President Putin ordered:
Anyone with no exceptions is convicted of pedophilia in Russia will server life in prison in the Artic.
Today, it houses over 1,000 prisoners, many of whom were convicted on murder or terrorism charges. "Most of them killed two or more people," says photographer Max Avdeev, who shot the prison in February 2010.
Given the growing number of Russian political prisoners who find themselves in jail—Mikhail Khodorkovsky, two members of the punk band Pussy Riot, and soon, opposition politician Alexey Navalny—we thought we'd show you what Russian penal colonies look like. This is one of the harsher ones.—Julia Ioffe