• Nadia Tolokonnikova is on hunger strike over prison conditions
• Singer and political campaigner is half way through a 2 year sentence
• 23-year-old vows to refuse food until she is moved to another jail
• Doctors administering medicine through an intravenous drip
  
• She has not been able to speak to husband or lawyer for 90 hours
  
• Husband complains of 'full-scale blockade' against her

By Will Stewart

PUBLISHED: 09:09 EST, 30 September 2013 | UPDATED: 09:15 EST, 30 September 2013

Concern was growing today for hunger-striking Pussy Riot dancer Nadia Tolokonnikova in her bleak Russian jail after her husband and lawyers were refused access because her health is 'so bad'.

The 23 year old anti-Vladimir Putin campaigner is being administered medicine through an intravenous drip but is refusing all food.

She is staging the protest over alleged death threats and 'slave labour conditions' at her grim Mordovian penal colony where she is now in the prison hospital nine days into a hunger strike.

The singer and political campaigner is half way through a two year sentence for a protest song against Kremlin strongman Putin in a Moscow cathedral last year. 

The chief doctor 'officially told me that he was refusing me a meeting with Nadia,' said her husband Pyotr Verzilov, who said she was also incommunicado from her lawyers.

'They explained it by the fact that her state of health is so bad that she cannot speak with her defence,' he said.

He complained of a 'full-scale blockade' against her. She vows to refuse food until she is moved to another jail.

'We have no idea what things can be happening to her now,' said Verzilov.

Her lawyers have had no answer to demands to access to her, saying they fear 'psychological or other pressure'.

The prison camps in Mordovia are remnants of Stalin's gulag labour camps.

Today, one of her lawyers filed a complaint about the conditions at her prison to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

'The situation in which Ms Tolokonnikova finds herself in the correctional colony no. 14 in Mordovia, Russia constitutes one of the abhorrent contemporary 'slave-like' practices,' lawyer Sergei Golubok wrote in English.

Tolokonnikova's open letter ignited a fresh debate about filthy jail conditions and prisoner abuse in Russia.

Rights activists have for years sounded the alarm over prison conditions in modern Russia, but few complaints from female jails have previously been made public due to what activists describe as a culture of violence and intimidation.

Several prominent figures called on the young mother to stop her protest.

'Unfortunately, our society only reacts to extreme situations,' veteran rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva said on Moscow Echo radio.

'I would like to ask her to stop the hunger strike, she's achieved her goal.'

In April, Tolokonnikova appeared before a court to argue for her prison sentence to be suspended or reduced.

The labour camp where she has been held for more than a year argued against her release.

It said she was 'decisive, insensitive to ethics and conscience and thinking only about herself' and also reports that she once failed to greet a prison official during a hospital stay.

One of the three Pussy Riot women jailed for hooliganism, Yekaterina Samutsevich, had her sentence suspended on appeal.

Russia law does not make repentance a condition for an early release but the court is supposed to take into account the convict's behaviour in jail.

The prison colony listed a penalty that Tolokonnikova received for failing to say hello to a prison official while she was in hospital and was once reprimanded for her refusal to go out for a walk while she was held in a Moscow jail.