I know that Kremlin is populated by bloody bastards, but I was surprised by Khodorkovski and Lebedev’s sentences. I thought that both will get some five years each, then they will be out of camps after three years. But eight, no, I didn’t expect it?
Then, both businesmen were send to serve their sentences to the place — to such places?
When Lefortovo is removed from the jurisdiction of the Federal Security Service and placed like all other penitentiary facilities under the Justice Ministry, the legend of the much-feared, high-security prison may finally draw to a close.
At Lefortovo, prisoners suffer extreme isolation, and routine prison regulations are followed to a depressing degree, but this also can make time spent there more tolerable, former inmates say.
“I feel a strange pity for the place. After the FSB gives it away, the super-orderly Lefortovo will turn into a regular, stinking jail,” said writer Eduard Limonov, who spent 15 months in Lefortovo in 2002 and 2003 as the FSB investigated his radical National Bolshevik Party. (more…)
part two of the eXile interview with Eduard Limonov
— To me, His Butler’s Story is one of your best books. One of the reasons I was shocked when I first read it was that somehow you managed to describe what Jenny, an ordinary American of the time, was like. I read that and looked around at the rest of American literature and nobody repeated it. I always wondered what made it so hard to Americans to describe carefully what was happening. You needed to go to a Russian…
— Probably really because I was new and fresh from the other world. What I saw was probably banality for the Americans. And I came from a completely different social situation. And I had some kind of a good eye… (more…)