Visiting My Friend in Putin's Prison Camp
A quiet geologist tried to blow the whistle on Olympic pollution and corruption. One year later, he's still paying the price.
—By Charles Digges
MY FIRST STOP at Sadovaya Prison Colony No. 2 in central Russia is the visitors' intake center. I've traveled for 14 hours on an overnight train that reeked of fetid socks to see my imprisoned friend, environmental activist Yevgeny Vitishko. By my noon arrival at the colony, I'm already running late, and reams of red tape await before I'll be able to see him.
I've come to these cold mud flats 440 miles south of Moscow for the first interview Vitishko has given in the seven months since February 12, 2014, the day he was sent away in the midst of the Sochi Winter Olympics.
In the years leading up to the event, Vitishko had emerged as one of the competition's fiercest critics. Along with his little-known organization, the Environmental Watch on North Caucasus (EWNC), Vitishko protested the ecological destruction and crony Kremlin corruption that fed the $51 billion games, the most expensive in history. Now, a year after the closing ceremonies, his dire predictions of environmental havoc have come true—and Vitishko sits in prison. He has been described as the only prisoner of conscience associated with the Sochi Olympics.
VITISHKO AND I immediately hit it off when we first met in January 2014, in his hometown of Tuapse, 75 miles northwest of Sochi on the Black Sea. A Krasnodar court had recently sentenced him to three years in the Sadovaya penal colony on charges that he'd painted an environmental message on a fence. He remained free on the condition he not leave Tuapse until a long-shot February 12 appeal was set to be heard at a regional court.
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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/02/sochi-environmental-activist-vitishko-putin-prison
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