Lefortovo Prison

I mean, I think one key thing is that it's not like everybody in Russian prison is a political prisoner, right? And the political prisoners are anti-Putin.

very, you know, I think one amazing statistic that is important to note here is that in the second prison in Yekaterinburg, because you're sent back to where, you know, I was brought to Moscow to Lefortovo, which is the FSB house prison for the pretrial investigation, but you're tried where you ostensibly committed your crime.

So sent back to Yekaterinburg, hence the second prison in Central.

There were seven members of the Russian military on my hallway who had refused to fight.

But in that moment when he's reading the sentence of 16 years, I actually get, I think, for the first time angry because I was keeping my emotions really in check the whole time, trying to stay stoic through the whole experience and depressed.

Let me ask you about being a reporter from inside Lefortovo Prison.

It's a pretty unique perspective.

And you're a journalist.

Um, what, what really interested me is that you end up in, in the iconic Moscow prison.

You end up in Lefortovo.

Give me, in a granular way, what daily life was like in Lefortovo prison.

I, I think, you know, one thing to say is that the Russian state's gotten much more calculating about how it, you know, it keeps people in prison and, uh, you know, Victoria Roshchina was a Ukrainian journalist taken captive around the same time.

She was reporting in Russian-occupied territory, and she came back in a body bag.

There's, you know, there's just this like netting above you.

And this is Lefortovo.

Leforto- Lefortovo in Moscow.

The kind of like-

It's pronounced Lefortovo.

Correct.

[laughs]

And I, within about a week, week and a half, started settling into this idea that, okay, it's gonna be for a swap.

Being held in the conditions of Lefortovo Prison in Moscow, which is this really isolating experience, you only have one cellmate, you're moved around without seeing any other prisoners.

That really wears on you psychologically, but I was allowed to sleep.

The food was fine.

He was the first US journalist to be charged with espionage there since the Cold War.

If you're like me, you might wonder, "How did he deal with the absolute terror of his arrest, then more than a year in Moscow's infamous Lefortovo Prison?" By treating it like a reporting trip.

It kind of felt like this would be the most interesting way, um, you know, to spend my time.

I'd already been planning a book before, and then when I got arrested, it sort of made sense that I just simply became a character in that.