From 2014 through 2023, the number of political prisoners in Russia grew by a factor of 15, from 40 to 600.
Letters are often prisoners' only way to stay in contact with the outside world. And, since corresponding with prisoners is, at least for now, both legal and safe, the independent media outlet Takie Dela spoke with people who are doing just that, and found out how to begin an exchange of letters with a political prisoner.
A political prisoner is anyone whose political beliefs or actions have led to incarceration in a detention center or prison camp, where they have been imprisoned for asserting their civil rights. “An enormous number of them are Jehovah’s Witnesses and members of other denominations being persecuted for their faith,” said Eva Levenberg, OVD-Info’s Head of the Department of Legal Assistance in Criminal Cases.
The most famous list of political prisoners is maintained by the international human rights organization, Memorial. That list currently contains the names of 668 individuals, 422 of whom are suffering persecution on religious grounds. The roster does not include people who have committed violent acts of any kind, such as setting fire to a military recruitment center.
Some organizations keep their own rosters. The Fairy Tales for Political Prisoners project (on Facebook as Сказки для политзаключенных), launched in 2015, is now giving its support to more than 1000 individuals. Its founder, Yelena Efros, reported that anyone who, in the opinion of the group’s volunteers, has been “unjustly sentenced” and whose case files reveal “so much as a hint of a political motivation” qualifies to receive letters.
“Our list covers people convicted or suspected of all kinds of offenses,” she said. “This might include someone who, according to investigators, has committed sabotage. It’s not that we condone sabotage. But once they’ve been imprisoned, they need help. Back in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was a tradition of fine ladies going to prisons, basket in hand, to visit People’s Will revolutionaries, petty thieves, robbers, and women fallen on hard times – you name it, in fact.[1] This was done out of charity, pure and simple.”
“I believe that letters are extremely necessary to people who have been imprisoned for their views, for craving freedom, truth, and democracy. It gives them the strength to go on, instills faith in them. It’s important to know that we’re not alone, that we’re being remembered.” This is how Yevgeny Bestuzhev, sentenced in November 2022 for spreading “fakes” – allegedly false information – about the Russian Army, explained the letters’ significance.
Mikhail Zharikov, who was sentenced to six years in a prison camp for his antiwar posts, said that political prisoners need letters to help them adapt more quickly to the conditions of incarceration. “They have no experience,” he said, “which means that they have no understanding of what to expect. Consequently, they start out in a state of shock. A person tumbles into an internal vacuum and is completely cut off.”
According to Zharikov, political prisoners often have no social contact other than through letters. “Of course it’s nice to get a letter from someone you don’t know, nice to realize that you matter,” he adds. He also said that writing back and forth convinces prisoners that they have not been forgotten, and that their cause is not a futile one. This is enormously important to a political prisoner, said OVD-Info’s Levenberg: “The letters help them understand that what they’re doing time for was of benefit to society. That’s how their contribution is confirmed.”
Civil rights activists also tell us how important it is for prisoners to have information about what is happening on the outside. Even news items that seem insignificant to an ordinary person are special to a prisoner with no access to the internet and no opportunity to communicate freely.
Both activists and political prisoners say that letters help keep people safe in prison. “The frequency and volume of letters let prison staff know that there are people who will ask questions if anything happens,” Zharikov explains.
The Fairy Tales for Political Prisoners project was created to support people imprisoned after the 2012 Bolotnaya Square election protests. There were initially 10 to 20 volunteers, some of whom had been writing to prisoners since Soviet times, and they wrote about things that the recipients would find interesting – recounting the biographies of famous people, passing on science news or lecture summaries... One of Yelena Efros’s correspondents, for instance, wanted to know about sales of electric vehicles in various countries.
“I send him rundowns of EV sales in China, say, or in France for the month,” she said. “People can have the most unexpected interests.”
Now the Fairy Tales group boasts almost 3,000 participants. The most active volunteers update prisoner rosters from open sources, keep an accurate count of political prisoners, and compile a list of birthdays at the beginning of each month, so that people can send greetings. Political prisoners who have no one left to help them may receive not only letters, but packages, some containing books.
At the same time, across the country and beyond, letter-writing evenings are being held, and groups that support particular individuals are being formed. “A great many people are writing letters because that is probably the only human rights activity that remains in the realm of legality,” Efros said.
Civil rights activist Pyotr Ivanov started writing letters in 2020, after seven young activists were sentenced for alleged terrorism in Penza. “I knew that the incriminating statements had been beaten out of those kids, that they were tortured,” Ivanov said. “And then they were given unprecedented sentences of 16 or 18 years. I wanted to support them.”
He is still writing to political prisoners, some of whom he knew personally before they were imprisoned. And he too feels supported by those letters, he said: because of that connection, he is less afraid of having a political charge brought against him. “I have seen that, even if a person ends up behind bars, he can still stay in some kind of contact with the outside world. So I started gaining a lot more confidence,” he said.
Prior to emigrating, Ivan Lyubimov and Aleksandr Mishuk, the founders of the Letters of Freedom project in Yerevan, were themselves held in a special detention center. “While standing on the street with a protest sign on February 25, [2022], I was picked up. While serving my time, I received little notes and letters,” Mishuk recalled. “It’s very supportive. It helps you stay sane under the circumstances and remember that ordinary life goes on somewhere out there, that people are waiting for you. I’ve kept those notes to this day.”
Lyubimov said he feels that letters to political prisoners are among the few ways of influencing the situation in Russia, even from outside the country. “Anyone can write letters, and that directly impacts people who are caught up in the Federal Penitentiary Service system,” he said. Darya Gorchakova, another Letters of Freedom organizer, joined the project long-distance herself, from Tbilisi in the Republic of Georgia.
Letters of Freedom was born a year ago out of various loosely organized letter-writing sessions. The organizers decided they would write to political prisoners once a month, primarily to send birthday greetings, and would sometimes meet more often if there were major developments. They always included a return address, given that the idea was to get a reply and to embark on a lengthy correspondence.
Now Letters of Freedom volunteers are sending out between 400 and 600 cards and letters a month, to 200 prisoners. Each meeting draws about 20 people, and sometimes more.
The volunteers decided to organize a New Year’s marathon, to send greetings to 400 prisoners, spreading the word through the worldwide grapevine. Nadezhda, mother of the artist Sasha Skochilenko, who is serving a seven-year sentence for replacing store price tags with labels carrying antiwar slogans and information, attended a session in France. Gradually, activists from 12 countries joined the marathon, and more than 800 cards – several for each prisoner on the list – were written. “We realized then how many people were writing letters,” Gorchakova said. “We had come together to pursue our common cause.”
One of the teams in the marathon was located in Montenegro. Olga Stepanova had met a number of like-minded people at an October 2023 exhibition in Budva featuring political prisoners. Since then, those activists meet every Tuesday, write hardcopy letters and emails, and send them to Russia.
Stepanova said that reflection is an important element in the Budva letter-writing evenings. While attendees are writing their letters, one of the organizers reads the Last Word courtroom speeches given by political prisoners after their sentencing. This sets the letter-writing mood or helps the letter-writers choose a recipient. All who care to can tell the story of the person they wish to write to.
Yelena Efros, the founder of Fairy Tales for Political Prisoners, attaches great importance to the fact that increasing numbers of people are being drawn into writing to inmates. Too few volunteers means that not everyone who needs support is going to get it. Besides, a single individual cannot afford to be sending out an endless succession of letters.
“When someone is released from prison, that person is replaced by a dozen new political prisoners. Repression is like the Lernean Hydra, which grew ten heads whenever Hercules cut one off,” she said. And this is why she said she wants to see more projects like hers and, in general, a growing letter-writing contingent.
According to Eva Levenberg, people are often uncomfortable telling prisoners about their lives on the outside. But a person in prison is actually interested in knowing about life beyond its walls.
“The most important thing you can do is transport them, while they are reading your letter and replying to it, beyond the confines of their cell into freedom’s open spaces. You can give them what has been taken from them: the opportunity, albeit virtual, to be where they want to be,” said Mikhail Zharikov.
Yet he asks letter-writers to “go easy on the sympathy and hypotheticals.” It is a difficult thing to explain to a person in a detention center or a prison that “everything will soon be alright,” he said. “To me it seems better to stay away from that, because the person is anxious and angry enough as it is.”
Levenberg recommended not talking too much about one’s own problems. “The prisoners live on the idea that they will sooner or later be freed,” she said. “They want their picture of the future to remain happy and sunny.”
But Zhenya Berkovich, the director arrested in May 2023 on charges of “justifying terrorism” in her play Finist, the Brave Falcon, once asked a correspondent to tell her everything:
“I beg you to stop apologizing for a) not writing; b) not writing for a long time; c) writing about sad things while I’m stuck in here; d) writing about happy things while I’m stuck in here; e) not knowing what to write...
“I delight in all the letters (except the ones about Soviet sport). ... And yes, you can and must cry on my shoulder, and I’ll sympathize,” she wrote.
Efros recommended beginning a letter to a new addressee by introducing yourself:
“Dear (first name), There have been stories in the media about your case. I want to support you in the difficult time you’re living through.”
She noted that the more details there are in the first letter, the easier it will be to get the correspondence off the ground. She advised asking recipients what they want to know about, and if they need any help.
Activist Pyotr Ivanov admitted that it was difficult to start; he mulled over every word. But when the replies started coming in, he felt more confident. “I realized that when you’re locked up, any letter is important to you,” he said. “Any letter can have a value of its own. When I write to people I don’t know, I try to find out the details of the case beforehand and talk about something that might be close to both of us. In cards, I send good wishes, try to find supportive words, or write about the values we share.”
In the Federal Penitentiary Service system, all letters have to go through censorship. Levenberg noted that the human factor plays an enormous role here: one and the same word might be allowed or deleted, depending on who the censor is. Pyotr Ivanov tells us that, in his case, the censors always allowed wishes for peace to go through, yet redacted the phrase “political activist.”
Efros said she once had a letter rejected that talked about Mikhail Bulgakov and his relationship with Stalin.
Levenberg does not recommend discussing politics or criminal cases – especially those that have not yet reached the sentencing phase – with political prisoners. The names of persons under investigation should not be mentioned.
Sergey Podolsky, an attorney with OVD-Info, noted that it is also best not to make any reference to articles of the Criminal Code, whether new or old. Wording that could be interpreted as a call for extremism or terrorism should also be avoided. “A letter like that could land both yourself and the addressee in bad trouble,” Podolsky said.
Efros adds that it is not a good idea to bring up anything connected with LGBT topics, especially when writing to a man. Even if he has no ties to the LGBT community, he might start finding himself under undue pressure after receiving a letter like that, she explains.
Some good places to start are the Memorial list, the OVD-Info database, or the RosUznik site, which contains information on the case against each prisoner. Also useful are Vot svobot and Napishi politzeku, two bots accessed via the Telegram IM app that randomly provide prisoners’ names and addresses. The Fairy Tales for Political Prisoners Facebook group also publishes lists of prisoners’ birthdays.
Civil rights activists advise writing primarily to less well-known prisoners, who get fewer letters. But if anyone wants to write to someone famous, they should go right ahead.
Vot Svobot, OVD-Info, and Fairy Tales for Political Prisoners are usually efficient in updating prisoner addresses. If there is no address or if nothing has been heard about the individual for a long time, it would be best to wait a while or make direct contact with the prisoner’s attorney or family members.
According to Levenberg, a letter sent to a non-current address may be redirected to another institution, but most likely will be returned to the sender. Or the writer will receive a notice that the letter was undeliverable.
Paper letters can be sent via the Russian mail, but it may be as long as several months before a response comes back. F-pismo and Zonatelekom will forward emails, which will arrive quickly, but not all prison camps and detention centers use those services.
Those who want a reply have to set things up so that the prisoner can write one. For paper letters, blank sheets and a self-addressed, stamped envelope must be enclosed. And for email, the online service’s response form must be prepaid.
There is a good chance that foreign stamps and envelopes will prevent letters coming directly from abroad from reaching their addressees. Olga Stepanova said that such letters are simply confiscated once they arrive at the prison.
For this reason, foreign letter-writers try to find trustworthy people in Russia and send them their letters, asking them to forward them through the Russian mail, with the intermediary’s return address. When a reply comes, the Russia-based volunteer can scan it and send it on to the foreign letter-writer – or, if the opportunity arises, forward the letter itself.
Alternatively, there are several centralized letter-sending initiatives. Darya Gorchakova has identified the following:
This is in addition to the organizations in Yerevan and Budva. There is also OVD-Info’s Letters Across Borders.
“When letters are not making it through,” Efros said, “I write this to the prisoner: ‘I don’t understand where my letters, and yours, are getting to, because, pursuant to Article 91 of the Russian Federation Criminal Penal Code, you have the right to receive and send, at your own expense, an unlimited number of letters, postcards, and telegrams. If that is not happening, we will be forced to register a complaint with the Federal Penitentiary Service, the prosecutor’s office, and the Plenipotentiary for Human Rights.’”
As a rule, that starts the letters coming. As Efros explained, technically the letter is going to a pen pal, but the censor reads it too and draws the appropriate conclusions.
This article was originally published in Russian in Takie Dela.
[1] The People’s Will or Narodnaya Volya was a socialist revolutionary group in late nineteenth-century Russia best known for assassinating Tsar Alexander II.
Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.
Russian Life 73 Main Street, Suite 402 Montpelier VT 05602
802-223-4955
[email protected]
