression – since he was in diapers. He serves as a journalist, in some kind of newspapers of the prison system. But before this, as they told me, he was the chief of a colony. The mentality, you understand yourselves, is still that one. An example? No problem.

Once some female journalist asked him why FSIN employees treat the zeks so badly: as if they’re less than human? He replied: “because no matter where you kiss a zek, anywhere, he’s got an asshole.” The journalist wrote exactly that in her newspaper. The former colony chief took offense, began to deny: “like, the stupid bitch, she thought it up herself.“