I got arrested in Kazakhstan and represented myself in court
When I was arrested in San Francisco, I ended up spending a night in prison naked, in solitary confinement. But, I have a dirty secret: it was hardly my first encounter with the police. Once, in Kazakhstan, I experienced what it was like to be treated as a human while in custody.
This is the story of how I was removed from the train at the border checkpoint of Kairak by Kazakh border guards, arrested, charged with illegal trespass, handed over to the custody of immigration police, taken to court, and redeemed.
I was in Kazakhstan on the final leg of an epic journey undertaken with close friends. We had bought a clunker in Germany, and had driven more than 10,000 miles through 15 countries, including most of the Stans. In Kyrgyzstan, we had donated the car, and my friends had returned home.
I still had one place left to visit. I left the Soviet Union as a refugee in 1989. From Kazakhstan, I was traveling back to my hometown in Western Siberia for the first time in 20 years.
Before getting on the train, I had an errand to run. I had to pick up my passport, which I’d sent back to the US for a Russian Visa. Then I confirmed my arrival details over the phone with my aunt. Yes, I told her. My train would arrive at the Russian border in the morning.
What I didn’t realize was that my Kazakh visa was going to expire at midnight.
After five years as a poor graduate student, I instinctively got the cheapest train tickets. The coach seats in the three-day liner from Almaty to Saint-Petersburg are called Platzkart, ‘sardine class.’ There are no barriers or privacy. It’s the perfect place to learn the intimate details of your fellow travelers’ lives.
When the train stopped at a dark service platform at 11PM, immigration police hopped aboard. They worked the train. “Documents please!”
When they got to me, I presented my US passport.
“Tovarish,” said the officer proudly. “You know your visa is about to expire?” In another hour, I would be trespassing on Kazakhstan soil. He didn’t bother to contain his glee. “Gotcha!”
This was my first encounter with Irlan.
I prodded with a few exploratory questions: Is this a big deal? What time will we cross the border? Can you help me fudge the 15 (the expiration date) into a 16 with a pencil perhaps? How else might we resolve this?
Irlan said he had a whole train to deal with and would figure out what to do with me in the morning. So with a faint hope I climbed onto the rickety shelf, which I outfitted into a bed, and went to sleep.
The ear-plugs, eye shields, denial and the vibration of the train combined for an unexpectedly good night of sleep.
At 5AM, Irlan tugged at my toe to wake me. The border checkpoint was going to open in an hour. I was officially in violation of my Kazakhstani visa. “Come. It’s time to deal with the paperwork. We need to photocopy your passport.”
I already had copies of my visa and passport, so I brought them along, trying to avoid getting off the train at all costs. But it wasn’t enough. Irlan had his next move prepared. “No. We have to make official copy at the station. I have to turn you in. I caught you.”
I looked through the train windows at an endless open steppe. “Where are we exactly?”
“On a big map, you can find here,” he replied.
Irlan kept talking: arrest, court, consulate, visa renewal, law, fine, jail, justice and platzcart. I’d been in power play situations with officials before, had heard the enumerations of all of the bad things that would happen to me. Irlan wanted it to settle in, to seem so palpably near, before finally…
After a long pause…
“Or …” he said, and smiled. He looked around, closed the door, sat down, pursed his lips and crossed his hands. “Let’s talk frankly.”
Oh, how choreographed and expected this all was!
“Let’s,” I agreed.
“For $100 US,” he said, “I will pretend that I did not see you on the train. When you cross the border checkpoint, you will fend for yourself. I am not a border guard. I’m the immigration police. My job is to catch you and turn you in here. That is what you are buying. For another $300 US, we might be able to arrange something at the border.”
I was startled, and dismayed, but I tried not to let it show. I did not have the sum he wanted. I reviewed my position. I had $160. How much was I willing to spend, and what was I intending to buy?
Irlan gave me a long hard look. “So what are we going to do? Think fast. Should I turn you in?”
I tried to use my body language to indicate that my money was back with my bags, so that he wouldn’t want to resolve things on the spot. “Let’s keep going to the border,” I said.
I didn’t want to commit to anything yet. I just needed to stay on the train.
“Ok, brother. Go back to your place. I will find you shortly.”
To distract my rattled mind, I resumed hobnobbing with other train passengers, most of whom were Russians. The conversation focused on comparisons: which nation drank more, who did more heroin, and who had more delinquents.
“Most of the children nowadays are imbeciles,” said Anya, a doctor born in Kazakhstan but educated and living in Saint Petersburg. “Religion used to keep the Kazakhs more conservative, but in the new economy they are catching up in all manner of depravity.”
Galina, Anya’s grandmother, lamented the absurdity of creating a border where none had been before, and the stupid customs laws that dictated which sausage she could or could not carry between her and her daughter’s home.
Next stop was the border. I went to the bathroom to prepare my bribe, distributing the bills in my pockets so I’d know where to reach without giving away too much information.
When I came out, the Kazakhs were preparing too. I saw a train conductor remove a bolt from a metal panel between the train cars and hide a whole sack of sausages. He caught me looking at him, but said nothing.
Irlan signaled that he was ready. I walked to the small compartment at the end of the car which he commandeered into his office and locked the door behind me. It was time to perform the bribe — to grease the proverbial palm.
Irlan thought of the deal as containing two transactions: one to appease him, and another for the guards. My goal was singular: get to the Russian side of the border, where my visa was valid.
Life is practice for life, and bribes are opportunities to hone negotiation skills.
“I’m a student,” I told him. “I’m traveling the world on my student stipend, which I saved up for many years. I am a guest (a keyword in Central Asia) in your country. I’m trying to get home to my historic homeland (Soviet Sentimental Appeal), my hometown, where my aunt (Family, Powerful Female Figure Appeal) is waiting for me. I don’t have any money.”
And so the price came down from $400, 300, 200 and at last we settled on something I actually had… one hundred dollars.
And this is when I said, “Irlan, I’m giving this to you so I will not have to see you again. If I do not cross the border, for whatever reason, you have not earned this money. This is what I am buying.” I reached out my hand. “This is a real Kazakh man handshake,” I told him.
Irlan looked quizzical. “There are no women here,” he said, but he shook my hand, saying, “I’ll do my best.” He took my passport and instructed me to return to my seat and to tell the border guards that the immigration police had my passport.
The train was rolled to a stop, and the border guards got on.
They took away Galina’s sausage. She said, “You do this every time!”
When they got to me, I repeated what Irlan had told me to say. “The immigration police have my passport.” They left for a moment.
When they returned, they said: “Collect your things and get off the train.” They hustled me down the carriage. No amount of pleading or conniving was going to keep me on board this time.
I stood on the tracks, dejected and $100 poorer. The train pulled away.
Irlan appeared on the tracks beside me. He was also dejected, and about to be $100 poorer. He handed me back my passport, my $100 bill folded inside.
“I’m sorry. The problem is the computer! The computer knows your visa expired. They cannot let you go because the computer will know they let you go. Unfortunately, we have to follow protocol.”
This interaction yielded several important lessons: (1) Electronic records actually reduce corruption. (2) A real Kazakh man handshake is as good as a contract. (3) If you have to give a bribe, be clear about what you are buying. A bribe is meant to be a win-win. It is not f@#k you money.
The border guards instructed me to carry my things to their quarters, five shacks in the middle of the vast steppes, where they wanted me to write a confession. I treated it as an exercise in written Russian, which I last studied as a seven-year-old schoolboy. I wrote generally, to leave my options open.
While I was writing my “confession”, I sat across from a girl who was crying. She looked frail. Her bitten nails were covered with black nail polish and her neck and chest were covered with bruises, which she tried to hide with make up.
Within this remote border outpost, I observed a peculiar pattern in the hierarchy. There was one of each kind of guard based on their shoulder patches. One puny guy had a blank patch and a guard sporting a patch each with: one arrow ›, two arrows », one star, two stars, and so on up to up to the big boss with four stars. That was Ermek ★★★★.
Each superseding guard was larger than his/her subordinates. As a rule, the subordinate could completely fit inside the ranking officer, as if they were matryoshka (Russian nesting) dolls. If there did exist anyone superior to Ermek, that would present a logistical problem, because all of the doorposts would have to be reframed. For such was Ermek, broad shouldered, round faced, red nosed, pimply, gold toothed and mischievous.
When I presented my confession, Ermek noticed my Lamy fountain pen, and offered to trade it for a pencil. “I joke.”
Rinat, ★★★, “reviewed” my statement. He had a slightly smaller table and correspondingly less ostentatious demeanor. He seemed not to care what was actually written. He only insisted that I add a sentence: I have no problems or objections to the way the officials at Kairak border station treated me.
I asked: why? Rinat said it was important. I realized the sentence gave me some kind of weird power that I wasn’t sure how to use. Rinat wasn’t willing to trade the sentence for my freedom, though, so eventually I wrote it in exchange for lunch, a print out of the charges, and an explanation of what was going to happen next.
Rinat told me the charge, and showed me the applicable legal statute that specified a punishment of imprisonment of up to 15 days and fine up to $500 for my “crime.” He said I had a few hours to kill before transport back to the regional immigration police center in Kostanay, who were taking over my case.
By lunchtime, the crying girls’ tears had dried up a little, and she was ready to talk. She said her name was Madina.
Madina was 18, and studying to be a chef at a lycee in Fedorovka. The night before, her ex-boyfriend had raped her. She’d broken up with him after having an abortion.
Bruised, covered in hickeys, and without a good explanation of what she had been doing that night, she couldn’t face heading back to the dorms at her lycee where the director keep tight control over students’ comings and goings. She also didn’t want to tell anyone about her ex-boyfriend. It would only lead to even more problems.
So as unprepared as she was to run away — no money, no documents, cell phone but no charger, no change of clothes, just a bag full of makeup — she had decided that morning that it was a better option than facing the school director. She’d bought a ticket to the border, then got off the train. She had been walking along the tracks towards Russia when the guards caught up with her.
Now that she’d had time to think about it, she was relieved she’d been caught and was spending time in the company of someone actually willing to listen to her. She wanted her story to be heard. She wanted me to listen to her sing, and asked me to take lots of pictures of her for my memory. She told me it was going to be boring without me. We went out in the yard and exercised using the border guards’ weights.
When I asked for permission to walk around, the guards laughed and said, “Just don’t go too far.” The joke was there wasn’t much to see. There were free-roaming chickens pecking a piles of trash, an angry suicidal dog on a metal leash, and a puzzling park bench with a metal mushroom parasol colored like an amanita muscaria 🍄. That was it. Surrounding the shacks, the flat flat steppe stretched in every direction. The largest geographical feature was an occasional taller tuft of discolored straw in the grass and the coal power station looming across the border in Russia.
When I came back, Madina told me that one of the guards (★) gave her a piece of chocolate and asked for her phone number. She said he seemed pretty nice, but then she accidentally walked in on him kissing with one of the female guards (›).
Another guard (») called me over and we talked about his wife. He told me that the best way to keep a woman honest is to get her pregnant.
“I was watching this Russian TV show about adultery,” he said, “and I noticed how most of the women who were cheating didn’t have children.” Having a child helped calm him down. “You know how you come home, angry from a day of work and you want to take it out on your wife?” He made a gesture as if grabbing someone and bending them over to beat them. He got into the act, yelling at his virtual wife, “Where have you been? What have you been doing?”
Now, he said, when he sees his baby, it helps to suppress that urge. The baby reminds him that his wife has been too busy tending to it to have sex with other men — babies are just that much of a time drain. I nodded and told him that I understood his advice. “It’s not me, it’s statistics brother,” he said, referring back to his analysis of the television show.
In the early afternoon, I was taken to the city of Kostanay, where I was handed over into the custody of none other than Irlan. The first thing he asked me was whether I told anyone about our financial interaction. When I convinced him I hadn’t, he became my best friend.
From then on, I was the entire immigration police departments’ pet.
- One officer rewrote my “confession”. He strategized with his peers about the best way to make me seem most innocent. The last line became the magic one: “I do not have any problems or objections to the way the Kostanay Immigration Police employees treated me.
- A second officer prepared the official charge against me. He too was asking for everyone’s input of how exactly to phrase it. The deliberation was vibrant and Talmudic.
- I used the cellphone of a third officer to send an international SMS to my aunt in Ekaterinburg who was getting ready for my imminent arrival. When she called back, I struggled to outshout the noise the officers were making. (Conversation: -I’m not arriving at the station. I was arrested in Kazakhstan. I’ll let you know when I am free. -You are where? -Kostanay. -Where is that? -They say, on a big map you can find it!)
- Per Irlan’s order, a fourth officer took my half used train ticket and passport so he could run to the station and get me a refund on the unused segment. (He succeeded!) Irlan stressed that he make sure they give me as much as possible. He was now my advocate and trusted financial advisor. “He is a student and traveling on his saved up student stipend.” And to me: “You have to conserve your money.”
It was a beehive, and I felt like the Queen Bee.
It was touching. I was amused, but I wanted to know what would happen next. I knew the maximal punishment for my transgression, but what was the minimal one and who decided? Where was this court they were talking about? What was the plan for the next day? Where was I going to sleep? When was I going to get to Russia? What could I tell my worried aunt?
They said: “chill.” Things are going to work out.
I could have called the US embassy, but from past experience I knew their help was often useless, and occasionally even harmful. So I kept that card in my pocket.
When the police chief left, Irlan and a buddy motioned for me to come out of the cell. They said something to the others, took me down the hall, and we walked out of the station.
“How about some beer?” asked Iryukhan, and in the same breath he asked Irlan whether he could spot him 1,000 tenge ($6.5) until his next paycheck.
By then, the cops had changed into their civilian clothes. We got into Iryukhan’s car and took a ride around the small town. They proudly pointed out monuments, but I could hardly feign interest. “Is court open on Saturday?” I asked.
“We’ll try to wake up the judge and the prosecutor.”
“How do the judge and prosecutor feel about being woken up and asked to work on a weekend? Does that make them angry?”
“We’ll try to wake up the lenient judge.”
“The lenient judge?”
Iryukhan told me there were three judges. The two male judges were not preferable. One didn’t like foreign transgressors of Kazakh law, and the other couldn’t stand foreigners. The woman was preferable. She was the lenient judge. He told me not to worry; we had little control. For now, we were just going to have some beers and concentrate on getting to know each other.
Still concerned about my finances, Irlan paid for several liters of draft beer in a plastic bag and some smoked fish. We snuck into the juvenile detention quarters at the back of the train station, put our feet up on the table and bonded.
Irlan made me promise I wasn’t going to tell their police chief tomorrow anything about this, and when he was happy with my assurances he told me, “Never forget that you have friends here in Kazakhstan.”
It turned out we are the same age, and were born in the same Soviet Union, and this touched him so sincerely that he almost shed a tear with the final toast. But he restrained himself and said we had to go, that I was going to get a shower and a bed at the train station hotel, but they would hold on to my passport.
The next morning, Irlan was prompt. He treated me to breakfast of coffee, yogurt and crackers. (He paid). To maintain appearances before the boss man, he put me back in the cell. Iryukhan and the police chief arrived at 7:30AM sharp. They briefly joked about the gas savings of leaving Irlan behind. When they saw he really wanted to come, they joked that he had to pitch in for gas.
We drove 100 miles to court in Karabalyk. We drove through empty fields and desolation alongside the train tracks. They told me about a recent accident where an oil tanker driver was so drunk that he forgot he was pulling two segments of fuel as he tried to race across the tracks in front of an oncoming train, and ended up burning brightly.
We drove by Fedorovka where Madina was probably still asleep — she had been dropped off at her lycee the night before. Her lycee looked like a cinderblock, but so did everything else.
The cops asked me what I thought of Kazakhstan, and before I could answer, the police chief said, “Take a good look at us now. It looks nothing like it did 10 years ago. If you come back in another ten years, you will see, we’ll be living like Arabs.”
In the court at Karabalyk, the prosecutor arrived first. He was 21 but looked like a teenager. It was his first case. He said he was the equivalent of an intern at the prosecutor’s office. Then the judge walked in. Her name was, Honorable SS Usenko, aka, “the lenient judge”.
I waived my right to a translator and an attorney and represented myself in court.
I spoke as eloquently and as obsequiously as I could, taking responsibility for the trespass while underlining my efforts to actually make it out of the country, which only failed by a matter of hours.
I told her of my recent PhD defense, of my long journey through Central Asia where I had loved the land and enjoyed the hospitality of the people, of my current pilgrimage to my “historic homeland” where my aunt was madly worried about me, about how I always, always obeyed the law, and how I very sincerely, on behalf of my country and Obama, my state and Arnold Schwarzenegger, myself and my family beseeched her to be lenient in her judgment.
I don’t know what got into me. It even sounded good to my ears. I spoke calmly, with a measured voice, in a clearer Russian than I have ever heard myself speak. I don’t know if my speech needed to be as elaborate as it was, but it was, and the chief of police patted me on the back afterwards.
The judge thanked me and turned to the prosecutor, who read from prepared notes. “I seek a guilty verdict and a punishment of one day in jail and a fine of $500.” Honorable SS Usenko asked me to leave the courtroom.
The three cops and I collapsed onto the couches outside. They took out their cell phones. When the prosecutor finally came out, the cops called him over. “So what did the judge say?”
Consider the scene for a moment. I am the defendant, sitting with three police officers who I had started to think of as ‘my boys.’ The chief of police pulls over a 21 year old prosecutor and extracts information from him on my behalf. “It seems like she might actually let him off,” said the prosecutor without emotion.
My boys were conflicted. They were happy for me, but they were also kind of sad that we didn’t get to drive around more monuments, drink more beer, maybe go fishing on Sunday.
The judge delivered her written verdict. She cited statute 68 that allows the judge to let the defendant off with a verbal warning in a case where the severity of the punishment suggested in the legal code is incongruent to the magnitude of the transgression. I was officially free.
Irlan invited me out for a celebratory coffee and éclairs while we waited for the judge’s declaration to be transcribed and officially sealed. Need I say it? He paid. The judge called ahead to the border post to warn the chief that I was to be let through.
My boys drove me to the station in Karabalyk. A bus was departing. While Irlan ran to buy me a ticket to Chelyabinsk, Russia, I ran to hold up the bus.
As I pulled away, all three of them stood by the window. “It’s going to be boring without you,” was the last thing I heard Irlan say.
On the bus, I sat next to a border guard who was getting a ride to his shift at the border. His name was Vasja, and unlike the others, he let me take a picture of him. He told me about a schoolmate of his who had moved to San Francisco and married an American.
“She did the absolute right thing for herself,” he said, “and I don’t blame her, but the guy she was engaged to in Kazakhstan, completely lost his mind.”
He told me her name, and though he didn’t want me to try too hard. “If you meet her in San Francisco, say hello from Vasja.”
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