This information came from an independent journalist who miraculously escaped the fate we are about to describe. After publishing reports about the war, criminal charges were opened against him for allegedly spreading “fake information about the Russian army.” He fled Russia in time. Otherwise, today he himself would likely be sitting in Magadan’s Penal Colony No. 3 — the very colony where authorities have now created a separate barrack for political prisoners and soldiers who refused to return to war.
These are no longer isolated repressions or rare demonstrative cases. This has become a mass system of political filtration. In modern Russia, persecution for words, anti-war views, and refusal to kill has reached such a scale that authorities have begun physically separating these prisoners from the rest — almost exactly as during the Stalinist лагер system. And it is deeply symbolic that this is happening precisely in Kolyma, the region that became one of the world’s main symbols of the Gulag, fear, and camp death.
The people imprisoned there are not terrorists or conspirators. They are ordinary citizens: workers, pensioners, doctors, journalists, entrepreneurs, historians. Many received prison terms for drunken comments on social media, kitchen conversations, or emotional statements made in private discussions. One man received six years for comments on VKontakte. Another was sentenced to five years essentially for retelling what his sister from Ukraine had told him during a drinking session.
These charges are labeled “terrorism” or “extremism,” and the prisoners are automatically treated as “especially dangerous.” They are marched separately, housed separately, and kept under special control. Yet even some prison guards openly understand the absurdity of the situation. Prison staff call them “our terrorists,” while one prison official reportedly told the guards: “What terrorists? They’re writers.”
Roughly one-third of this barrack consists of soldiers who fought in Ukraine and later refused to return to the front. Many are wounded, traumatized, or permanently injured, yet were still declared fit for service and ordered back into combat. Some even fought in court to receive prison sentences instead of being sent back to war. According to inmates, in Magadan those refusing to return to combat are literally hunted down in apartments and bars, forced onto planes, and sent back to the front against their will.
That is exactly why these people are dangerous to the system. They are living witnesses of the war, capable of destroying the official propaganda narrative. One former soldier stood up during a propaganda screening in the colony and told the filmmakers: “I don’t know what kind of war you filmed. We lived in dugouts under shelling, and at night rats were gnawing people’s ears.” After that, the propagandists reportedly fell silent.
Magadan’s IK-3 is a typical “red zone” prison camp where the administration controls every aspect of life: humiliations, endless searches, pointless labor, punishment cells for the slightest violation. Prisoners are forbidden even to sit on their beds during the day. In winter they endlessly shovel snow; in autumn they are forced to “dry puddles with shovels.” Medical care is almost nonexistent. The barracks freeze so badly that frost forms on the walls from the inside.
Yet the system encountered something unexpected: political prisoners failed to become outcasts. On the contrary, many ordinary inmates began respecting them. These prisoners help others write legal complaints, understand the law, openly confront the administration, and preserve dignity where fear usually destroys it. One prisoner openly declared in court that his only wish was “for Putin to die.” For this he received seven years and is now held almost permanently in solitary confinement. Yet even there he continues confronting prison authorities over prisoners’ rights — and for that he is deeply respected by other inmates.
This may be the system’s greatest fear. The danger lies not in drunken kitchen conversations or internet comments, but in people who refuse to bow even inside prison walls. People who, by their very behavior, destroy the foundations of the camp system itself — fear, informing, humiliation, and obedience.
That is why what is happening increasingly resembles the world described by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov. Soviet authorities eventually realized that political prisoners and war veterans were dangerous when mixed with ordinary inmates because such people could become the core of resistance even inside prison camps. That was why the USSR created separate “Special Camps” for political prisoners in the late 1940s.
Today it is impossible to know whether the Magadan political barrack is part of a broader state strategy or merely a local initiative. But its very existence shows that repression in Russia has already reached an industrial scale. The system is no longer fighting isolated dissidents — it is trying to isolate an entire social group capable of undermining state propaganda simply by existing.
And only one question remains: will the system ultimately succeed in turning all of society against those who try to tell the truth — or not? Because if it fails, then in the long term the system itself may face a profound crisis. Every dictatorship survives through fear and the ability to conceal lies. But when more and more people begin to see reality with their own eyes — when soldiers, political prisoners, and even ordinary inmates stop believing the official narrative — the lie itself begins to collapse. And eventually, the system built upon it may begin collapsing as well.
Source: the media outlet “Govorit NeMoskva”
https://storage.googleapis.com/qurium/nemoskva.net/2026-05-18-barak-dlya-politicheskih.html