Information about correctional facility IZ-75/1 of the Federal Penitentiary Service’s Chita department, to which Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev had been moved

Chita’s pre-trial detention facility No. 1 (IZ-75/1) is the only pre-trial detention centre in the Chita Region. In the mid-1990s 3,000 remand prisoners were held there in buildings designed to house seven hundred. According to a report by the Moscow Helsinki Group, in 2001 sixty to eighty suspects were being held in cells meant to hold between ten and twenty: prisoners had to take turns sleeping. Human-rights activists have pointed to the facility’s extremely poor sanitary conditions, resulting in virtual epidemics of scabies, pediculosis, TB and intestinal infections.

The Moscow Helsinki Group’s report for 2003 says: “Sixteen to thirty people are kept in a 25-square-metre cell. Living quarters have no ventilation, as they should by law, and the atmosphere is very humid. Walls and ceilings badly need repair. Cell-lighting doesn’t conform to standards, and it is impossible to read in the afternoon even with the lights on. Prisoners are not provided with enough warm clothes, bed linen, shoes or bedding. Washing-facilities have neither showers nor wash-basins. A pipe has been run under the ceiling with a hole in it, from which water comes. The state of the kitchen is also unsanitary”.

Until recently the whole of Chita’s detention-facility No. 1 consisted of two buildings built before the Revolution: the “big” and the “small” building. “Support walls were in such a terrible condition that it was apparently enough to tap them with a finger and the brickwork would fall apart”, says one visitor. In 2003, a federal program aimed at modernizing penitentiary facilities promoted some new construction. The opening of a new pre-trial detention centre in Krasnokamensk was supposed to provide extra accommodation.

The media describe the detention centre

February 25, 2005: Incarcerated teenagers started a riot after the administration ordered them to take sheets and blankets off their cell-walls. The teenagers themselves said that the riot was set off after they heard screams from people being beaten up in a nearby cell. A criminal case was initiated and all five of the accused teenagers received extended sentences.

November 30, 2005: At a round-table discussion on the application of the European Convention for Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, the governor of the Chita Region Ravil Genatulin said the detention centre did not meet modern requirements. A new building, though, was under construction and would be open in a few years.

March 17, 2005: Prison officers have found detainee Alexander Grigoriev dead in cell No. 182. According to the official report the inmate, who had received a life sentence for serious crimes and involvement in an organized criminal group, hanged himself with his sports trousers. Grigoriev’s jacket contained a suicide note.

November 16, 2006: In an interview with the Rossiya periodical, Lieutenant-General Vladimir Semenyuk, deputy-director of Russia’s Penitentiary Service, described the Chita detention centre as one of the most problem-plagued in the country. Among current detainees are those who took part in “Chita’s Kondopoga”, the attack on Azerbaijanis in Haragun village.