'Sleeping is a violation of the rules' – Pussy Riot's Maria Alyokhina on life inside a Russian penal colony

The Republic of Convicts is what they call the Perm region. This is where the camps of the Gulag were, and the last camps of the Soviet dissidents. Total isolation, hand-picked prison guards, a harsh northern climate.

I arrive at the penal colony there after a month of transportation in a Stolypin railroad car. November in the Urals is cold and wild. The women in the prison transport who had already done time gave me this advice: Don’t talk to anyone; first, take a good look around; and, please, don’t talk politics.

I have no desire to talk politics. I want to sleep. Shuddering at dawn, 6am wake- up, I jump off my bed and run to wash my face in icy-cold water. I run so that I can find a free washbasin, but I see there’s already a queue. I run in the other direction, to the storage room, where my huge checked bag with all my belongings is stowed, which is only open for half an hour. We aren’t allowed to keep our things with us; they must be stored in this special room. I rush there to put away my pyjamas. But I see that a queue has already formed there, too.

In the 1990s, when I was a little girl, people stood in queues to buy clothes, food, tickets. I’m twenty- five now. I’ve grown up. I was told that the country had changed, although, here, I find the same queues. The irony is that, this time, you don’t get anything in return. Nothing; no food. No tickets to freedom. I can’t sleep while I queue. But I’d like to. Lean into the wall like a giraffe, cover myself with the spots of solitude and go to sleep. ‘Attention, women!’ shouts a prisoner attendant, as the head guards turn to inspect the barracks.

Whenever we hear ‘Attention!’, we have to stand up and say, ‘Good day!’ in chorus. These are the rules. It is the first lesson in politeness, which I must master, because to reform is to know and fulfil the orders. Politely. So we stand up. Forty women run to their assigned spots.

“Who was sleeping during the recitation of regulations?” the guard shouts, entering the barracks. We remain silent. The day before, we’d been herded like cattle into one room and forced to sit there for three hours, reading and repeating the prison regulations in unison.

“I said, ‘Who the fuck was sleeping?!’” the second guard bellows from behind the first guard’s back. They never make their rounds alone.

In the corner of the room there is a surveillance camera. This is how they were able to see that one of us sitting on the wooden benches had discreetly rested her head on her palm and dozed off. We all wear identical checked uniforms. We look so much alike it must be hard to distinguish whose head had dipped down. We stand in our places, not budging, and look at each other. Someone smiles, another whispers, and a third sighs wearily. Someone else stares at the others’ faces with interest. I am not interested, and I don’t think this is funny. Because I know who was caught on camera sleeping for ten minutes. It was me.

You have to think up things to do to stay awake: tie cigarettes together (the packs themselves are forbidden; they throw them away during searches and the cigarettes are dumped into a big bag). Put matches back in a box. Sew name tags into your uniform. Make a list of your belongings. All so you won’t fall asleep. Sleeping is a violation of the rules. A missing or poorly attached name tag is a violation. A coat unbuttoned during inspection is a violation.

“This is not a holiday resort!” the head guard roars.

“This is not a health spa!” the second screams.

“Out of the room, everyone! It’s time for a search,” the first one says, and it becomes suddenly clear to everyone why the guards are here. It is not about who was sleeping. It’s the search.

The first rule of every search is that it’s unexpected. Russia has known this since the 1930s, when the Black Raven vans would round up sleepy, terrified people for interrogation in the middle of the night. Now they prefer mornings. This is so that they can take you by surprise, disarm you. Then they can take whatever they want from you with no resistance. So they drop into our barracks, somewhere in Russia in the middle of nowhere, to check whether we’re hiding an extra sweater or a T- shirt or a dress that “doesn’t meet the standards.”

We wrap ourselves in green coats like sacks with name tags on our chests, tie thin shawls around our heads, crawl out of the barracks and assemble in the prison yard. It’s not even dawn yet. There is snow on the ground, and the wind blows up our clothes, no matter how much we wear – and we don’t get to wear much. We wait outside for the search to end, about forty minutes. After the guards emerge from the barracks we are allowed to go back inside. They come out holding small black rubbish bags. The bags are stuffed with the things they’ve confiscated.

“Masha,” one of the women says to me in a whisper, while we are warming tea in the kitchen. “If someone comes to visit you – you know, from Moscow – tell them. Don’t be silent. Tell them how we live here. You’re a political. We have rights. We may be prisoners, but we’re still people. Tell them.”

Later, a guard shouts at another woman: “Hurry up, Crocodile!” They don’t call her by her name. Instead, they use the name of the drug that turned her into a walking corpse.

She sits in a corner, with a white shock of hair, and a wooden stick nearby – her crutch. She is sitting down, but what does it matter? Prison or freedom? She is already dead and gone, though she is still alive, still breathing.

“Keep up! You hear?”

Her hearing isn’t so good; she can’t answer. Her legs are covered with bruises because they are putrefying, rotting away. Her child is in an orphanage, because how can a child be part of her life? And maybe there is no child at all; she’s not very clear. She can hardly remember, she can hardly walk.

I take her by the arm. She clutches my elbow. And presses her crutch to her side. She tries to walk like everyone else. With all her strength. We are lagging behind the formation on the way to the sanatorium to have our medical checks. She might not live until the end of her term. If you have to walk across the whole penal colony, you get cold. Very cold.

“Go faster, bitch!” screams the quarantine unit monitor.

“Shut up,” I say. “She’s walking as fast as she can.”