The Gulag of Our Time
Russia
Sergei Savelev: "Trojan. The Gulag of Our Time"
This book is a chronicle of an unprecedented exposure of torture that has been tacitly legalized in Russian prisons. An ordinary young man from Belarus, Sergei Savelyev, ended up in a Russian prison on a fabricated drug charge and at first experienced the bloody hell of “re-education” himself. Later, when he was assigned administrative work in the prison hospital, he gained access to a vast video archive stored in the Federal Penitentiary Service system. These recordings, made with the knowledge of prison authorities, showed people being beaten and raped.
Savelyev not only managed to smuggle copies of the archive to freedom and make them public under the pseudonym “Trojan.” He not only escaped the vengeance of several Russian agencies, but also remained who he was – a person incapable of looking at cruelty with indifference.
Excerpt from the Preface of the Book
I was almost an ordinary Minsk boy of 23. Work, university, computers, music, and literature – that was my life then. By that age, I had already come out to a few friends, and breathing became easier. There were plenty of LGBTIQ+ places in Minsk, and I spent my weekends there.
I was far from everything – media, politics, human rights. It all seemed unrelated to me. I didn’t take part in the political life of Belarus. Arrests, censorship, destruction of journalism, harsh laws against protests – all this killed the desire to speak out. Even during the 2010 protests, I didn’t go. Speaking openly was dangerous for health and freedom; every Belarusian knows this.
So, I just lived my life, knowing about prisons only from films. Yet I was already moving toward the barbed wire – unconsciously. Did I think about the future? Hardly. Life went its usual way: modest work, extra shifts, no vacations, just saving money for studies and loans.
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