In the library of Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, my fellow-inmates and I could choose from great novelists such as Charlotte Brontë and Marcel Proust or existentialists such as Samuel Beckett and Albert Camus. For escapism, there were celebrity memoirs by Michelle Obama and Arnold Schwarzenegger. If we preferred something a bit closer to home, we could find the works of the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who, like us, had spent time in Lefortovo. There were offerings in economics, history, math, and psychology, and even some in contemporary fiction: the American novelist Donna Tartt, the South Korean Nobel Prize laureate Han Kang. When I expressed surprise about the diverse selection to my lawyers, soon after landing in Lefortovo, in March, 2023, they pointed out that many highly educated people had spent time in the prison and left their books behind. At least one had even written his own book there—Eduard Limonov, the part nationalist, part jester writer, and politician, who drafted “Imprisoned by Dead Men” during his fifteen-month detention in the early two-thousands.

In prison, reading was a distraction, but a false hope was always present. Sometimes it was a phone ringing in the hallway outside my cell. I would think, Is the call about me? Is a guard being told to grab me for release? At low moments, all it took was the regular sound of footsteps approaching. I would look up from my book, glance at the door, and watch a guard’s eye examining me through the peephole. Then the feet would shuffle onward and I would sigh, returning to my reading.

After I had spent two weeks in Lefortovo, a guard stopped outside my cell and asked, “Gershkovich?”

“Yes,” I said.

“With your things.”

At that point, I was being held in solitary confinement—a customary welcome to Russian prison, my lawyers had explained, as it insured that outside diseases didn’t spread to other inmates. They had also said I would be getting a cellmate once that period was up.

The door opened and I saw two guards, one with a shopping cart. He instructed me to place my things in the cart, carry my mattress, and follow him.

My first cell, No. 40, was directly across from the entrance to the prison. We headed left and up a flight of stairs. As I walked, my mind raced over whom I’d be living with. Lefortovo houses not only political prisoners but also those charged with corruption and arms dealing and drug crimes. On the second floor, we turned down a long, diagonal hallway—the first of two in the K-shaped building—and stopped at cell No. 85. The guard opened the door.

Standing in front of me was a tall, well-built man with a shaved head and arms that were covered in tattoos. He wore a white sleeveless T-shirt, gray shorts, and white socks with black athletic sandals. He was leaning on a low wall separating a toilet from a sink, and he had a burning cigarette in his hand, which he ashed into the toilet. Greeting me with a nod, he watched as I tossed my mattress onto a bed across from his.

Once the door shut behind me, I offered the man a handshake. He stared at my hand, then back at me, took a drag of his cigarette, and said, “What’s the trouble?”

I looked at him, confused.

He smiled. “You’re a first-timer?”

I had never heard that exact Russian word, but I understood it in context: pervokhod, which means “one who is on his first passage”—specifically, through the penitentiary system. (I am an American, but I grew up speaking Russian at home with my Soviet-émigré parents.)

“Yes,” I said.

He nodded.

“What’s your article?” he asked. “That’s what ‘What’s the trouble?’ means.”

“Article” referred to “article of the Russian criminal code.” “The two hundred and seventy-sixth,” I said, having remembered the number from when the F.S.B., Russia’s domestic-security service, had presented me with my charges. My cellmate looked like he was trying to recall what it stood for, so I added, “Espionage.”

He coughed, his eyes widening. “You’re a spy?”

“No,” I said. “I’m a journalist. An American journalist.”

He looked skeptical. “They’re just framing me as a spy,” I explained. “They took me for a swap.”

He smiled. “Sure,” he said. “Most people here aren’t guilty, just like in ‘Shawshank Redemption.’ But I’ll take your word for it.”

I blushed. My lawyers had advised me not to share details about my case, so I decided against explaining further and started arranging my things.

That night, I didn’t sleep. I was lying next to a grown man I had just met, his feet mere inches away from my head, in a tiny concrete box I couldn’t leave. I wondered what my friends were doing at that very moment. It was a Friday evening, and Berlin—where many of them had moved after Vladimir Putin sent his armies into Ukraine, in February, 2022—was one hour behind. Were they having dinner? Going out to a bar?

The next morning, my cellmate, observing my puffy eyelids, told me that he hadn’t slept well, either. “It’s always like that when you get someone new,” he said. “But, with each change, it gets easier.”

I’ll call my cellmate Seryoga. (He’s still incarcerated, so to protect him I’ve rendered him using some details from other, subsequent cellmates.) I told him that my official name was Evan but that in Russian I’d always been Ivan. Seryoga immediately started calling me by my family nickname, Vanya. Before I arrived, he had spent three days without a cellmate—enough for him to go a bit stir-crazy, he said. He had been in Lefortovo for more than a year by this point, some of it in solitary confinement, and he couldn’t stand being alone.

Seryoga had been accused of running an illegal-weapons shop, pleaded guilty, and was hoping to be sentenced soon. He wanted to move on to the zona, or the zone, as Russia’s sprawling network of penal-work camps is known. He was tired of detention-center life—its monotony, cramped quarters, and lack of a thriving social scene. He yearned for the regular workweek and open spaces of a camp, where he could cook dinner in the evening and have a group of friends. “I want to get to camp already,” he said, though he admitted that conditions varied. Camps in the region east of Moscow were notoriously hellish, but camps in the south, near the Black Sea, were supposed to be “a resort,” he said. “Think about all the fresh fruit we would have if we get there,” he added, with a sigh.

Like me, Seryoga was a first-timer. He had grown up in a town outside of Moscow; his father, who died when Seryoga was young, worked at a state-run company, and his mother was a schoolteacher. But Seryoga got in with the wrong crowd as a kid, and he now saw organized crime as one of the few viable professions available to him. “I tried the regular office thing, made no money, and didn’t see the point,” he said. Plus, if Putin’s government was running a corrupt racket, why shouldn’t he? “Everything’s relative here,” he added.

Seryoga had launched his weapons shop a few years earlier, starting with pistols and then expanding into larger and deadlier equipment, though he never offered specifics. Business had been good, and he was able to get his mother a new apartment. But he kept pushing things too far. In the summer of 2021, shortly before the all-out war, the government extended the maximum sentence for his article—No. 222, illegal-weapons trafficking—from eight years to fifteen. The F.S.B. got busy shutting down black-market arms networks across the country, possibly to prevent weapons from getting into the wrong hands before the invasion. Seryoga wasn’t a political prisoner, but it seemed that he had ended up in Lefortovo because of the war, too.

“It’s pointless,” Seryoga declared about the conflict. “It’s just about the political interests of competing powers.” He didn’t see why his country should be going to war with its “little brother,” but he also didn’t want to spend fifteen years behind bars. He and his wife had three kids—ages six, four, and nine months—and he wanted them to remember him. And so, even though he sometimes rhapsodized about life in a work camp, he was also considering enlisting once his verdict came down. “It would be a decision made out of desperation,” he said.

Drafting convicts had become a key part of Russia’s military strategy, a way to replenish its forces without having to mobilize the broader population. I pressed Seryoga on whether it wouldn’t be better for his kids to have a father who was alive, even if imprisoned, than one who was dead. “I grew up without a dad,” he said. “I’d rather my son say his dad died at war than not talk to me because I’m a convict.” Several of Seryoga’s friends had left their penal colonies for the front; one had remained unharmed, despite participating in several assaults, whereas another had been quickly injured and hospitalized. “It’s luck of the draw whether you survive out there,” Seryoga said. “I do understand that.”

That evening, Seryoga began my Russian-prison education. It turned out that I had made two key mistakes upon entering my new cell.

The first mistake had come as soon as I crossed the threshold: I hadn’t wiped my feet on a rag at the entrance. That was a sign of disrespect, Seryoga informed me. The second mistake was that I had offered a handshake without asking for his article first. If I shook the hand of the wrong person—a child molester, for instance—I could end up on the lowest rung of the prison caste system, automatically becoming a petukh, or a rooster.

What should I have done? Ideally, upon entering the cell, I would have waited until Seryoga asked, “What’s the trouble?” He might have also asked, “Is everything even in your life?” That’s Russian-prison slang for establishing whether I have an “even”—that is, acceptable—article. An “uneven” article often had to do with sexual violence: No. 131 (rape), No. 132 (violent sexual acts), No. 133 (coercion to perform sexual acts), No. 134 (pedophilia), No. 135 (indecent acts toward an underage person). Any of those automatically put a prisoner into the lowest caste. This meant that the person couldn’t share cigarettes with others in his cell, ate last in camp, and might be forced to give out sexual favors. (In this world, a gay man is a petukh by default.) If I answered in the affirmative, acknowledging that everything in my life was even, Seryoga could shake my hand.

I discovered that there were other rungs in the caste system, like sherst, or wool—typically someone who violated the code by coöperating with, say, the prison administration, or by not practicing good hygiene. According to Seryoga, the No. 1 goal of our life was to maintain good hygiene. We wiped our flip-flops when we entered the cell, and wore them at all times: no walking barefoot, ever. (As Seryoga put it, “We shit where we eat.”) We cleaned the cell each morning, alternating days, and we had different rags for different parts of the space—the floor, the walls, the sink and table, the toilet. If the wrong rag was used for the wrong area, that could land a person in deep trouble.

All of this raised a question: Given our isolation, how would other inmates even know about our reputations? As Seryoga explained, when two cellmates were separated, each would carry with them a kind of unwritten report card. Any large prison cell or penal-camp barrack had an inmate who served as the smotryaschiy, or the watcher—the senior authority who enforced the code and adjudicated disputes. If this person needed to find out about “how you sit,” he’d ask his contacts and eventually figure out the truth, or something close to it, just as a reporter would.

In Russian, the verb “to sit,” used on its own, is enough to convey the meaning “to sit in prison”; you don’t have to specify the where. And the verb is an active one. You don’t simply sit—you have to sit in a certain way. You are judged on how you sit. I found this idea comforting: it helped me think of my imprisonment as a period of development, in which I had to be sitting well, not just sitting around. I also liked how the Russian word for “to sit someone down” could mean “to plant.” At one point, I read an autobiographical novel by the writer Andrei Rubanov about his time in Lefortovo and another detention center in Moscow, titled, if translated literally, “Plant Him and He Will Grow.” Later, I started to enjoy another common saying even more: you’re not Russian if you haven’t sat in prison.

Even though he was kind to me, Seryoga had a short temper. One of his first instructions was that we had to turn on the tap before using the toilet—both for the sound and to avoid touching the faucet’s handle afterward with dirty hands. That wasn’t an easy habit to remember. I would glance over the partition and see Seryoga’s eyes raised from his book, staring at me, his eyebrows arched ominously. I would quickly apologize and run over to the tap, turning it with the back of my hand.

For taking a shit, Seryoga taught me a carefully choreographed procedure. We wouldn’t just turn on the water but also blare the TV and open the window. Then we would drape an extra sheet that he kept—against the rules, but with the guards’ tacit permission—between the end of the protruding wall and a fridge across from it, securing it in place with two plastic bottles filled with sugar. He had dug a crevice into the wall, and we would stick a small piece of dried lemon peel in there and light it with a match for its strong, masking aroma. (Seryoga ordered the lemons from the prison shop each month.) He also advised me to bring along a plastic bottle, fill it with water, and squeeze it afterward as a handy bidet.

There were other nonnegotiables. If we had to fart, we walked to the cell door. Masturbation could only be done when you were alone. (This I learned early on, when a guard told Seryoga that he had a summons. “You should jerk off while you have the chance,” Seryoga instructed me.) Other rules concerned the appropriate volume for the TV, which Seryoga turned up to mask our chewing noises. Cigarettes could be smoked only at the vent near the toilet, or at the window if the vent wasn’t working. Certain words couldn’t be used in prison, either. For instance, you couldn’t say stuchat (“to knock”) since that word has a secondary meaning of “to snitch.” Shumet (“to make noise”) was the preferred alternative.

This wasn’t even the half of it, and it took me some time to learn it all. Occasionally, when I botched a rule, Seryoga lost his patience and got in my face, threatening to inflict pain on me. At a calmer moment, he told me that he had once dragged a lax cellmate to a place where the camera couldn’t see them, and then beat the cellmate with his intimidatingly large fists. “I warned him multiple times, though,” Seryoga informed me. “It’s not like I would do that immediately.”

As I figured things out, we developed a fine relationship. There’s a term in Russian, patsan, that essentially describes a boy in a gang but means much more: it suggests someone who lives by the street’s code of honor. Seryoga very much did, and there were lines he wouldn’t cross. He believed that you had to hit first in a fight, that you always had to honor your word, and that you could never shake the hand of a gay person. On the outside, we would never have been friends. But here, in these circumstances, we got along. And he made me laugh. Like me, Seryoga had grown up on shows like “SpongeBob SquarePants,” and once, after he napped for four hours in the middle of the day and woke up groggy, he said, “That’s purely”—then switched to the French narrator’s voice from “SpongeBob”—“one . . . year . . . later.”

In truth, I was lucky to have him. He read constantly, he exercised, and, most important, he didn’t snore. Sometimes he woke up in the middle of the night talking gibberish, but that was it. Just four days after moving in, I marvelled in my diary about how quickly you can feel like your cellmate is an integral part of your life. Each day, Seryoga and I were allowed to take an hour-long walk on the roof of the prison, in a cell with webbed-metal netting instead of a ceiling, and we would pace along parallel tracks, going back and forth, back and forth, finding a rhythm together.

Like Pierre Bezukhov, who is taken prisoner during the French occupation of Moscow in Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” I soon found that even while v nevole—or in the state of being without free will—I could find moments of pleasure. “Just as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free,” Tolstoy writes, “so too there is no situation in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree.” ♦

This is drawn from “This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian-American Story.”