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MOSCOW -- The Russian authorities may have thought they would silence Grigory Pasko when they threw him into prison after he documented the navy's nasty practice of dumping nuclear waste at sea.
But the crusading journalist has refused to go quietly. From behind the walls of a Vladivostok jail, the captain has resorted to a time-honored Russian practice: chronicling the dismal life inside the country's overcrowded and disease-infested prisons.
Unlike Alexander Solzhenitsyn and other Russian writers who often waited decades before their accounts of Soviet gulags became known to the world, Pasko's jailhouse diary can be found on one of the country's most frequented Internet sites on political news, http://www.polit.ru/index-dossier/mayday/.
The texts are not only a window into the arbitrary world of Russian justice, but also into the mind of a man battling to maintain emotional equilibrium.
"He is a journalist, so he always tries to write about topics that interest him," his wife, Galina Morozova, said in a telephone interview from Vladivostok. "And he spends a lot of time absolutely alone in solitary confinement. The best way to get rid of the solitude is to make some use of your talent and write about it."
A career navy officer and military journalist, Pasko, 37, made a name for himself as an environmental crusader at Boyevaya Vakhta (Battle Watch), the newspaper of Russia's Pacific Fleet. What really worried the authorities was the freelance work he did for NHK, Japan's largest television network.
After NHK broadcast a report on Russia's dumping of nuclear waste, the authorities began to clamp down. Captain Pasko was arrested in November 1997 and charged with selling the nation's secrets.
Amnesty International has designated him a "prisoner of conscience," and other human rights groups have taken up his cause. A verdict in Pasko's long-running trial, at which the prosecutor is demanding a 12-year prison term, is expected this month.
When he was hauled into the military courtroom in January, Pasko shouted out, "We will fight!" But there is little bravado in his prison essays.
The first is titled "Cookie," slang for a first-time prisoner. It is a set of survival tips for new prisoners and an informal dissertation on the sociology of Russia's jails.
Anybody determined to challenge Russia's authorities, Pasko writes, should keep a large bag at home full of provisions, because he can be hauled off to jail at a moment's notice. Essential goods include an electric heater for boiling water, cans of food to compensate for the meager prison rations and a blanket.
He warns that initial prolonged detention at a police station means threats and beatings, advising new prisoners to adopt the old adage of Soviet spy movies: say nothing and wait to be passed on to the next step in the chain of custody.
"You have to survive the first 72 hours," he writes. "It's the period when they can keep you there. To extend it they need to obtain special documents and they will have to provide you with a defense attorney."
Friends in the police are no help, merely a hindrance once they sense that the state wants a conviction, he warns.
"I am sorry for those who have friends in the militia," Pasko wrote. "That means additional evidence against you."
Between interrogations, the prisoner is kept in a "preliminary confinement cell," a cage stuffed with other detainees with a rank toilet in the corner.
Later they are shifted to "quarantine," where each is photographed, X-rayed and subjected to painful blood tests with a thick needle.
Then it is on to an overcrowded prison ward where inmates sleep in shifts as their trials drag on. While the prisons are dirty, noisy and pungent, the hardest part is not losing hope, as savvy prisoners forecast the long sentences likely to be handed down, regardless of whether the inmate is innocent or guilty.
"The memories about the relatively good life you had before, about your wife and children, put a lot of pressure on your mind," he said. "Just bear in mind that from now on you have nothing and nobody: no apartment, no family, no car, no work or rewards. You are nobody."
Still, prisoners must survive, and Pasko offers his own rules of prison etiquette. He recommends that inmates join a "family," a small group of prisoners who try to look out for each other.
Parcels of food from home should be shared, to ease the strains of coexisting in such close quarters, but prisoners should be careful about sharing clothes, he says. Nothing that is lent will ever be returned.
Pasko says he donated two sleeves from his sweater, which were used to fashion a crude "mail rope" for transmitting notes and small packets of tea and tobacco from cell to cell. But he drew the line at handing over his boots and pants to prisoners who insisted that they merely needed them for a trial appearance the next day.
The most important rule involves communication. Because cells are rife with informers, a prisoner should never talk about his case. Pasko reports that he became so reticent that he even found it difficult to talk to his own lawyer.
The Pasko case underscores one of the paradoxes of modern-day Russia. While the collapse of the Soviet state and advent of computer technology has made the draconian censorship of Soviet days all but impossible, the new Russia is also a place where a muckraking reporter can be locked up for 19 months before he is pronounced innocent or guilty.
Pasko has spent his recent months in solitary confinement. Despite his messages to the world outside, he appears to have retreated further into himself and lost his zeal for doing battle with the authorities.
His second prison writing -- excerpts from a book in progress about his experience in solitary confinement -- is grim, metaphysical and fatalistic. Recalling that he bought a copy of the criminal code six months before he was arrested, Pasko muses that his thoughts of jail, not his role as a journalistic gadfly, might have led to his imprisonment.
"I thought about it, and the thoughts came true," he wrote.
He then briefly dared to hope that he could influence his fate by thinking positively.
"Perhaps something written by me now will come true," he wrote. "What if I put down something optimistic? No, it will turn out to be false."