Evan Gershkovich was moved from solitary confinement to a shared cell in Lefortovo prison in Moscow in March 2023 after two weeks alone. The transfer took him from cell No. 40 to cell No. 85, where a cellmate immediately began teaching him the language of prison life.
Inside the cell, Gershkovich heard the first line of that new routine: “What’s the trouble?” He understood it as pervokhod, the phrase for someone on a first passage through the penitentiary system, and the exchange turned a guarded arrival into a lesson in how detention is spoken as well as lived.
Lefortovo prison and its library
The setting matters because Lefortovo prison was not only a place of isolation. Its library held works by Charlotte Brontë, Marcel Proust, Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Michelle Obama, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Eduard Limonov, Donna Tartt and Han Kang, a list that places high culture beside confinement and routine surveillance.
Gershkovich said reading was a distraction in prison. That detail fits the contrast at the center of his account: a library full of familiar names on one side, and the stripped-down rules of solitary confinement on the other.
Cell No. 40 to cell No. 85
After a guard asked, “Gershkovich?”, he was escorted from cell No. 40 to cell No. 85. A guard opened the door and he saw a tall, well-built man with a shaved head and tattoos, wearing a white sleeveless T-shirt, gray shorts, and white socks with black athletic sandals.
The cellmate’s first words were, “What’s the trouble?” Gershkovich later said the man explained the prison code around him, including the meaning of “Article” in the question “What’s your article?” That exchange gave him a working map of the system at the exact moment he entered shared custody.
Eduard Limonov in Lefortovo prison
The prison’s routines also sit against older histories. In the early two-thousands, Eduard Limonov drafted Imprisoned by Dead Men during his fifteen-month detention in Lefortovo prison, another reminder that the building has housed writers as well as people held on serious criminal accusations.
For Gershkovich, the practical question after the move was immediate: how to read the rules, the phrases, and the room itself. What followed was not a formal briefing but a cellmate translating prison language one phrase at a time, starting with the line that opened the conversation in cell No. 85.
