Rogue military personnel humiliated prisoners at Abu Ghraib and we never hear the end of it, despite those responsible having been prosecuted and sentenced to prison.

Will Russia bear any stain for this?

The cruelty to prisoners often begins prior to their actual sentencing. “When people are transported from prisons to courts to attend their hearings, they are jammed in a tiny room where they can barely stand. There’s no toilet; if they have to relieve themselves, it has to be right there,” says Mr. Ponomarev. “Then they are put on trucks. It’s extremely cold in winter, extremely hot in summer, no ventilation, no heating. These are basically metal containers. They have to be there for hours. Healthy people are held together with people with tuberculosis, creating a breeding ground for the disease.”

Once sentenced, prisoners are transported in packed train wagons to distant correctional colonies that, under Russian law, range from relatively lax “general regime” colonies to “strict,” “special,” and (most terrifying of all) “medical” colonies. Arrival in the camps is particularly harrowing. According to prisoner testimonies collected by Mr. Ponomarev, in the winter of 2005 convicts from one torture colony in Karelia, near the Finnish border, were shipped to the IK-1 torture colony near the village of Yagul, in the Udmurt Republic, about 500 miles east of Moscow.

“The receipt of convicts ‘through the corridor’ takes place in the following manner,” Mr. Ponomarev reports. “From the [truck] in which a newly arrived stage [of prisoners] is brought… employees of the colony line up, equipped with special means — rubber truncheons and dog handlers with work dogs. . . . During the time of the run, each employee hits the prisoner running by with a truncheon. . . . The convicts run with luggage, which significantly complicates the run. At those [places] where employees with dogs are found, the run of the convict is slowed by a dog lunging from the leash.”