A correspondent for Izbrannoye succeeded in talking with a person close to the family of Svetlana Bakhmina. He wished to remain anonymous.

Yelena Kaluzhskaya, Izbrannoye, 26.09.2008

The former lawyer for Yukos Svetlana Bakhmina has been taken to the prison hospital. Most likely this is in connection with her pregnancy – the convict is in her seventh month. The internet is incandescent with indignation over a post by a classmate of Bakhmina which appeared on her blog.

It is odd that we know so little about Svetlana Bakhmina. Only recently, it emerged that in May the court rejected her application for parole. And only now have the details been revealed. It turns out her lawyers appealed against this decision, the Supreme Court of Mordovia sent the case back to the district court for a second hearing. And the district court refused parole again.

That’s right, they refused it.

On what grounds?

Zubovo-Polyansky district court held that Svetlana “has not embarked on the path of reform and has not developed respect for society and people”. This conclusion was drawn because over these years she had four sanctions. It’s true, they are spent now.

What does that mean – spent?

Sanctions remain “effective” for a year, and Svetlana had four sanctions which were set earlier. Nevertheless the court decided to take them into account. And the three commendations which she had in fact received during the past year the court decided not to take into account.

What were the sanctions imposed for?

Two “infringements of the regulations” were entered back in Moscow, in the pretrial detention centre. The first was for Svetlana “not rising for the wake-up call”. The second was for “inter-cell communication” which took the form of some lady who had earlier shared a cell with Svetlana trying to call her through a window. The third sanction was imposed upon her entry into the penal colony. During a search when she arrived they found a SIM card on Bakhmina. Svetlana says that it was planted during the journey there. In reality a SIM card without a telephone would be of no use to anyone, and if Svetlana had found it, she would have thrown it away, of course. But it was found during the search, and Svetlana was punished for this with ten days in the punitive isolation cell.

The isolation unit?

Yes, a prison within the prison. In ten days she lost eight kilograms in there. Sometimes they do that in the prison camp – to break a person straightaway. Generally settling into the camp is very stressful. And if your stay in the camp starts off in the isolation unit, that’s an even more serious psychological blow.

And what did she get the fourth sanction for?

At the end of October 2006 she climbed a flight of stairs to the floor above where her sleeping quarters were located, and she chatted with one of the convicts. This was in fact the territory of another unit, as it emerged, and you could only go there with the permission of the colony’s administration. She simply didn’t know that.

Since then there have been no more sanctions, and there have been five commendations, two of which were in the summer after the parole refusal. The leadership of the colony has not objected to parole: they gave her a good character testimonial and supported her petition for release. By the way, in May even the representative of the prosecutor’s office had no objection to freeing Bakhmina. But the judge ignored this. The lawyers appealed against the decision, and on 30 July their complaint was heard by the Supreme Court of the Republic of Mordovia. Svetlana did not go to the court, she wasn’t feeling well – she is pregnant after all.

It is not quite clear how she could get pregnant while in custody

Once every three months a prisoner is granted an extended visit: their spouse can come for three days. During this time the family live in a room, the conditions there are like in a hostel. Besides, Svetlana was awarded leave in March. Which also confirms that she is in good standing in the colony. She travelled home, spent time with her relatives, with her children. This happens rarely, but Svetlana earned such a commendation.

Why did the court refuse parole in such a situation?

There are a number of opinions regarding that. Perhaps the court received a direct order, or perhaps the problem lies in the lameness of judicial thinking… There was no command to release her, and the judge simply did not resolve to make a humane decision, bearing in mind the result of the court ruling on Khodorkovsky’s parole. If Bakhmina had not been imprisoned for the “Yukos affair”, bearing in mind her impeccable behaviour, her two children and her pregnancy, she would have been released, there can be no doubt. The court had also been provided with a guarantee that she would be given a job straight after her release. That is important too, as finding work for ex-convicts as a rule is problematic.

Tell us how Svetlana’s children are living without her.

The children don’t know that she is in prison. She has seen them over all this time only once – in March, during her leave. They are being told that their mummy is on a business trip abroad. When Svetlana was arrested, the eldest son was seven. At first he had no communication with her and he thought that she was dead. Because up till then she had never gone away for long, and whenever she went away, she phoned often. The younger child was three, and when she arrived, he didn’t recognise her. He is now seven, and he has lived without his mother for over half his life. When she was on leave in March, the children just stayed glued to her side: they held onto her with their hands the whole time. They couldn’t believe that she was not just a voice on the telephone. She had been phoning them all this time, in the colony there is a pay phone which she is permitted to use a certain number of times per month.

But it must be very difficult to keep a secret like that. The children go to an ordinary school?

Yes, a plain ordinary school. Decent people work there, who naturally do everything they can so as not to traumatise the children. The head teacher and the form teachers know everything and are sympathetic. They are saved by the fact that Svetlana didn’t change her surname when she married, and the children have their father’s surname. Therefore they are not directly associated with the case. The elder child has now gone into class five, the youngest is in his first year. Svetlana dearly hoped that she would be released on parole, and that she herself would take him for his first day at school on 1 September. She has a hang-up, you could say, that this should be done by the mother. By the way it was because of the children that she asked her lawyers to limit contact with the press – so that there would be less talk. She had hoped to be released before they found out the truth.

Is there now no chance of that?

There is a hope anyway, but it is remote. In October the next appeal will be heard by the Supreme Court of Mordovia. There are two possible rulings: either the district court decision to reject the parole will be upheld, or the case will be sent back to the district court again. Everything is in favour of her being released on parole, and if it doesn’t happen then it means the court was forbidden to do it. But no one knows for certain of any orders and therefore we need to have hope. From the point of view of common sense this is crazy – to hold a pregnant woman in prison who has already served almost four years out of six and a half. And we are talking about not just Svetlana and her two boys but also the unborn child who is already in prison.

Has the family now decided not to hide anything from the children?

I don’t know about that. It is decided in a narrow family circle. The risk that someone will say something to them has grown – Svetlana has accepted that. But so far the children do not know the truth, because they don’t use the internet, and Svetlana is not shown on television.

Are Svetlana’s parents involved in bringing up the children?

The husband is bringing up the children, the grandmothers are helping him. Svetlana’s father died not long before her arrest, in the summer of 2004. Her mother still works. It’s a very simple family – the father was a welder, the mother too, I think, without higher education. Svetlana was in a certain sense naturally gifted: without any help she got into Moscow State University to study law, as a day student, she was always working, she supported her parents. And not only her parents: her assistant said that on Svetlana’s orders she regularly sent her surplus money to a fund to help sick children. No one even knew about this before the court case.

And what is known about the prison conditions for Svetlana Bakhmina? Who is with her?

In her unit the women serving sentences are convicted of serious crimes. There are only 100 prisoners in all, the majority are in for murder. Clearly this is not the most straightforward company, in terms of aggression levels as well as intellect levels. Many of them have unstrung nerves, so you can’t relax in the unit – you have to remain constantly tense. She doesn’t complain, says that everything is okay, her wellbeing is tolerable. She’s not at all the type to complain, but you have to understand that to spend your seventh month of pregnancy in prison – it’s not like being laid up in a Moscow clinic for bed rest. What’s more, let’s not forget that she is not guilty of anything – she has been imprisoned for nothing. Realising that is difficult too: she was imprisoned at thirty-five and she is spending, you could say, the best years of her life in a penal colony, when she needs to build a career, to bring up her children, to help her mother.

What kind of conditions will she have to give birth in?

In Mordovia over twenty colonies are concentrated on the territory of Zubovo-Polyansky district. Three of them are women’s colonies. There is one hospital for everyone, with a maternity unit attached to it. That is where the prisoners give birth – on the whole it happens all the time. There is a separate colony No. 2 where nursing mothers live with their children. When the child grows bigger, he can be left on his own, in the colony – there is a boarding school there, or you can hand him over to relatives. Svetlana still hasn’t decided what she will do: right now the main thing is to carry to term and give birth to a healthy child. After all on 13 October she will turn 39. Everything is very challenging, considering the conditions of constant stress and everyday discomfort. There – excuse me – the toilet is outdoors, and in winter the temperature can drop to minus forty.

And what about food there? Food, after all, is important during pregnancy.

The women’s colony has the advantage over the men’s in that there are no limits on parcels, so everyone who visits her – lawyers, relatives, friends – tries to take her the maximum of food. In that sense things are all right. And the attitude of the prison administration towards Svetlana is quite humane. She, of course, differs from the main body of the camp. There you don’t often come across educated lawyers. What’s more Svetlana is someone who is not arrogant, she’s sensible, decent and tries to be in harmony with her surroundings. I think that the commendations which she is getting, her leave and the good character testimony from the colony all characterise her behaviour in these challenging conditions. Apart from that, the majority of women who find themselves in prison experience a breakdown in social ties. It is a quality of our mindset: families don’t abandon men in prison so often, they support them more than is the case for women. Svetlana has maintained all her ties, this is evident to the prison administration, and to others in the unit, many of whom don’t get any letters or parcels. Svetlana, of course, shares things out – you don’t eat under a blanket in there. Everyone who goes to visit her bears in mind the fact that she’s not alone. But friction, of course, does occur, and envy – in prison you come across all sorts of people.