As the prisoners say, it is a “total patriarchy”: the new head of the penal colony 7 in the Stavropol Territory personally beats the convicts. ASTRA’s editorial staff collected evidence of six beatings – but there are many more such episodes. Harassment and beatings, fear of wiretapping, the fight against same-sex relations and inter-ethnic conflicts: ASTRA publishes an investigation on how the head of one of the largest women’s colonies in the Caucasus turned it into a territory of personal power.
New Year’s Contest
December 31, 2022. Prisoner Evgeniya Vyshninskaya arranged a meeting with the head of IK-7, Albert Bidzhiev, in his office. “He came up to me, within a few centimeters, and said irritably, ‘How are you standing?’ (using only foul language). I instinctively bent down to look at my feet, and at that moment, he kicked me in the face with his knee.”
“I fell to the floor, and Bidzhiev started kicking me. He kicked wherever he could get to, but he tried to hit my face. I covered my face with my hands and curled up into a ball. He kept kicking me, and I screamed very loudly: ‘Why? Why?’ Everyone in the punishment cell and in the hallway heard it,” Vyshinskaya said.
Her screams were indeed heard by other inmates. “Bidzhiev kicked her, threw her out of the corridor, and pulled off her ‘green’ [prison uniform]. She had a lot of bruises on her face, and half of her face was blue. They brought her foundation in the isolation cell in case the management came,” says Yulia Vovk, a witness to the beating.
Vyshinskaya asked to see Bijiev in his office, trying to find out why she had been sent to the punishment cell. Before that, she had a conflict with other prisoners over a New Year’s contest. Vyshinskaya was preparing a performance in her unit. She suspects that her competitors from another unit reported her in order to remove her from the contest.
In IK-7, Vyshninskaya served a 17-year sentence for murder. She suffered from gambling addiction, accumulated debts and accidentally killed an antique dealer during an attempted robbery. She dismembered the man’s body with a “Bulgarian chainsaw”. Because of this, other prisoners of IK-7 gave her the nickname “Saw”.
After being beaten by the head of the colony, Vyshinskaya was again placed in an isolation cell. “I do not know how long this [beating] lasted, but the duty officer came in. He saved me, because he came between us.” The woman was not given medical help — Vyshinskaya was bleeding from a split eyebrow, and she tried to stop it with toilet paper on her own.
A day later, the prosecutor’s office arrived at the colony. Vyshinskaya refused to tell the inspectors about the beating: “Because he [the prosecutor’s representative] will come and go, but we will stay here. If you tell the truth, they will extend your time in solitary confinement or beat you up again.”
Vyshinskaya told the Prosecutor’s Office the version that the colony staff insisted on: “I fell and hit the toilet.”
“Everyone knew about the girls’ beatings”
Albert Bidzhiev, a 56-year-old native of the village of Uchkulan, became the head of IK-7 in Zelenokumsk, Stavropol Region, in 2021. IK-7 has a capacity of more than a thousand prisoners and is the second-largest women’s prison in the Russian Caucasus.
“We have a general-regime colony, and he made it worse than a special-regime colony,” says Yulia Vovk. She was released from IK-7 in the summer of 2025. “Bidzhiev abuses people and doesn’t hide it. He openly declared that he was the king here.”
According to eight prisoners of the IK-7 prison, ASTRA knows about six episodes in which Bidzhiev personally beat them. The last one took place on October 22, 2025.
Then, during the morning assembly, Bijiev beat a prisoner with a second-degree disability, Diana [name changed]. She was arguing with another convict, and Bijiev heard the argument and approached her to find out the circumstances of the argument. The prisoner replied to the warden that she was arguing with “no one” and “with herself.”
“He took it straight for the “green” and, like a piece of meat is discarded, he threw her away like this. We hear a scream: when she f * * ked up, she probably f* * ked up a lot — she screamed. Then he took a rock and f*cked her up. Another scream. He went behind the library, but couldn’t be seen from the parade ground behind the payphone. But all the plusoviki [convicted prisoners who cooperate with the administration] in the colony said that he beat her up pretty good. After that, we saw her in the medical unit, and her face was all blue and purple,” one of the witnesses recounts Diana Bidzhiev’s beating in an audio recording provided to the editorial office by the victim’s relatives. This version of events is confirmed by another former inmate, Ekaterina [name changed].
“Everyone knew about the beatings of the girls in the punishment cell. But it was never done in front of everyone or on camera,” says Elena [name changed], who was released from IK-7 two years ago. She says that Bidzhiev regularly beats the prisoners.
After the beatings, Diana was offered a choice: either hide the violence or go to solitary confinement, says the girl’s mother. “Of course, under pressure, she agreed to say that she ‘fell,’” confirms Ekaterina.
“I called the Department of Internal Security. They said they hadn’t opened a case because there were no grounds. What grounds do they need when the facts speak for themselves? How could she have fallen so badly that her knees were scraped up and her face was so bruised? They covered her face with a headscarf on the way to the infirmary so the girls wouldn’t see her bruises,” Diana’s mother said.
It’s not just the convicts who get in the headmaster’s bad books. According to three ASTRA interlocutors, Bijiev allows himself to beat his employees. As a result, two guards and several inspectors have resigned from the colony.
“He could have come over and grabbed my ass, and taken me to his office.”
23-year-old Ilana Gochiyaeva spent the last three years in IK-7, serving a sentence for drug trafficking (part 4 of Article 228.1 of the Criminal Code). The girl’s mother’s last name is Bidzhieva, so it is possible that she is a distant relative of the head of IK-7. At first, it seemed that her mother’s last name might protect her from harassment.
“He called me for a personal meeting. There, I noticed that he wasn’t communicating the way he used to, either because he was intoxicated or… Something was wrong with him, because his eyes were red and he sounded half-drunk. Then he started flirting with me. I didn’t know how to respond…
I can’t be rude to him — this is a penal isolation ward, and I didn’t get out of there anyway, I was a malicious violator. But I can’t meet him halfway either. My mother [has a surname] The Bidzhievs, that is, they are, as you might say, distant, ery distant relatives. So far away that I have never even seen him in my life ” says Gochiyaeva.
In his office, Gochiyayeva continues, Bidzhiev tried to pin her down: “He gets up, starts walking around the office, and at some point he gets very close and practically hugs me. He turns off the lights and starts kissing me, and I was completely taken aback.”
“He told me that I would be his second wife, and that’s normal, you know. I explained to him that my family wouldn’t allow it because I have a mother named Bidzhieva. Plus, he was at least my father’s age, if not my grandfather’s! He was 54 years old, and I was 21,” says Gochiyaeva.
“Bidzhiev could approach [the convicts] by the ass, touch them by the chest, and take them to his office,” says Yulia Vovk, a former prisoner of IK-7.
The woman claims that she “fought back against Bidzhiev.” As a result, she spent eight months in a a more restrictive form of detention.
According to Vovk, she spent 120 days in there. One day, the prison guards, on Bidzhiev’s orders, removed the toilet and sink from her cell, stopped giving her toothpaste, and stopped allowing her to shower. “I swear, I bathed in the radiator. I opened the radiator, poured out all the water, and bathed. I said, ‘Do you want me not to bathe? Turn off the radiator,’” Vovk said.
She was only able to get toiletries by threatening to commit suicide: “I took a sheet, threw it over the bars, made a noose, stopped, and said, ‘Okay, I’m going to hang myself.’ They [the prison staff] ran in, sat down with me, and brought me water, a brush, toothpaste, soap, and shampoo.” Vovk’s story is corroborated by another former prisoner of IK-7, Margarita Ezhova.
“You’re a man, endure this!”
In 2018, Irina, a former prisoner of IK-7, [asked to remain anonymous] personally participated in the conflict between Russian and Chechen female prisoners.
After the fight between the Russian and the Chechen woman, the latter was taken away in an ambulance. According to Irina, the Chechen women then conspired and tracked down and beat a young Russian woman, forcing the prison staff to hide her in the punishment cell.
“We [the Russian prisoners] gathered in a large group and went to their ‘leader.’ She was scared and gave the signal to her men. That was the end of the conflict,” Irina said.
Three ASTRA interlocutors say that relations between prisoners of different nationalities in IK-7 have deteriorated since Bidzhiev’s arrival.
“He comes to the Chechens and orders them to attack a couple. He says, ‘You’ll spend two weeks in solitary confinement, but you’ll gain my respect.’ He might offer them hair dye or promise to forgive their next report,” Gochiyayeva said.
Russian women are usually the ones who get beaten up, a former prisoner and the mother of another convict with a Caucasian last name told ASTRA. “We initially assumed that the prejudice was not only due to complaints, but also because of the hatred towards Russians. People with Russian last names are often the ones who get beaten up,” says the mother of the prisoner.
Former prisoner Irina claims that the prison administration recruits women with Caucasian roots to inform on other inmates. Another source tells the newspaper that since Bidzhiev’s arrival, a girl with a Russian last name receives a punishment, while a girl with a Caucasian last name receives a reprimand for the same offense.
According to Ilana Gochiyayeva, Bidzhiev artificially creates national conflicts between prisoners in order to combat same-sex relationships.
According to Yulia Vovk, Bijiev is particularly opposed to women who have relationships with other women. She witnessed Bijiev physically assaulting a female inmate for this reason: “As Bijiev kicked her, he shouted, ‘You’re a man, so endure it!’” Additionally, prisoners recall that one of Bijiev’s first decrees in his new position was to prohibit prisoners from wearing trousers.
According to one of ASTRA’s interlocutors, the new head of IK-7 is building a “total patriarchy” there.
Control methods
Anna [name changed] recalls how, a couple of years before Bidzhiev’s promotion, a prisoner died in the colony. “She suffocated and swelled up, and at 8 a.m., her body was lying near the factory’s airlock. That’s how she was released—with her feet first. Everyone stepped over her corpse and continued to the sewing workshop,” the woman recounts.
Like many other women’s colonies, IK-7 has a sewing production facility. According to ASTRA’s analysis of public procurement data, the colony provides uniforms to other branches of the Federal Penitentiary Service. In 2025 alone, IK-7 supplied clothing and other textiles worth nearly 50 million rubles under a government contract.
According to ASTRA’s interlocutors, the prisoners currently work 12 hours a day in the sewing workshop for a salary of less than 1,500 rubles per month.
Six days a week, the prisoners stop working two hours before curfew. After that, they are taken to the bathhouse, where there are nine working taps for “hundreds” of seamstresses, according to Anna. According to her, this leads to fights in the bathhouse. After washing, the women are taken to the dining hall for dinner, where they may have to wait in line until curfew. “The girls don’t have time to wash, call, clean, or correct the inventory lists, which can result in 15 days of solitary confinement,” says Anna.
The money earned in the workshop can be taken away under various pretexts. This includes both extortion by the day watch and more formal fees (such as for Victory Day banners). Sometimes, Anna continues, the money is used for bribes, such as purchasing a positive recommendation for parole in IK-7 for 50,000 rubles. Additionally, it is possible to purchase a bed rest order or gabapentin tablets [a medication similar to the recreational drug Lyrica] from the prison surgeon.
In the summer of 2020, Natalia Shcherbakova, a prisoner who worked as a seamstress, died in IK-7. Prior to her death, she had been complaining of high blood pressure, fever, and vomiting for almost a week, but she continued to work in the factory. This is stated in a complaint about the conditions in IK-7 to the Investigative Committee, which is available to the editorial office.
The ambulance took the woman away only on the sixth day after the first complaints, and she died on the way to the hospital. The Gulag-Info website claims that Shcherbakova died from a ruptured appendix, and after her death, her medical record and work attendance sheets were allegedly edited by the prison administration.
Under Bidzhiev, control over prisoners in IK-7 was no longer limited to labor and medical helplessness. The new administration restricted an important resource for survival in the colony: parcels from relatives.
According to Tatyana Pogorelova, a former prisoner of IK-7 (who runs a business that delivers parcels to prisoners), hundreds of parcels were delivered to the colony every week, but after the change of leadership, the number of parcels dropped significantly. Officially, this is due to a lack of staff, but unofficially, it is attributed to Bidzhiev’s personal decision to combat the prison cigarette market.
According to Pogorelova, this restriction has led to an increase in thefts among prisoners, a problem that the prison administration is unable to address.
Wiretapping
While Bidzhiev is pitting prisoners against each other, a conflict is brewing within the colony administration. Two ASTRA interlocutors claim that Bidzhiev is being undermined by the colony’s operations manager, Nina Karnaukhova.
In IK-7, Karnaukhova was always an unspoken authority for the prison officers, according to former inmates. She maintained this status by collecting compromising evidence on the administration, according to Ilana Gochiyayeva. However, when Bijiev took over as the prison warden, he wrote a report against Karnaukhova for not wearing a hat, which caused the inmates to rejoice. Gochiyayeva continued, “However, the warden’s authority began to decline.”
The girl recalls that in his office, Bidzhiev kept repeating that he was being bugged and that they wanted to “get rid of” him.
Former prisoner Irina claims that the head of the operational department “protects” those convicted of crimes against children: “Karnaukhova has formed a coalition of informants, and they are living in a state of bliss. They feel much better than other prisoners. If you make a remark to such a person, they will respond, ‘Have you heard from the operational department lately?’”
According to former prisoners, Bidzhiev has at least one opponent and one ally at the regional level of the Federal Penitentiary Service. Dmitry Kulakov, the deputy head of the regional penitentiary service, wants to remove Bidzhiev.
However, Kulakov’s superior, Bidzhiev, is already covering for him. This is the head of the Stavropol Federal Penitentiary Service, Anzor Iriskhanov, and the prisoners claim that they are friends with the head of IK-7.
In response to a complaint addressed to Anzor Iriskhanov [available to the editorial board], the Federal Penitentiary Service for the Stavropol Territory stated: in IK-7, ” only polite treatment of convicts is allowed.”
Albert Bidzhiev did not answer ASTRA’s calls.
Author: Daniil Bolshakov
