EXPLAINING THE STRUGGLE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS IN RUSSIA |
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Hello and welcome back to the Digest. |
Hope 2025 is treating you all well. I want to try a lot of new things this year — so the format of the Digest will be somewhat unusual every now and then. Remember that I love to hear your feedback — please let me know if any of our upcoming format changes particularly appeal to you. |
Today is going to be one of these new formats — instead of two or three short sections the entire newsletter will be about prison support groups. |
In solidarity, Dan Storyev |
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Donate to OVD-Info to keep us running |
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Trigger warning:
This is a newsletter about Russian repressions. Sometimes it will be hard to read. |
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“We kept telling him — ‘get out! They will jail you’” |
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Liza, 23, lives in St Petersburg. She has short blonde hair and dark, expressive, eyes. Liza is sitting on the floor, stuffing plastic bags with cheese, cereal, soap and toothpaste. |
| Liza / Photo: @free_pavel_sinelnikov, Instagram |
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Liza is a part of the community that shadows prisons and police detention facilities in Russia. She is part of a prison support group. Support groups are informal organisations that are vital for a prisoner’s survival — they deliver food, money, books and many other necessary supplies.
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They are especially important if it’s someone imprisoned for political reasons — these prisoners are often at risk of additional pressure from jailers and fellow inmates. Support groups tend to be made up of volunteers, friends and relatives — people from all walks of life.
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Liza is part of the support group that takes care of Pavel Sinelnikov, a young man imprisoned as a part of the Vesna case against anti-war activists. |
| Pavel Sinelnikov in court / Photo: SOTAvision |
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Liza has long been friends with another Vesna detainee — Eugeny Zateev. She still gets agitated when Zateev gets brought up. “We kept telling him — get out! They will jail you. He was the only one who thought everything was gonna be OK.”
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Eugeny Zateev in court wearing a T-shirt in support of him / ‘Женя, достал, выходи!’ Telegram channel |
| Zateev didn't want to leave Russia because of his grandmother. They were very close. She died while Zateev was in jail. His mother died a couple months later. He was not allowed to attend their funerals. |
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“Communication outside the jail system” |
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Sometimes just to see their “dependents”, volunteers like Liza have to get creative. For instance, Liza met Pavel after his arrest but then promptly married him — legal marital status allows her to visit Pavel in jail.
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Yury Neznamov, Danil Chertykov, Nikita Oleinik and Deniz Aydyn, defendants in the ‘Tyumen Case’ at the Central District Military Court in Yekaterinburg, 30 September 2024 / Photo: ‘Тюменское дело’ Telegram channel |
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Friends and supporters are not allowed visitation. Sometimes, even spouses have to find roundabout ways to see their loved ones. For instance, two wives of antifascist prisoners in the Tyumen case managed to attend their husbands’ court hearings by getting accredited as journalists.
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Communication challenges extend beyond visitation. Lidia, a supporter of jailed anti-war poet Vsevolod Korolev (sentenced to 7 years for posting about Kremlin’s war crimes) recounts sending books to the prisoner. The support group soon realised they are not allowed to send books through the hyper-bureaucratised parcel system — even though it is perfectly legal. Instead, Vsevolod’s support group began sending books in letters, printing them out page by page.
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| Vsevolod Korolev in court / Photo: RFE/RL |
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Dan Storyev on how the Kremlin scaled up its domestic repression since the start of the full-scale Ukraine invasion
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Two books about Russian history never made it to Vsevolod — “perhaps, because the censors saw they were about Kyivan Rus” says Lidia, referring to modern Russia's medieval predecessor with its centre in Kyiv. |
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Another support group recounts launching New Year fireworks for PhD student Dmitry Ivanov, jailed for 8.5 years for administering an anti-war Telegram channel. To make sure Dmitry saw the fireworks, the group had to invent cyphers in his letters, as censors would not let him reveal which direction his cell window faced. |
| Dmitry Ivanov at the Timiryazevsky District Court in Moscow, 18 January 2023 / Photo: Antonina Favorskaya, SOTAvision |
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“This is communication outside the prison system. This is what you see from the window, it happens here and now and only for you. When a person is in prison, everything is slow and sluggish, there are very few active emotions at the moment,” says Sonya, Dmitry’s friend and prison supporter. |
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“When the initial shock [from Dmitry’s arrest] passed, people relaxed, and there was less active participation in Dmitry’s life. Then it became clear that if I personally did nothing, then no one would do anything,” says Sonya. |
Most support groups note that it is heartbreakingly hard to stay committed to a political prisoner. After media attention goes away, the groups shrink to close friends and relatives. No wonder — it is expensive and tiring work.
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Liza, the Vesna supporter, explains: “This is a fucked up job. 24/7, 12 months a year for free. That is, literally a full-time job, from which you can’t look away, you have no days off, no vacation: you are constantly in touch with the lawyer and the prisoner, find out whether letters, parcels with food, clothes and cigarettes are reaching him, regularly top up the account in the prison store, collect parcels.” |
Supporters of the ‘Vesna case’ defendants and journalists at the St. Petersburg City Court, 26 June 2024 / Photo: Bumaga |
Support groups estimate that an average prisoner dependent “costs” around 400 USD per month, which is the same as Russia’s median salary (February 2023 data).
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Yet the support groups carry on. "If we give up, [police violence] will fill everything around us," says Inna, a friend of the jailed Ural anarchists. "Sometimes the prisoners name the operatives involved in torture - this is a good way to combat violence within the system. Publicity works."
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Liza believes that supporting Russian political prisoners is one of the few remaining ways to make a political statement while inside Russia. “A man should not lose agency while imprisoned,” she told OVD-Info. |
This is a re-write of our article in Russian by Marina-Maya Govzman. |
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The Digest is created by OVD-Info, written by Dan Storyev, edited by Dr Lauren McCarthy |
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