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Read, Debate: Engage.
| topic: | Political violence |
|---|---|
| located: | Russia |
| editor: | Andrew Getto |
On 12 July, a 67-year-old man accused of murder died of cardiac arrest on his way to a St. Petersburg court. On an extremely hot day, he found his last shelter in the belly of a beast - inside a police truck for transporting detainees, known as avtozak. It has evolved to become not just another service vehicle, but an omnipresent symbol of a police state in Russia.
Over the past century, the dread of government oppression in Russia has been closely associated with vehicles. In the early 20th century, the Russian Empire became a pioneer in using cars to transport inmates. At the height of the Stalin purges, residents of Moscow and Leningrad stayed awake at night, trying to make out the sound of a “black crow” - a Gaz M1 sedan, operated by the secret police - parking at their apartment block. That meant inevitable arrest, torture, and almost inevitable death in a labor camp.
In the 1940s, millions of people from about a dozen ethnicities were forcibly deported from their lands by Stalin. They travelled thousands of miles inside teplushkas — train cars, designed to move cattle. One of a handful of World War II memories that my veteran grandfather shared with me was a wagon packed with captive German soldiers. Two thirds of them froze to death, unable to build a stove from scraps of metal, like Soviet soldiers used to do.
But “black crows” are meant for individual arrests, and look overly vintage. Whole train cars are probably a bit of a stretch, too, although recent news that inmates will build a major railway in Siberia causes some second thoughts. The single major headache of the Russian authorities since 2011 were mass protests. Modern problems require modern solutions, and this solution was found.
Avtozak stands for “an automobile for moving inmates, suspects and accused.” It’s basically any van or truck re-designed to be able to house detainees, up to three dozen at a time. But what comes to mind of any Russian are enormous six-wheel KAMAZ trucks, stationed all over central Moscow and St. Petersburg to deter any thought of disobeying the regime.
From the outside, an avtozak looks like a metal fortress with gridded windows. The interior design is as utilitarian as one might expect: metal walls, metal benches, all painted grey. The death of a murder suspect in St. Petersburg is no surprise, because autozaks, it seems, were designed to cause maximum physical suffering to their passengers. There’s little to no air ventilation, and exhaust gas fumes often find their way inside the cabin. It’s incredibly hot in the summer, and miserably cold in the winter.
At first, avtozaks started to pop around central Moscow and St. Petersburg during the mass protests in 2011-2012. Thousands of activists, or random passers-by, found themselves dragged inside these metal monsters, and left there from a few hours to a couple of days. It’s safe to say that a selfie made inside of an avtozak is a must for every respectable Russian protester. Social media were filled with smiling faces of young people, amused by a breath of this very 20th century Russian experience.
As famously put by Niccolo Machiavelly, it’s better to invoke fear than love. Perhaps the Russian authorities took it a bit too literally and stationed the metal monsters permanently on major squares and other popular protest sites as a precaution. I don’t think it worked, because mass protests still take place almost every year, but the trucks are now an important part of the urban landscape.
Visitors of the recent European football tournament in St. Petersburg witnessed avtozaks parked in a row in the middle of crowded bar streets. Maybe they are meant to create a vision of safety, but for any local who follows non-government media, they are a vivid and physical symbol of terror; you see it every day and easily imagine yourself being crushed behinds its bars.
Image:Valery Tenevoy.
