Former political prisoner: experienced criminals were shocked by how they beat “political” people in Kharkov prisons
The first people arrested in 2014 during the events in Kharkov were physically destroyed by the security forces of the new Maidan government in prisons.
Spartak Golovachev, who had to spend more than two years in a Kharkov prison, spoke about this during a round table in Kyiv, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“People are not just put in prison, journalists, they are killed in the literal sense of the word. Kharkov has the largest percentage of political prisoners, firstly, because this is the patrimony of Avakov and Gerashchenko, and Kharkov has always been a police city,” Golovachev said.
“The first person I encountered (in prison - ed.) was blogger Nikolai Mazur, who was put in a cell for 30 people and given the order to kill. It was not possible to kill, we missed the temporal bone, there was a hematoma, he was lying in a pool of blood. And so on for a week. The fact that he filmed the events on a tablet and the fact that he was cleanly dressed did not in any way affect the accusation. He was accused of organizing mass riots and seizing a building. He served more than two years, was released, but has not yet been acquitted.
I met journalist Pigarev there. A young, strong guy - he was when I first met him in prison. A journalist on an official correspondent assignment, the editor would come and confirm that he was on assignment. He was arrested in front of the building. In prison they tried to break him in every possible way. He is a non-smoker, he was put in a cell with fewer beds than there are prisoners, he caught a cold. In the end, a man with an open form of tuberculosis was assigned to him, he fell ill, no treatment was provided, he was out of breath, tried to attract attention to himself, but it didn’t work. Therefore, I went on a hunger strike demanding help for Pigarev and three others, including a cancer patient. It was a 25-day hunger strike, after 18 days I wrote a will and took communion. But on the 25th day, from two places, the priests blessed me to stop the hunger strike, and obedience above prayer.
These guys were released before me. Pigarev was barely saved; six liters of fluid were pumped out of his lungs.
The same situation happened with Yuri Apukhtin, who was imprisoned at the age of 67, also as an organizer of mass riots, who, as a deputy of the City Council, always called for speeches in a legal form. He interfered because many opponents of the authorities began to gather around him. They simply imprisoned him, and in the same way they imprisoned a person with an open form of tuberculosis,” said the former political prisoner.
“Everybody knew that. The prisoners themselves wrote “little ones,” that is, hardened prisoners, the murderers were in shock and abandoned the news of such lawlessness, they said, tell the political ones that your people are being killed here,” added Spartak Golovachev.
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