At Home with John and Debbie

This CNN story and this BBC story both tell how Mikhail Gorbachev has asked Bill Gates to intervene in a software piracy prosecution in Russia.

Apparently the headmaster involved could be sent to “a Siberian Prison camp”.

There’s a phrase with connotations. We are invited to imagine ourselves as white collar criminals chained up in unheated cabins, being fed a meagre diet unsuitable for our days of forced labour, building roads in freezing conditions. As our fellow inmates drop dead one by one, their corpses are incorporated into the road, although in our weakness and hunger we are tempted to gnaw some flesh from them if we can manage it.

Indeed, millions perished under Stalin’s regime under just these kinds of condition. Prisoners were released from some Gulag camps as late as 1987, although I have to imagine that conditions improved from Brezhnev’s era onwards.

However, we have to free our minds from these connotations. In a 15 minute scoot around the Internet, I’ve been unable to find any useful information about the Russian penal system today — if there is anything, the searches are diluted by the vast amount of information about Soviet prisons. Without such information, all we can know about the punishment facing Mr Ponosov is:

• It’s a prison — he would be detained
• It’s a camp — could mean all sorts of things - but at its broadest just denotes a small settlement.
• It’s in Siberia — a name with negative connotations, but it’s vast, it contains some beautiful landscape, and the Southernmost parts aren’t even all that cold all year round.

For all we know, he’s faced with a couple of months in Siberia’s equivalent to Ford Open Prison. Of course, it could be much worse. The point is, I don’t know. You probably don’t either. If you do, tell me.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 14:41 and is filed under Soapbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.