The City of the Condemned. An Honest Report on Seven Colonies for Lifers

Journalist and human rights activist Eva Merkacheva visited all seven Russian colonies for life sentences - places where no one wants to find themselves willingly. She interviewed colony staff and inmates and shared in her book honestly and vividly everything she was able to see and learn. The author detailed the daily routine in the colonies, the life of the inmates, themselves, and how prison changes people, the awareness of the gravity of their committed crimes and that they will not be released for the rest of their lives. Eva Merkacheva spoke with killers, maniacs, pedophiles, and other criminals who committed acts so horrifying that society preferred to permanently exclude them from its life. She sought to understand what drove them, once completely normal people, to commit crimes, what turned them into monsters in human guise; do they regret their actions or, on the contrary, do they lament that they cannot continue to do evil? The book includes unique documentary photographs from the author's personal archive.