Political repression is a matter of the Soviet previous, based on Vladimir Putin. The human rights group Memorial disagrees. Though the Russian authorities disbanded Memorial’s Moscow-based Human Rights Middle 4 years in the past, the group’s undertaking supporting political prisoners lives on, with virtually all its employees now overseas.1 As of February 11, Memorial has formally acknowledged 837 political prisoners. Although over half of them are confined on the idea of faith, since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, most arrests have been made for actions in opposition to the warfare. The month after the invasion, Russia added to its legal code “discrediting” and “intentionally spreading false information” in regards to the navy. Talking of executions in Bucha, for example, turned unlawful.
To establish a detainee as a political prisoner, Memorial follows a rigorous course of based mostly on the definition utilized by the Parliamentary Meeting of the Council of Europe. A analysis staff opinions every candidate’s case, together with paperwork from court docket proceedings, then twelve board members deliberate. Anybody who has dedicated violence in opposition to one other person who was not in self-defense, or has known as for violence towards any group, is ineligible.
There are political prisoners whose circumstances go unrecognized. Final July, Pavel Kushnir, a pianist jailed for posting antiwar content material on a YouTube channel with solely 5 subscribers, died throughout a starvation strike whereas awaiting trial in Birobidzhan, close to Russia’s border with China. Kushnir was not included in any group’s depend on the time. Memorial acknowledges that its verified numbers are too low; the human rights monitoring group OVD-Data, which makes use of a much less formal process to trace politically motivated prosecutions extra rapidly, lists over three thousand individuals. Memorial estimates that the complete variety of political prisoners in Russian custody—together with Ukrainian prisoners of warfare and civilian hostages in Russia and occupied territories, thought to whole roughly 7,000 individuals—might be round 10,000.
In August I spoke with Sergei Davidis, the director of Memorial’s Political Prisoners Assist Program. He instructed me that for the reason that invasion Russia is not “bothered by any legal niceties. It simply announces that whoever is against it is an enemy who has committed a crime.” (A couple of months after our dialog, the Russian state added Davidis, who lives in Vilnius, Lithuania, to its official checklist of terrorists with out offering a cause.)
Memorial’s database reveals the various types that protest can soak up a society that forbids any trace of dissent. A couple of of the prisoners it has listed are distinguished, equivalent to Alexey Navalny, who died in an Arctic penal colony final February, or the opposition politicians Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza, who had been launched in a multicountry prisoner swap in August. However many are barely identified. Their tales reveal a hidden archipelago of opposition that has endured and tailored.
I realized from the database that along with common mail (which tends to be gradual and unreliable), some penal establishments provide a web based service for correspondence with prisoners. For a small price, letters are printed out, reviewed by a censor, and, if accredited, handed to the prisoner, who can handwrite a reply that’s in flip reviewed by the censor, scanned, and uploaded. Probably the most used providers, F-Pismo and Zonatelekom, are accessible solely by means of native financial institution accounts, however one other web site, prisonmail.on-line/ru, takes overseas bank cards. I discovered contact info by means of Memorial, Telegram channels run by help teams, and Solidarity Zone, a company that aids antiwar protesters accused of acts which may disqualify them from Memorial’s checklist (equivalent to making an attempt to derail trains).
Final summer time I started writing letters to individuals imprisoned for resisting the warfare. I didn’t anticipate to listen to again from them. A report by Amnesty Worldwide in June had described more and more harsh censorship; its writer was unable to speak with anybody in jail. However, as one activist instructed me, “Listen, we live in Russia”—which means that the state just isn’t as ruthlessly environment friendly as it could appear. Selections typically rely upon particular person whim. One censor might enable a letter that condemns the federal government, whereas one other rejects a postcard with turtles on it (true story). Mutual assist flows by means of the cracks.
To my shock, 9 of the fourteen prisoners I wrote to responded. Over the next months, six of them answered extra questions. I additionally carried out video and cellphone interviews with just lately launched prisoners and their members of the family, in addition to volunteers, activists, and legal professionals inside Russia. As I reached out to others, I started to grasp why some had been prepared to speak regardless of the dangers: they needed witnesses.
Nikita Tushkanov is a thirty-year-old historical past trainer from a village that’s completely Komi, an indigenous group native to the northern Komi Republic. A few of his ancestors are ethnically Komi; others—like his great-grandfather—had been despatched to the area by pressure. In 1931, throughout Stalin’s drive to collectivize agriculture, Tushkanov’s great-grandfather was branded a kulak, or wealthy peasant, and deported from Luhansk (then Voroshilovgrad) to Komi, the place he was pressured to work as a logger. So was Tushkanov’s great-grandmother, an area whose neighbor accused her of stealing straw from the collective farm. Their son, Tushkanov’s grandfather, was despatched to an orphanage on the age of six. “It was driven into my grandfather’s head that his parents were bad people,” Tushkanov wrote to me; his grandfather saved a portrait of Stalin on his wall till the mid-Nineteen Nineties.
Tushkanov grew up talking the Finno-Ugric Komi language and realized Russian solely in school. As a youngster, he started collaborating in efforts to recuperate the stays of Russian troopers who had died preventing in World Battle II. “Thanks to these expeditions I understood that any war is just death, just tragedy, nothing more,” he stated. In early 2021 he staged a one-man protest in help of Navalny, holding up a poster with the phrases “KEEP QUIET OR DIE” by the native Lenin statue. He was promptly fired from his educating job for “immoral behavior.” Different colleges within the space wouldn’t rent him, so he discovered work as a tutor.
In late 2022, Tushkanov was arrested for antiwar feedback he had posted on the Russian social community VKontakte. (Amongst different issues, he captioned a video of the Crimean Bridge explosion “A birthday gift for Putler.”) Federal Safety Service (FSB) brokers instructed him that in alternate for an apology, his sentence could be suspended and his jail time period modified to accommodate arrest. He refused. The court docket discovered him responsible of justifying terrorism and repeatedly discrediting the Russian navy, positioned him on the nationwide checklist of terrorists and extremists, ordered him to pay a 150,000-ruble high-quality (about $1,500), and sentenced him to 5 years in a penal colony.
In 2023, Tushkanov married a Komi lady named Alexandra Kochanova, whom he had met after she examine his Navalny protest within the information and commenced following him on social media. They wed whereas he was being held in a remand middle. She wore a white gown; he wore a T-shirt and sweatpants.
Tushkanov was given “strict conditions of confinement” that severely restrict his contact with the skin world, together with Kochanova. He’s permitted three lengthy and three brief visits per yr (which require prior approval) and isn’t allowed cellphone calls. Employees have repeatedly despatched him to a punishment cell—the place all correspondence is forbidden—for infractions like failing to greet a guard accurately or standing together with his palms in his pockets.
“The hardest thing is the lack of direct contact with my loved ones,” he wrote me, “though I was born and grew up in a remote village in the taiga, and I often lived in the forest, so I’m used to rough conditions.” In a letter to his supporters on the primary anniversary of his arrest, he stated he had acted for the sake of his nation, “which is mired in dirt and blood. And even if my actions pulled it out by a fraction of a millimeter, it is still important that I fought and am fighting.”
Dmitry Skurikhin, a fifty-year-old native opposition politician, lives in a village close to St. Petersburg. In 2009 he started taping slogans like “I DON’T RECOGNIZE PUTIN AS THE PRESIDENT” on the facet of his van. In 2014 he put up posters and graffiti condemning Russia’s annexation of Crimea on the partitions of his normal retailer. Over the following decade he displayed a whole bunch of anti-regime messages there, together with ones in help of Navalny. In February 2023, on the primary anniversary of the invasion, Skurikhin shared a photograph on-line of himself kneeling in entrance of the shop with an indication studying “FORGIVE US, UKRAINE.” He was arrested the next day. For his antiwar statements (together with a poster that stated “RUSSIAN SOCIETY, WAKE UP!”), he was discovered responsible of discrediting the Russian navy and sentenced to a yr and a half in a penal colony on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. The police stole his household’s financial savings—he’s married with 5 youngsters—when looking their home.
Within the penal colony, Skurikhin needed to clear bogs and shovel snow. To cross the time, he learn sixty-one books, together with ten volumes of Chekhov; he additionally realized Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin by coronary heart. Once we spoke over video chat in August, a number of weeks after his launch, Skurikhin described himself as “a foot soldier for democracy.” He believes that extra Russians will finally be a part of his facet: “I would like to think that we’re waking up, we’re waking up, and that we’ll come to the point where we’re not sleeping anymore.”
Ruslan Ushakov was born in 1993 in Cherkessk, a city within the North Caucasus, to a Chechen father and a Cherkess (or Circassian) mom. He moved to Moscow in his twenties. A real-crime aficionado, he launched a preferred criminology Telegram channel and live-streamed lectures about serial killers on Twitch, making a residing from viewer donations. Beneath a pseudonym, he additionally ran a separate Telegram chat with round 9 hundred members, the place he dissected homicide circumstances and posted feedback essential of the Russian authorities—above all, of the invasion of Ukraine. Ushakov wrote that “the destroyed maternity ward in Mariupol is a war crime that Russia and its residents will never be able to wash away.” “Both mother and child are dead,” he remarked after a Russian missile assault killed twenty-three civilians within the city of Vinnytsia. “Putin smiles: a little victory, but a victory all the same.”
In December 2022 masked armed males confirmed up at Ushakov’s condominium. They claimed to be from the fuel firm. After breaking down the door, they beat him for a number of hours, then tortured him with electrical shocks in a police van till he confessed to idolizing Hitler and the Chechen guerrilla chief Shamil Basayev. He was convicted of calling for and justifying terrorism, rehabilitating Nazism, threatening to violently hurt Russians, and spreading false details about the armed forces, together with by criticizing the warfare in Chechnya. He’s now serving an eight-year sentence in a penal colony within the Tver area, the place he works six days every week in a garment manufacturing facility (and tries to popularize veganism among the many different prisoners).
Ushakov knew that he might be arrested for talking out in opposition to the Russian state. All the identical, he by no means imagined such a factor would occur to him: “I always told myself, ‘That’s paranoia,’ ‘Repressions won’t affect regular people,’ ‘There’s no point spending huge resources on going after internet dissidents.’… And here I am in prison.”
After the Russian authorities introduced a “partial mobilization” in September 2022, which made a whole bunch of hundreds extra males eligible for conscription, dozens of individuals had been arrested for attacking buildings related to the navy and safety providers, normally by throwing Molotov cocktails. Viktor,2 a language trainer in a provincial city, shot a bullet by means of a navy recruitment billboard. The FSB tortured him, making use of electrical shocks to his physique and placing a plastic bag over his head; they needed him to admit to beginning a fireplace at an enlistment workplace. He was additionally crushed in pretrial detention by prisoners who gave the impression to be appearing on official orders. When he sought medical therapy, the physician concluded that he had fallen on the road; the prosecutor declined to analyze.
After serving over two years in a penal colony, the place he labored in a smelting plant, Viktor bought out this summer time. Once we spoke over Telegram in August, he instructed me that shortly earlier than his act of protest, he had completed enjoying Spec Ops: The Line—an antiwar online game loosely impressed by Apocalypse Now—which opened his eyes to “the horror of war.” Disturbed by the killings in Ukraine, he had a “meltdown” and determined to take issues into his personal palms.
Since his launch, he feels “paranoid, more suspicious,” he stated. “I dream that they put me back in prison again, that I’m being tortured and cigarette butts are being put out on my body.” I requested him whether or not what he did was price it. “Probably not,” he stated, due to the monetary and emotional prices to his family members.
As of final October, the impartial Russian information web site Mediazona had recognized 137 individuals who have confronted legal fees for making an attempt to sabotage Russian railways, typically by diverting trains or setting sign containers on fireplace. Most of them are younger. A 3rd of the accused are underneath eighteen, and virtually two thirds are underneath twenty-four. Courts normally seal these circumstances from the general public file, making info on them troublesome to search out.
A thirty-six-year-old anarchist named Ruslan Siddiqui carried out arguably essentially the most daring assault of this sort. In November 2023 he was arrested for launching drone strikes on a Russian navy airfield and blowing up railroad tracks used to provide troops. (Nineteen prepare automobiles had been derailed, however nobody was injured.) Siddiqui faces as much as life in jail on fees together with “undergoing training in terrorist activity.” The safety providers have instructed Russian media he was working on the orders of Ukrainian intelligence. Siddiqui doesn’t deny the assaults however instructed me he acted alone to avoid wasting Ukrainian lives. Of all of the letters I acquired from prisoners, solely a message from him was partly redacted. The whole web page describing his deeds was withheld, with a notification that it “did not pass the censor.” In one other letter to me, nonetheless, he emphasised that he deliberate his actions to keep away from casualties.
In the summertime of 2022 one of many Ukrainian pals he had met on unlawful backpacking journeys to the Chornobyl exclusion zone was killed preventing within the Kharkiv area. “The grief of this loss” influenced his resolution to behave, he stated. “I was ashamed that guys younger than me were dying, while I was in relative safety and doing nothing.” The ultimate straw was the information that Russia was bombarding Ukraine’s energy grid: “Since I was living with my grandmother, I understood just how vulnerable an old or sick person is if left without heat or light in the colder time of year.”
On January 31, 2024, in Moscow, Nadezhda Buyanova, a sixty-seven-year-old pediatrician, noticed a seven-year-old affected person who had an issue together with his eye. His mom, Anastasia Akinshina, instructed Buyanova that the boy’s father, her ex-husband, had just lately died within the warfare.
After leaving the clinic, Akinshina posted a video message about Buyanova in a pro-war Telegram channel. Within the video Akinshina claimed that this “scum” had stated that “killing our guys in the SVO [special military operation] is a legal action by Ukraine…. Does anyone have any idea where I should complain to get this bitch the hell out of here? Or even better, locked up?” (Buyanova says that Akinshina is mischaracterizing their dialog and that she didn’t point out Ukraine.) Akinshina additionally despatched the video to a different, bigger channel linked to the safety providers, whose administrator posted it alongside a textual content stating that Buyanova had “mocked” a useless soldier, was from Ukraine, and “probably” provides cash to the Ukrainian military.
The following day, plainclothes officers arrived at Buyanova’s clinic and interrogated her. She was instantly fired. The next night police turned her condominium the other way up and introduced her in for an all-night interrogation. In an uncommon transfer, Alexander Bastrykin, the top of the nation’s most important federal investigative authority, personally instructed a state prosecutor to cost her with spreading “false information” in addition to being motivated by “national and political hatred.”
Throughout her trial final fall, prosecutors cited Ukrainian-language video clips and vacation greetings discovered on Buyanova’s cellphone, in addition to movies with Ukrainian titles she had preferred on YouTube and chats through which she wished victory to Ukraine, as proof of her guilt. In her closing phrases to the court docket, she contested the notion that she needed to determine between nationalities. Her mom was Belarusian, her father was Russian, and she or he was born and raised in Lviv. “What should I do?” she requested. “What choice should I make?” She was sentenced to 5 and a half years in jail.
In a letter she despatched me from pretrial detention, Buyanova described her final days on the skin. She had felt a “premonition” that “prison was unavoidable”: “When I heard the beautiful sound of an accordion in an underpass, I walked out crying, stood there, listened, and told myself that I was saying farewell to my freedom.” She was “not angry” at Akinshina, she wrote. “Maybe, though not necessarily, she’ll come to understand what she has done.” Final spring somebody despatched Buyanova twenty kilograms of salt with a view to exhaust her month-to-month restrict for packages and forestall her from receiving anything.
The Kremlin has forcibly closed many human rights organizations in Russia—together with the Sakharov Middle and the native workplaces of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty Worldwide, all of which shuttered after the 2022 invasion—underneath the “foreign agents” regulation. But native teams advocating for political prisoners nonetheless function. Open Area, a collective based mostly in Moscow and St. Petersburg, works with each political prisoners and their family members, providing free psychological, authorized, and sensible assist on-line and in particular person. At its bodily places, Open Area hosts occasions at which, for example, individuals collect to write down letters to prisoners.
Probably the most devoted letter author I’ve met is Anastasia,3 who chronicles her work with political prisoners on Telegram. She spoke to me by cellphone from a public lavatory in Moscow; when somebody got here in, she referred to “the war” as “the situation.” After the invasion she had struggled with a sense of “helplessness,” she stated. She watched a web based lecture by the exiled political scientist Ekaterina Shulman, who really helpful that Russians protest by writing to political prisoners, attending court docket hearings, and contacting legislators. Anastasia wasn’t within the latter—“I thought this was completely pointless”—however she began going to court docket and sending letters.
Anastasia now writes thirty to fifty letters a month. She additionally assembles packages, raises cash, coordinates letter-writing evenings at Open Area, and sends much more letters on-line. In accordance with the chart she retains, she has written to 415 prisoners a minimum of as soon as. Her ex-husband disapproved of her actions: “He thought I was doing something wrong, illegal, that I’m a fool, that Americans had rotted my brain.” Her mom doesn’t point out the stream of letters flowing out and in of Anastasia’s condominium when she comes to go to.
Peter Losev is an organizer in Moscow who used to run campaigns for opposition politicians. In early 2022 his pal Daniel Kholodny, a Navalny affiliate, was jailed—however the public outcry was short-lived. “A person was arrested, he was written about, and then the next day everyone forgot,” Losev stated. To assist political prisoners like Kholodny really feel much less “abandoned,” he established a samizdat month-to-month, Tiuremnyi vestnik (the Jail Herald), whose small editorial staff gives sardonic updates on home and worldwide information. A cartoon on the duvet of a current difficulty depicts devastating flooding in elements of Siberia and the Urals, the place residents had been largely left to fend for themselves. Oblivious bureaucrats in white fits, accompanied by a unicorn, maintain an indication saying “EVERYTHING IS FINE” aboard a ship labeled “NOT NOAH’S ARK.” (Close by, wood homes and a church sink underwater.)
At its peak, the Herald went out to round 300 prisoners. Now it’s despatched to about 150, however penal establishments destroy most copies. When Losev realized about this, he created a authorized undertaking named Freedom of Correspondence (FOC), which sues prisons for withholding inmates’ mail. It at the moment has three circumstances underway. The legal professionals should be cautious: in a earlier case, when the choose appeared poised to rule within the prisoner’s favor, the penal colony’s administration moved him to a punishment cell. Ultimately, Losev stated, the events got here to a “gentleman’s agreement”: the go well with was withdrawn on the understanding that FOC would cease suing the jail, and “they will not censor what should not be censored.” In one other case, which Losev believes FOC would have gained, the authorized staff settled out of court docket, fearing retaliation.
A lawyer who works with FOC defined to me why prisons typically make a deal. If the establishment loses a go well with, any monetary penalty is deducted from its funds, and a observe is added to the recordsdata of the related staff, which might forestall their promotion. The lawyer believes that FOC’s authorized efforts, nonetheless gradual and arduous, are invaluable for exposing the system’s hidden workings. He stated he fights for political prisoners’ rights as a result of “I was taught in my family that you should love your motherland, and that the motherland and the government are not synonymous.”
As soon as they’ve served their sentences, political prisoners reenter a society that calls for silence in alternate for freedom. Felony fees will not be the one technique of imposing conformity; some who’ve criticized the warfare have misplaced jobs or been ostracized by their communities. A member of Open Area described to me how the police typically invite individuals to return to the station for a “prophylactic chat,” which is voluntary however alerts that they’re being watched. Within the face of authorized and social stress, open dissent has all however vanished.
Nobody is aware of what precisely is secure. Although Telegram is broadly utilized in Russia, cybersecurity specialists have argued that its house owners cooperate with the authorities. (In late September 2024, Telegram’s founder and CEO, Pavel Durov, introduced that to “discourage criminals,” the app would start turning over customers’ IP addresses and cellphone numbers in response to “valid” authorized requests. He had beforehand assured customers that their privateness was “sacred.”) On the day of the invasion, Marina Matsapulina and a number of other different opposition politicians requested official permission to carry an antiwar demonstration. The request was denied; Matsapulina was arrested and interrogated, then launched. A couple of weeks later, after transferring to Armenia, she wrote a Twitter thread describing how a Ministry of Inside Affairs officer had quoted, phrase for phrase, messages that she had despatched to her pals on Telegram. Different customers have reported unusual exercise that implies their accounts are compromised, even in supposedly encrypted chats. In early September, once I was checking quotes and info with sources for this text, my account was banned. Once I reestablished contact with one supply, he instructed me that each one my messages had disappeared.
For these in confinement, an odd type of freedom can come from refusing to again down. In 2023, Lyudmila Razumova, a fifty-seven-year-old artist who lives within the Tver area, acquired a seven-and-a-half-year sentence (alongside together with her then husband, Alexander Martynov) for opposing the warfare on social media and stenciling slogans like “UKRAINE, FORGIVE US” on the facet of a village retailer. In a letter to considered one of her supporters, she admitted that she hadn’t been all for politics till the invasion. She has since come to really feel that “all our troubles arose precisely because everyone thought this way, except for the ones who were more honest, more honest and stronger, than those of us who meekly stayed silent.”
FOC has filed a lawsuit in opposition to Razumova’s penal colony for intercepting her copy of the Jail Herald in addition to quite a few letters. I listened to a recording of a current court docket listening to at which she appeared by video hyperlink. Razumova stated she was drained and requested to take a seat down—she works in a jail stitching manufacturing facility—however the choose insisted she stand. When Razumova had hassle listening to due to a nasty microphone, the choose reprimanded her for not displaying enough respect. The choose then stated that the Herald had been declared “undesirable.”
“I don’t understand what ‘undesirable’ means,” Razumova replied. “Undesirable for whom? It’s very desired by me.”
The choose requested what crime she was convicted of.
“In my opinion, there was no crime,” she stated, however defined the costs of spreading false details about the Russian armed forces.
“That’s not a crime?”
“No, I spread the truth.”
—February 12, 2025
