'This is crazy': an American spoke about 600 days in a Russian jail

Former Texas-based firefighter Geile Grandstaff spent more than 600 days in a Russian detention center on drug smuggling. After almost two years, he was released from custody. He said Air forcewhat I learned behind bars and what I learned about Russia during that time.

53-year-old Grandstaff peers into the faces of the pre-trial detention center employees in camouflage, doing something on the street next to the gates of the detention center, and says: “I remember everyone’s face.” Back in March, he met them on the other side of the bars.

A year and a half ago, Geilen ordered a cleaning product on Alibaba to clean his moonshine still. Then everything was like a fog. Instead of a postal courier, the parcel was delivered by customs officers in disguise. A search, detention - and here he is in a pre-trial detention center and accused of smuggling, since the substance is prohibited in Russia and is recognized as a narcotic in most countries.

Gaylen and his defense claimed that they did not know what was there. After months of 20, he was released.

During this time, he lost a lot of weight, but his Russian skills noticeably improved - and he talks about his adventures in prison with a smile. But when all this happened to him, he was definitely not laughing.

I met with Galen Grandstaff near the fence of the SIZO No. 3 on 1-m Silikatnom Passage in the west of Moscow, built in 1938, as a transit point for prisoners, to find out how he experienced more than a year and a half in the cells of Moscow insulators.

Lost in Translation

Before his life in the SIZO, Geilen hardly spoke Russian. His knowledge was limited to the level of elementary language courses. And although he lived in Moscow for more than seven years married to a Russian woman, Anna, they mostly spoke English.

He earned money by teaching English, but his students were foreign children or businessmen with knowledge of English, so he did not need Russian at work. He could only speak a few simple phrases in Russian.

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However, correspondence from the SIZO was allowed to be conducted only in a language understandable to the Federal Penitentiary Service. Helen spent hours in the cell with a dictionary to write a letter to his wife.

We speak English with him, as Geilen is shy of her conversational Russian.

“There, in the pre-trial detention center, as I now understand, unfortunately, I mostly learned colloquial slang. It’s used a lot in prison and it’s hardly ever used here in the wild,” Gaylen laughs.

“Shkonka”, “shmon”, he says in an American accent as an example.

He also recalls a funny incident that happened to him once. His cellmates taught him a variety of everyday words in Russian. And among other things, they said that the guard in the pre-trial detention center is called “garbage” in Russian.

“As usual, I tried to remember the next word. During one of the cell checks, when we were all lined up along the wall, I said to one of the cellmates, pointing to the guard: garbage. Everyone laughed. And the guards looked at me as if they were going to kill me. I just didn't know what it meant. After this incident, I stopped believing what my cellmates taught me,” says Grandstaff.

In prison jargon there are synonyms for almost every word, but for most ordinary people they can not talk about anything, he shares his discovery.

“Now I pronounce them - and it sounds like a joke to me. I never used this vocabulary there,” says Gaylen.

During his arrest, Galen replaced several cells in several Moscow detention centers. Among them was a camera with four bunks on six prisoners, a camera with 12 bunks on 13 prisoners and a camera with 12 bunks on 19 prisoners.

After Russian media wrote about Geilen’s case, he was transferred to a double cell. “I call my latest two-person cell the Taj Mahal!” - he laughs.

However, before that, in moments of aggravating anti-American sentiment among the inhabitants of the detention center, Galen often had to sleep on the floor.

“It happened that they tried to beat me up”

Particularly acute moments happened when they talked about the relations between Russia and the USA on TV.

“As soon as Donald Trump started showing on TV, I immediately got the opposite reaction: the guards started calling me “Trump”, and not my real name. This was their way of demonstrating a derogatory attitude towards me. When they treated me badly, they always called me “Trump,” Gaylen recalls.

Cellmates repeatedly tried to arrange a “dark” for Galen - once it was “at an assembly”, when several dozen people beat him, he recalls.

“It was easy to foresee when there would be another surge of negativity from the cellmates. Whatever they watched on TV, they completely believed in it. This is madness. For example, they showed a program on TV where they compared the Russian and American military, as if it were a real confrontation. It was obvious that this was all a show. But in the cell everyone automatically began to express negativity towards the United States.”

He was repeatedly harassed by the guards; once, when he was being taken out of the car, he was dropped, as a result of which he received a concussion and a knee injury, Geilen lists.

In one of the cells, he, as an American, was openly given an ultimatum: to ask permission for literally everything, even to use the toilet: “As a result, a conflict arose, because they want to humiliate you, and no one likes it when someone starts to resist this . It happened that one or two cellmates tried to beat me.”

"Pelican Vomit"

Gaylen suffers from Crohn's disease, a chronic inflammatory bowel disease, and is only allowed to eat healthy foods.

“I tried only once what they gave there, and I was sick for three days. I didn’t eat it again,” he says.

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“They add some kind of oil everywhere, apparently to make the food meet a certain amount of calories. Regardless of the dish - potatoes, buckwheat or something else. Because of him, my body simply did not absorb this food,” recalls Gaylen.

“For example, there was this dish that looked like you took raw sardines and put them through a blender. I always called it "pelican vomit." It smelled terrible and looked terrible. Some even refused to eat at all when this dish was served. I didn't like it either. Usually a day or two later the same fish was served fried.”

In order for Geilen to be able to eat normally, his wife Anna ordered him the officially paid food provided every day. There were different dishes to choose from; recalling this, Gaylen calls the paid lunches “normal food.”

13 walks in 50 days

Geilen kept a diary in which he noted every day when he was allowed to play sports or at least go out for a walk.

“For example, in 50 days in 2017, I was allowed to go for a walk only 13 times. The rest of the days I did not leave the crowded cell,” he shows his notes.

In the last seven months of his imprisonment, due to the fact that, thanks to the media, a lot of attention was focused on his case - journalists came to court hearings, he was visited by employees of the US Embassy - Geilen was transferred to a double cell.

There he was able to push-ups, pull up, and once he was even allowed to visit the gym. For this spouse Anna officially paid the FSIN dachshund. True, he was not allowed to visit the prison gym a second time.

When he was brought to the pre-trial detention center, Geilen had only one book with him - the autobiography of the famous British businessman Richard Branson.

“I was once given this book; it was lying at home. I must say that I started reading it several times. But it is quite big and there was never enough time. And suddenly, unexpectedly, I had a lot of time,” he says.

Later, Gaylen presented it to a foreigner who could read English before he was sent to serve his sentence to the colony.

Only a few months before the release from custody, the prison management allowed the spouse to transfer several books in English

“There will definitely be someone decent”

When Galen first arrived in Russia, friends advised him to avoid contact with the police. Now he calls this advice correct.

What he happened to him, he calls insanity. And he believes that the problem has arisen, because in Russia there are indeed problems with drugs and with justice.

He is sure: he was released from the SIZO only because of the attention of the press and the fact that he is American.

“It’s unfortunate what’s happening to the Russian people. I only get attention because I'm American. But I guarantee you that a lot of Russians find themselves in the same situation, but no one listens to them. Because there is no justice in the system. She was created differently. She doesn't need justice, but sentences. So that we can say, for example, we have a drug problem - we fight it - we put people in prison. And it doesn’t matter whether a person is guilty or not,” says Gaylen.

Photo: FROM PERSONAL ARCHIVE OF ANNA GRANDSTAFF

The case of the Grandstaff is not yet closed. In March, the court decided to release him from custody, and return the case to the investigator. The investigation filed an appeal on March 28, which, according to the law, should have been considered by the Moscow City Court for 30 days, but so far this has not happened, said a spokesman for Grandstaff. Investigation suspended.

The cases of the Grandstaff were conducted by investigators (altogether they were changed five times) by the Internal Affairs Directorate of the closed joint-stock company, said Grand Staff's lawyer Anton Omelchenko.

Field investigators of the same Department of Internal Affairs detained journalist Ivan Golunov. The head of this department after the scandal with the criminal case against Golunov in late June, was dismissed by President Vladimir Putin.

Grandstaff himself says he intends to seek innocence in order to protect his reputation. During the time in the SIZO he learned a lot and is even ready to give advice to those who will be there for the first time:

“I would say this: be yourself. But this is impossible. They won't give it to you, and if you try, then you will become an enemy. Act according to the situation as much as your consciousness allows you. For me personally, there were very clear boundaries that I would never cross. And this led to problems. I was not ready to tolerate someone taking alcohol and drugs in my cell. This caused conflicts. The best thing you can do is be yourself, treat people with respect, and there will definitely be someone decent who will repay you in kind.”

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