How Russian show trials expose imaginary plots

SIX OR SEVEN men in balaclavas walked into a prison cell in Penza, a provincial Russian town 400 miles (650km) south-east of Moscow. They told their 25-year-old prisoner to undress. They gagged him, tied his legs to a bench and connected wires to his big toes. Then they started to electrocute him. “My muscles started to contract, causing a paralysing pain,” he recalled. “I started to scream and hit my head against the wall, but they carried on. Ten seconds seems like an eternity.” The masked men then tried to connect more wires to his genitals. Terrified and in pain, he repeated what his torturers told him to say: “Yes, I am the ringleader. Yes, we were preparing terrorist attacks.”