For the first time, Brittney Griner takes the public on a glimpse into her stay at the IK-2 Russian labor camp in Mordovia, a Russian republic about 300 miles east of Moscow, where she spent ten months of her life.
The details are harrowing, from the dangerous working conditions to the shabby bathrooms that made personal hygiene nearly impossible. And all because Griner forgot two cartridges of hash oil that she left in her bag while traveling through a Russian airport. Griner’s mistake led to her arrest in February 2022 and subsequent nine-year prison sentence.
your new book, Return homewritten with Michelle Burfordcoming out next week and TIME shared an excerpt in which Griner details what she went through at the camp.
“All inmates work 10, 12, or 15 hours a day or more,” she wrote. “We earned a few rubles an hour, about 25 cents. Essentially it was slave labor.”
And as she describes it from the sewing shop where she was employed, that’s no exaggeration.
Brittney Griner has been a basketball phenomenon for more than a decade, but she’s currently in the spotlight for a completely different reason. The 31-year-old Texas native was arrested in Russia after a drug-sniffing dog allegedly found hashish oil in her luggage at an airport near Moscow. The Russian Federal Customs Service announced Griner’s detention […]
“There was no ventilation and little heat. No bathroom breaks. We knew we had to empty our bladders during the 20 minute lunch break. Each group was assigned a quota, about 500 military uniforms per day. Teams that failed were insulted. A girl near me was sewing so quickly that she sewed her fingers together, which meant she leaked onto the garment and slowed down production. Her leader ripped the material out of her hand, threw it on the ground, and yelled at her to pick it up and move on.”
To get through, she focused on her release date: October 20, 2031. She knew that could change, but the goal in mind reminded her that this chapter in her life would be over.
But after three days of sewing in an environment unsuitable for a person her size, Griner said she could barely stand and had debilitating back and knee pain. When she was transferred to a new job to better accommodate her size, she had to cut up pieces of fabric alongside second-time offenders who “follow their own rules to a certain extent.”
“Our machine was basically a rusted old table saw with no guard,” Griner wrote. “Several of the 30 women in my group were missing fingers. My partner had a long scar on her face that started near her eye.”
It didn’t take long for Griner to become ill. With every breath she felt as if the air in her lungs was freezing. Their morning exercises were conducted in blizzard-like conditions and their hand-washed clothes never fully dried. Wet and cold, Griner’s dreadlocks eventually froze together and she had to cut them off.
“The girl I once was was now lying in a pile of dreadlocks on the concrete floor,” she said. “But the real me, the survivor, remained. I had always thought of myself as someone who could endure almost anything. I found out how tough I was in a slave camp in Russia in the middle of winter.”
Coming Home will be released on Tuesday, May 7th.