I first became involved in work in the prisons of the former Soviet Union within a year of its break-up in 1991, beginning with Russia in 1992, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in 1993 and Belarus in 1994. For more than a decade thereafter I was a regular visitor to the region in various contexts: as a member of the Russia/Council of Europe programme on the Reform of the Prison System in the Russian Federation; as an expert member of the first two visits of the CPT to Russia and its first visit to Armenia; with the Council of Baltic Sea States, the World Health Organization and other bodies for work in tackling the problem of tuberculosis in places of detention; to several countries for work on the abolition of the death penalty; as well as on a number of ICPS long-term projects on improving human rights in places of detention.

In later sections I describe the terrible conditions in the post-Soviet pre-trial detention centres (SIZOs) which I witnessed in the early 1990s. Once a prisoner was convicted and sentenced he or she would be transferred to a labour colony. Colonies were classified according to the severity of their regime and in passing sentence the judge would specify the severity of the regime to which the convicted person was to be allocated according to the nature of the offence, the length of sentence and the number of previous convictions.

Prisoners in Soviet times were regarded as enemies of the State – outlaws, literally placed outside the law. One thing which the State could demand from them in return was labour. This principle was added to the earlier Tsarist system of exile to far-flung parts of the Empire (Rybakov, 1988). At one level the Gulag described by Solzhenitsyn (1973) was an unstructured archipelago of camps and colonies which happened to exist wherever they were placed. At another level it was a sophisticated organisation which was a key contributor to the economy of the country, and the Soviet labour camps were units of production (Dallin and Nicolaevsky, 1947; Shifrin, 1982). Until the early 1990s the forest camps in Siberia were administered as a separate prison administration. Other camps were clustered geographically.