Stanislav Aseyev's memoir denies us the luxury of thinking that concentration camps and the torture of prisoners are a matter of the past. Atrocities repeat, not as farce but again as atrocities.
In 2014 pro-Russian separatists proclaimed the independence of the districts of Donetsk and Luhansk, as People’s Republics. Aseyev, a Ukrainian journalist, stayed in his native Donetsk and sent reportage to the Ukrainian Mirror Weekly and Radio Liberty, under the pen name Stanislav Vasin. In June 2017 he was arrested, beaten at interrogation, kept for six weeks in a sickening basement of the State Security Office, tortured, and then transferred to a secret prison called Izoliatsiia, in the building of a defunct factory that used to produce isolation materials (after the factory closed, the building had housed an arts foundation, but in June 2014 it was taken over by separatist militants). This is the torture house of the title: Aseyev focuses on this makeshift penal colony reigned by terror, electric-shock torture, beatings, psychological abuse, semi-starvation, constant humiliations, and rape or sexual coercion of women prisoners. He was happy to be transferred to a regular bed-bug infested jail. In November 2019 he was liberated through a prisoner exchange. The book ends with some fictional and reflexive texts, confiscated but purchased back, that Aseyev had composed in captivity.
The memoir is divided into relatively brief thematic chapters, as if in an attempt to control the material. There are occasional blank spots: Aseyev is less concerned with his own ordeal than with the collective suffering. Minor self-contradictions in his account are probably associated with the nature of the institution—its combining solid personal entrapment with the general sense of fluidity. The first concentration camps in Russia (starting with 1918) were likewise in makeshift facilities and seemed temporary; ironically, their very cheapness granted them permanence. Izoliatsiia is cheap too; being secret, it probably fails to get sufficient funding, and the prisoners are held on a semi-starvation diet. This, however, may be a lesson learned from Gulag history: starving people are easier to manage and terrorize. Large parts of the food from their relatives’ care-packages is stolen by the guards; this too may be overdetermined. Yet if during the Stalinist terror, torture interrogators would introduce themselves to their victims by name, here the torturers are anonymous and wear balaclavas, as if unwilling to be eventually recognized in the streets. Other innovations are the electric-shock equipment, constant monitoring of the prisoners by cameras installed everywhere, as well as the bags—makeshift hoods—that the prisoners have to wear over their heads when anyone enters the cell or takes them out of it.
The confusion and fluidity can be read as signs of the temporary affiliation of the prison: there is a pretense that it is run by Russian separatists, but there are many such separatists (former militants) among the inmates. Indeed, in the fall of 2022, Russia annexed the Donetsk and Luhansk “People's Republics”—Aseyev's taking one of these appellations in inverted commas had been the pretext for his indictment. As a reader, I wonder whether the true boss of the institution was not the FSB, in advance of the annexation. Meanwhile, the front man was a prison supervisor nicknamed Palych, a psychopathic sadist of the kind that surface at breakdowns of legality. His condition is also fluid: after a drunken excess, he is himself arrested and placed in a basement, though later seemingly put to use again. The translator's preface notes that eventually this man was arrested in Kyiv.
The prisoners include veteran criminal convicts. One might expect their presence to cause the dominance of the “criminal code” described in Gulag literature (it devolved into unlimited moral chaos, the bespredel, after the so-called “bitch war” among criminal inmates of the camps in 1945–53; see Varlam Shalamov's “Sketches of the Criminal World”). Yet the abnormality and fluidity of the prison conditions cause departures from the remnants of the code, which also becomes fluid.
Written soon after release, the memoir bears traces of trauma. Aseyev knows this and is consciously trying to recover. What troubles him most is the awareness that similar torture houses still exist, and, while one is enjoying the amenities of regular life, other people are being tortured. In 2022 it was known that Izoliatsiia was still a functioning concentration camp.
