Pussy Riot member on hunger strike

A jailed member of Russian punk-rock band Pussy Riot said that she was starting a hunger strike on Monday to protest "slave labor" in her penal colony and that she had received a death threat from a senior prison official.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova was sentenced to two years in prison last year after performing what the band called a "punk prayer" in a Moscow cathedral during a protest against President Vladimir Putin that came amid street demonstrations against his rule.

"Beginning Sept. 23, I am going on hunger strike and refusing to participate in colony slave labor," she wrote in a letter circulated by her husband, Pyotr Verzilov.

"I will do this until the administration starts obeying the law and stops treating incarcerated women like cattle," she wrote. Tolokonnikova is in Penal Colony No. 14 in the Mordovia region, southeast of Moscow, where she said inmates were forced to work up to 17 hours per day sewing police uniforms.

She said workers received no more than four hours of sleep per night and that prison officials used senior inmates to enforce order in a system reminiscent of Soviet-era Gulag labor camps.

Tolokonnikova added that collective punishment, increasing production quotas and cases of violence against those who failed to deliver were common at her penal colony. She also said living conditions failed to meet human-rights standards and Russian law.

"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.

She said she had also asked the regional arm of the federal Investigative Committee to investigate a senior prison official whom she quoted as saying after a complaint about conditions: "You will surely never feel bad again because it is never bad in the other world."

Penal-colony administrators declined to comment on her accusations, and Mordovia's prison authorities could not immediately be reached for comment.

Critics say the sentencing of Tolokonnikova and two other band members is part of a crackdown on dissent since Putin returned to the Kremlin for a third term in May 2012.

The Pussy Riot protest offended many in the mostly Russian Orthodox country, but their treatment has also won them high-profile support in the West, with celebrities including Madonna and ex-Beatle Paul McCartney speaking up for them.

Tolokonnikova is due for release in March, as is fellow band member Maria Alyokhina. A third band member had her sentence changed to a suspended one.

Alyokhina went on a hunger strike in the summer, after officials prevented her from attending a parole hearing. She was hospitalized in late May and ended her protest days after prison authorities agreed to her demands, Verzilov said. 

Reuters