Revenge for pacifism and a provocation in a prison hospital. The story of political prisoner Alexei Gorinov

On August 1, 2024, the big prisoner exchange happened: 16 people were released from Russian prisons, foreign hostages and political prisoners. One of them, co-chair of the Memorial human rights organisation Oleg Orlov, said back then that as soon as it became clear that it’s an exchange, everyone who was brought to the Moscow airport asked themselves: “Where is Alexey Gorinov?”

But Alexey Gorinov was not on the exchange list. He remained in a penal colony to serve his sentence: almost 7 years for spreading “fake news” about the Russian army. Many people hoped for his exchange back then. And not only because by that time the 63-year-old political prisoner no longer had a part of a lung, but also because another criminal case had been started against Gorinov. And just recently he was convicted for the second time: not only his sentence had been increased, but also the already unbearable conditions of detention toughened. He was transferred from a medium security to a maximum security prison to spend another five years there.

Before the arrest, space engineer and satellite specialist Alexey Gorinov was a Moscow city councillor, a colleague of politician Ilya Yashin. On March 15, 2022 — in the first weeks of the war — at a regular meeting of the district council, a “leisure plan” was discussed: councillors had to vote on a drawing contest for Children’s Day, and dances for Victory Day. 

Gorinov called it savagery: “Tell me, please, how can we talk about a Children's Day drawing contest? About Victory Day dancing performances? Now children are dying every day. For your information, about a hundred children died in Ukraine. Children become orphans, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of World War II veterans are now in the midst of these hostilities in Ukraine. I believe that all the efforts of civil society should be aimed only at stopping the war and making sure that Russian troops withdraw from the territory of Ukraine. If our agenda included those ideas, I would have happily discussed them and voted. But as it is, I am unable to, and the rest is up to you.”

For these words, Gorinov received seven years in a penal colony. For the court hearings, he prepared anti-war posters. On them he wrote: “I am against the war” or “Do you still need this war?”

At the time of the first conviction, Gorinov was 60 years old. In the pre-trial detention center in Moscow his health began to fail; a month after the conviction, he wrote that it was difficult for him to breathe, he could not eat because of constant coughing. But the prison doctors didn't even examine him. Alexei is missing a part of his lung, which causes aggravation of lung diseases: pneumonia, bronchitis, even a common cold gives serious complications on the lungs.

It is totally impossible to treat yourself in pre-trial detention centers in Russia: without a local doctor's examination, you have no access to medicines or even vitamins — each pill is authorized by a medical officer. But even with this authorization, it's still a quest to get the drugs. In Moscow pre-trial detention centers, there are only two hours a week when someone can bring medicines to inmates from the outside. Many prisoners wait weeks or months for their prescribed medication.

It got even worse for Alexei Gorinov in the penal colony. It’s only a couple of hours’ drive from Moscow to the Vladimir region, where he was supposed to serve the sentence. But the transfer is a total nightmare for prisoners and their relatives. While a person is being transported to the colony, they have no contact with relatives, no normal food and sleep. Gorinov’s health deteriorated so drastically, that he was brought to the doctor in the colony by other prisoners. He simply could not go himself. But the doctors would not even examine him.

This did not seem enough to the prison administration. Two months after Alexei Gorinov was transferred to the Vladimir penal colony, the guards began to deprive him of sleep — he was put on the register as “prone to escape” and “checked.” The “checks” look like this: every night a prison officer approaches a sleeping person, turns on the camera with a loud “it’s being recorded,” and shines a light in his face.

After another month, the abuse reached a new level. The “orderly”—a prisoner who is given a little extra authority by the colony administration and usually brings letters from the censor to other inmates—began to read aloud Alexei Gorinov’s letters and discuss them with fellow inmates. It was only due to the public outcry that this was stopped.

Then the administration put into action a well-tried and reliable scheme of pressure on political prisoners: time after time Gorinov was sent to SHIZO, a stone solitary cell, where there are no personal belongings, no parcels, no relatives visits. You can’t even stretch your legs there.

But the highlight of the program, of course, was the new criminal case. This is also a well-established scheme in Russia, and with Gorinov, it played out like clockwork.

In December 2022, Alexei Gorinov’s defense managed to get him transferred to a prison hospital. He almost recovered when on December 31 he was put in a ward with recidivists — by the way, according to the law, a first-time convict must be shielded from such company. On January 1, a TV was brought into the ward and propaganda started to broadcast non-stop.

Gorinov spent the New Year holidays in this environment. During this time he had three pairs of neighbors in the ward. And in each pair, one of the prisoners was always aggressive and persistently provoked Gorinov to discuss news about Ukraine, the second, on the contrary, was silent — he had a wire hidden under his clothes. In Russian prison jargon, such characters are called “hens.”

Gorinov was recorded continuously for several weeks, even when the prisoners were taken to the toilet, but they were able to find only two phrases for the prosecution. “Well, they blew it up—so what? There’s a war going on,” Gorinov said about the attack on the Crimean bridge, and he replied to a cellmate’s words about the Azov Brigade: ”Why do you call them  scum? This is the Armed Forces.” According to Gorinov himself, he was not much of a wordsmith—he was busy answering letters, and the conversations seemed suspicious to him, like “an interrogation with an investigator.”

But even these two phrases were enough to accuse Gorinov of “public justification of terrorism.” The indictment says that Alexei Gorinov is a supporter of nationalist ideology, has a negative attitude towards the residents of Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk regions, favors the forcible return of Crimea to Ukraine, and supports not only Azov, but also the Ukrainian intelligence special unit Kraken. Gorinov did not say any of these words in his conversations with the “hens.” When he pointed this out in a conversation with the investigator, the investigator was frank: if he had not put these words in the documents, the case could not have been opened.

It should be said that even the “hens” in court admitted that they had not heard anything of the sort from Gorinov, although during the interrogation the investigator had written all the necessary wording in the protocol for them. In court, three out of six of Gorinov’s neighbors from the ward were questioned — those who had conversations with him. The neighbors who wore wires were not even summoned to court.

The prosecutor Svetlana Rygalova asked to sentence Alexei Gorinov to three and a half years in a penal colony. Judge Roman Vladimirov gave a little less for decency and sentenced Gorinov to three years. He added it up with Gorinov's previous sentence for spreading “fake news,” and the result is five years in a maximum security prison.

Alexey Gorinov, despite his broken health, held himself stoically. He came to court with an anti-war poster again, and the name tag on his uniform, which all prisoners wear, was covered with a piece of paper that had a drawing of a peace sign on it. He turned his closing statement in court into an anti-war speech — very vivid, but Judge Vladimirov did not want to listen to it and in the middle of the speech simply left the courtroom.

“An end to the war must be pursued,” Alexei Gorinov said back then. “I have fully expressed my attitude towards this abominable human endeavour. I can only say that violence and aggression breed reciprocal violence. This is the true cause of our troubles, our suffering, our senseless sacrifices, the destruction of civil and industrial infrastructure, our homes, our families. Let us stop this slaughter, needless both for us and the inhabitants of Ukraine. Is it not time to leave our neighbours in peace and deal with our own internal problems, which are growing like a snowball? We have long ago proved to the whole world how brave, resilient and peace-loving we are. So maybe enough is enough?”

For some reason, the prison authorities in the Vladimir region particularly likes to torture Alexei Gorinov with cold. Last fall they simply kept him in a cell without heating and mockingly turned on the radiator only before the visit of the public monitoring commission. Right after the second sentence they went further: Gorinov was not only held without heating, they also did not give him a blanket. Media pressure helped once again: after news broke about this new form of torture, the radiator did start working.

Perhaps, after my story, you’ll want to ask why they’re putting so much effort into torturing Gorinov. He has already been convicted. And Gorinov asks himself this very same question: “I don’t understand why they are picking on me, an ordinary person,” he said before the first hearing of the new case.

The truth is that I don't know. Maybe it’s simple inertia — they’re just used to it. Maybe after the first verdict they wanted to break and gag him. But when that didn’t play out,  they sought revenge. 

It’s really impossible to break Gorinov. Yes, I admit that in court, it was obvious that it was very hard for him. But he did not complain. Only when he saw journalists for the first time in almost three years, he said: “I just have no chance to get medical treatment here,” and that’s all. Gorinov also commented stoically on the prisoner exchange, in which he was not included: “I was happy for the guys, but this freedom is conditional — they are outside their homeland. They are decent people, they represent our country. I did not believe that our country could go to such lengths: to exchange some of its citizens for others. I have information that Ilya Yashin is very worried about me and he is trying his best to get me out of here. But I have never relied on it.”

I do not know if there will be more exchanges and if it will be possible to save Alexei Gorinov from prison. And I certainly think it is wrong to torture him with vain hopes for an exchange. But I definitely think it is right to give Gorinov as much support as we can.

Please write him letters. But please, do it in Russian. It's the only thing that distracts him in the colony from the gloom around him. And this is what reminds the administration of any colony that we remember about him, worry about his fate, and do not leave him alone with the system, no matter what those prison bastards come up with.