The Torture Camp on Paradise Street
The Torture Camp on Paradise Street is a memoir by Ukrainian journalist Stanislav Aseyev about his detention in the Izolyatsia camp in Donetsk from 2015 to 2017. The camp, run by the Russian FSB, is known for torture, rape, and severe psychological abuse. It sits at 3 Svitlyi Shliakh Street, whose name means “Shining Path Street” and is often translated as “Paradise Street.”
The book also reflects on how a person can survive such conditions. As of 2022 the camp was still operating, and one of its main perpetrators was captured in Kyiv in 2021, helped in part by Aseyev. After Russia seized Donetsk in 2014, Aseyev stayed and continued reporting under a pseudonym. He was kidnapped in June 2017 by members of the Russian-backed Donetsk People’s Republic, accused of putting the words “Donetsk People’s Republic” in quotation marks in a social post.
Aseyev spent about a month and a half in solitary confinement in the DPR’s Ministry of State Security basement, then thirty-two months in Izolyatsia as part of a fifteen-year sentence for “terrorism,” where he was tortured. He was recognized as a political prisoner and released in December 2019 in a prisoner exchange. The book, published in 2020 and translated into English by Zenia Tompkins and Nina Murray, describes this experience. Aseyev says torture changed his writing, making it shorter and more precise, like a military report. Lisa Hijari compared the book to the works of Jacobo Timerman, who was imprisoned in Argentina. Aseyev has won Ukraine’s top journalism prize, the Shevchenko Prize.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 13:08 (CET).