Backbreaking manual labor, poor hygiene and lack of access to medical care – these are the conditions awaiting American basketball player Brittney Griner in a Russian penal colony after she lost her appeal last week against a nine-year drug sentence.   

  It’s a world familiar to Maria Alyokhina, a member of the feminist art group Pussy Riot who spent nearly two years in prison for taking part in a 2012 punk protest in a Moscow cathedral against President Vladimir Putin.   

  The first thing to understand, Alyokhina said in an interview, is that a penal colony is not an ordinary prison.   

  “This is not a cell building.  This looks like a strange village, like a Gulag labor camp,” she said, referring to the vast penal network created by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to isolate and crush prisoners.   

  “It’s actually a labor camp because by law all prisoners have to work.  What’s quite cynical about this project is that the prisoners usually sew police uniforms and uniforms for the Russian army, for almost no pay.”   

  The colony was divided into a factory area where prisoners made clothes and gloves and a “living zone” where Alyokhina said 80 women lived in one room with just three toilets and no hot water.   

  Griner, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, could soon be transferred to a colony in the absence of further appeals or an agreement between Washington and Moscow to exchange her for a Russian arms dealer jailed in the United States — a possibility that was ruled out months ago but has yet to materialize .   

  In a Pussy Riot show that has toured the world and is now playing in Britain, Alyokhina relives memories of her time as an inmate – snowy prison yards, plank beds, long spells in solitary confinement and punishment for minor infractions such as unbuttoning coat or poorly affixed name tag.   

  She was constantly videotaped by prison guards “because I’m a ‘famous provocateur,'” she added.   

  Russia’s prison service did not respond to a request for comment for this article.   

  A more recent penal colony inmate, Yelena, described a similar regime to what Alyokhina experienced a decade ago.   

  Yelena, 34, served eight years in a Siberian penal colony after being convicted of drug possession.   

  He said he was paid about 1,000 rubles ($16) a month for toiling 10-12 hours a day in a sewing workshop.   

  “Girls with a strong, athletic body type often take on much heavier work.  For example, they load sacks of flour for a prison bakery or unload mountains of coal,” he said.   

  Prisoners could face punishment for unexplained “offenses” such as placing a wristwatch on a bedside table.   

  The final sanction was solitary confinement, known as “the Vatican.”   

  “Just like the Vatican is a state within a state, solitary confinement is a prison within a prison,” Yelena said.   

  A gynecologist visited her colony every month, where more than 800 women were imprisoned.   

  “You do the math, what are the odds of getting a doctor?  Practically zero,” he said.   

  For a foreigner with little or no Russian, it is more difficult to navigate the system and face the isolation.   

  The brother of Paul Whelan, a former US Marine serving 16 years in a Russian penal colony on espionage charges he denies, said he is given a 15-minute phone call each day to his parents, cannot call other family members or friends and does not have access to email or the internet.   

  David Whelan said his brother has to work at least eight hours a day, six days a week, doing menial jobs such as buttonholes, which has caused him repeated injury.   

  Inmates sleep in barracks-like buildings and access to many basic necessities, including medicine, depends on bribing prison guards, he said.   

  Conditions can be highly dependent on the whims of the guards, warden or elderly inmates.   

  Paul seems to use his military training “to get through each day, to figure out which battles to fight and which battles not to fight,” David Whelan said.   

  “His phone calls even to our parents are recorded.  His letters were all translated before they came out.  So you know that everything you do is being watched and you really have no sense of individuality.”   

  Alyokhina said receiving cards and letters from the outside world offered a rare glimmer of hope and urged people to support Griner in this way.   

  He said they should use a machine translation and send the text in both English and Russian to get it past the prison’s censorship more easily.   

  “Don’t leave someone alone with this system,” he said.  “It’s completely inhumane, it’s a Gulag, and when you feel alone there, it’s much easier to give up.”