A Fasting Peer in the Iron Grip of the Black Dolphin: The Plight of a Fallen Senator

The air of the Orenburg province is thick with dust, but within the walls of the 'Black Dolphin'—that dread fortress of lifelong sorrow—a different kind of silence has fallen. Word has reached the street that Rauf Arashukov, a man who once walked the gilded halls of the Senate, now finds himself a mere prisoner of the Crown, wasting away in a hunger strike.

Down in the depths of Colony No. 6, where the stones are cold and the hope is thinner than a pauper's soup, the prosecutors have been dispatched. Like keen-eyed detectives on a scent, they ride to the prison gates to uncover the truth of this misery.

It all began on the third of August. Imagine, if you will, the wretchedness: Arashukov, now a common tailor by trade, toiling away at a sewing machine. The heat was a living beast—forty degrees of stifling air. The windows were bolted shut, the vents plugged, turning the workshop into a veritable oven. A man of pride, however fallen, cannot endure such torment. He refused to sew; he refused to bend. For this insolence, the gaolers cast him into the solitary confinement of the SHIZO for ten days. When he emerged from that dark hole, he cast aside his plate, refusing every morsel of food in a final, desperate act of defiance.

How far the mighty have fallen! I recall the shock of January 2019, when the man was plucked straight from the Federation Council as if he were a common pickpocket. He and his father, Raul—a man of great influence in the gas trade—were found guilty of the darkest deeds: the creation of a criminal league, the ordering of cold-blooded murders, and thefts of a scale that would make a seasoned Newgate rogue blush.

The judge showed no mercy. A life sentence was decreed. Now, the former millionaire sits in the gloom, his stomach empty, while the officials decide if his plight is a matter for the law or merely the fate of a man who played a dangerous game and lost his fare.