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Pussy Riot band member begins hunger strike

One of the Pussy Riot members jailed for protesting the re-election of Vladimir Putin has gone on a hunger strike to publicize the inhumane conditions in his prisons.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, a 23-year-old mother, revealed on the Russian punk band’s Web site that she was forced to work 17 hours a day in a Gulag-style sweat shop making police uniforms.

“Your hands are pierced with needles and covered in scratches, your blood is all over the work table, but still you keep sewing,” she wrote.

In an impassioned letter from Corrective Colony No. 14, she described how female inmates who fail to meet their quotas are punished by being denied food, prevented from using the bathroom, forced to stand outside in the cold or physically attacked.

“Just recently a young woman got stabbed in the head with a pair of scissors because she didn’t turn in a pair of pants on time,” she wrote.

Tolokonnikova also said a deputy warden, a professed Stalinist, told her other inmates would be encouraged to kill her for challenging the prison system.

“Things never will be bad for you because there is nothing bad in the next world,” the warden said.

Prison officials tried to prevent other inmates from being sympathetic to her, she said. One woman was punished just for having tea with her.

Russia’s state prison laws are supposed to guarantee inmates at least eight hours sleep a day, but she said it was impossible to get more than four hours.

Tolokonnikova sent separate complaints about her penal colony, located in the Mordovia region 300 miles east of Moscow, to Russia’s chief investigative agency, the prosecutor general’s office and the state prison service.

“My health and my life are in danger,” she wrote.

After complaining previously about her brutal conditions, including a 7:30 a.m. to 12:30 a.m. work day, prison officials made her life worse. she said.

“You complain that there is no hot water, and they shut it off completely,” she wrote.

“Therefore, on Sept. 23, I am declaring a hunger strike and refusing to take part in the slave labor in the colony until the administration starts obeying the law and stops treating incarcerated women like cattle thrown out of the justice system to serve the needs of the sewing industry,” Tolokonnikova wrote.

“This is an extreme measure, but I am absolutely confident that this is the only possible way for me out of this situation. I demand that we be treated as people and not slaves.”

Tolokonnikova is serving two years after she and two other members of Pussy Riot performed what they called a “punk prayer” in Moscow’s main Orthodox cathedral to denounce Putin in February of last year.

She and bandmate Maria Alyokhina, who is in another prison, are scheduled to be released in March.

The third member, Yekaterina Samutsevich, had her sentenced suspended.

Human-rights activists have said Tolokonnikova was singled out and sent to the Mordovia penal colony to break her spirit.

With Post Wire Services