Hunger-striking Pussy Riot member on IV drip: doctor

Jailed Pussy Riot punk band member Nadezhda Tolokonnikovap has been put on an IV drip in hospital as she enters day eight of a hunger strike, a prison doctor said on Monday.

Tolokonnikova went on hunger strike on September 23, releasing an open letter in which she described harrowing conditions at her prison and alleged that she had received death threats over her complaints.

“She agreed for medicine to be given to her intravenously,” Alexander Pozdnyakov, chief doctor at a prison hospital in Mordovia, told AFP by phone.

He added it was not clear how long the 23-year-old would remain there.

Earlier Monday, her husband complained Tolokonnikova had been held incommunicado for 90 hours.

The feisty counterculture activist, who went on a hunger strike to protest what she described as “slave labour conditions” and death threats, was moved on Sunday to the hospital from her Mordovia prison colony. Prison management denies the charges.

Tolokonnikova has said she will refuse food until she is transferred to another jail.

Her husband, activist Pyotr Verzilov, said the authorities of the hospital, which is part of the prison system, denied his request to meet with Tolokonnikova.

“Colonel Oleg Klishkov, head of medical facility number 21, officially told me that he was refusing me a meeting with Nadia,” Verzilov told AFP, referring to his wife by her nickname.

Verzilov said he was also not allowed to get in touch with her by phone.

“They explained it by the fact that her state of health is so bad that she cannot speak with her defence,” he said.

On Sunday, Verzilov issued an open letter addressed to the head of the Federal Service for the Execution of Punishment, which oversees prisons, protesting that Tolokonnikova was being held incommunicado.

Speaking separately on popular radio Moscow Echo, Verzilov said: “The Federal Service for the Execution of Punishment has begun a full-blown blockade against Tolokonnikova, and we have no idea what things can be happening to her now.”

Tolokonnikova’s letter ignited a fresh debate about filthy conditions and prisoner abuse in Russia.

Rights activists have for years sounded the alarm over prison conditions in modern Russia, but few complaints from female jails have previously been made public due to what activists describe as a culture of violence and intimidation.

Tolokonnikova is serving a two-year sentence for performing a protest song against President Vladimir Putin in Moscow’s main cathedral last year.