Modern Russian prisons, while not as brutal as the gulag of the Stalinist era, are still rough places for doing hard time. RFE/RL looks at what convicts face in Russia's prisons today, as well as what they endured in the past.
# In the New York Times "Latitude" blog, Russian Service Director Masha Gessen discusses Radio Svoboda's coverage of a prison riot at Prison Colony No. 6 in Kopeysk, a developing event that was sparked by allegations of abuse.
# Jailed Russian physicist Valentin Danilov, who wrote a blog for Radio Svoboda while in prison, was granted early release on parole after spending a decade in a prison on an espionage conviction. Rights groups have called his incarceration politically motivated.
# A half-century after the publication of one of the most gripping accounts of the Soviet-era Gulag, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich," Correspondent Orken Zhoyamergen visits one of the labor camps that inspired it, Ekibastuz, in what is now northern Kazakhstan.
# "If you can't serve the thyme, don't do the crime." For one day at least, inmates at Prison No. 18 in the Russian city of Novosibirsk went from behind bars to behind burners in the high-security jail's modest kitchen for a regional version of a barbecue cook-off. Correspondent Grant Podelco reports.
Follow all of RFE/RL's breaking news online and on Twitter and Facebook.
# In the New York Times "Latitude" blog, Russian Service Director Masha Gessen discusses Radio Svoboda's coverage of a prison riot at Prison Colony No. 6 in Kopeysk, a developing event that was sparked by allegations of abuse.
# Jailed Russian physicist Valentin Danilov, who wrote a blog for Radio Svoboda while in prison, was granted early release on parole after spending a decade in a prison on an espionage conviction. Rights groups have called his incarceration politically motivated.
# A half-century after the publication of one of the most gripping accounts of the Soviet-era Gulag, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich," Correspondent Orken Zhoyamergen visits one of the labor camps that inspired it, Ekibastuz, in what is now northern Kazakhstan.
# "If you can't serve the thyme, don't do the crime." For one day at least, inmates at Prison No. 18 in the Russian city of Novosibirsk went from behind bars to behind burners in the high-security jail's modest kitchen for a regional version of a barbecue cook-off. Correspondent Grant Podelco reports.
Follow all of RFE/RL's breaking news online and on Twitter and Facebook.