Writing to Political Prisoners in Russia
Dmitrij’s main crime was photographing bridges in Vladivostok. I decided to write to him.
JANUARY 14, 2024
Last May, the Instagram profile of Pismo Svobody (“Letters of Freedom”) — an Armenian organization that facilitates correspondence with Russian political prisoners and publishes their replies online — announced the arrival of a stack of letters by Dmitry Kulikov, a political prisoner from Vladivostok who is in his early 50s. One letter included a drawing of a beautiful golden dragon, probably done in January to mark the start of the Year of the Dragon.
A few months before this, I’d discovered that anyone could send letters to Russian prisoners from anywhere in the world. I had been waiting for an excuse to do just that, and when I saw Dmitry’s letter, I felt that this was my chance. I was going to write to a man who lived on the last stop of the Trans-Siberian Railway, on the border with China — geographically and culturally, as evidenced by the dragon drawing — and who identified as an amateur photographer. Based on the two letters published on Pismo Svobody’s Instagram, he seemed like the type who loved to philosophize until the early hours of the morning. When studying in Moscow, I’d met many people like that — such Tolstoyan characters abound in Russia.
I wanted Dmitry to write to me, as he had done to others, about the chrysanthemums on 1960s Chinese stamps, or of the hundreds of thousands of people who had died for their rights in Stalin’s Great Purge.
I had lived in Moscow on several occasions, each time affiliated with a different university. Back then, people would flock to me, an Italian woman who spoke Russian, hungry for cultural dialogue. This was 20 years ago, when Putin was at war with Chechnya but it was still possible to hold mass protests. At the first Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, in 2005, hope and perestroika still mingled in the air. One night, in the shared kitchen of one of the hostels where I was staying, a physics professor expressed his opposition to the prevailing theory that Russians need a strong leader. Dmitry’s letters made me think back to that night.
Maybe it was a little unfair to choose my correspondent based on a drawing. I’d discarded babushki who’d left behind daughters and grandchildren already abandoned by men gone off to war. But I wanted Dmitry to write to me, as he had done to others, about the chrysanthemums on 1960s Chinese stamps, or of the hundreds of thousands of people who had died for their rights in Stalin’s Great Purge.
I learned about the opportunity to write to Russian political prisoners last January, on the homepage of Meduza, an independent publication the Russian government considers a foreign agent. In Russia, it can only be accessed through an app or a VPN. According to Meduza, frequent correspondence offers moral support to prisoners and acts as their only source of outside information. It can even be a form of protection: Prisoners in regular contact with those abroad are more likely to be shielded from abuse by jailers.
The site maintains an up-to-date list of political prisoners that includes names, ages, charges, and sometimes photos. I found 16-year-old kids, university students, middle-aged men and women, a blonde TikToker you could more easily picture wrapped in designer clothing than in the pacifist flag that likely got her arrested. The top of each page contains a series of statistics: last January, about 600 people were being held in pre-trial detention for political reasons. Now, there are more than 1,000 people, many of whom have been given unjust and disproportionate sentences: Nine years for liking a post against the war in Ukraine, six years for undergoing hormone replacement therapy for gender reassignment, 12 years for donating $30 to a Ukrainian NGO.
Often, prisoners begin their letters by talking about the weather or what they imagine the outside world looks like. Their requests for images of plants and flowers from warmer climates remind me of astronauts, who often say nature is what they miss most about Earth.
My search for a prisoner to write to started with international groups that facilitate correspondence between political prisoners and ordinary people. They also hold events where people can gather to write letters together. This led me to Pismo Svobody’s Instagram page, where I found some of the messages Dmitry and other prisoners had written. Posts started popping up on my screen every day, allowing me to follow their stories and their arbitrary transfers from one prison to the next, across short or long distances, like in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Now as then, letters from the gulags tell of eternal winters, cold cells, and the longing for the first signs of greenery to appear amid the thaw.
Often, prisoners begin their letters by talking about the weather or what they imagine the outside world looks like. Their requests for images of plants and flowers from warmer climates remind me of astronauts, who often say nature is what they miss most about Earth. Some write that without these letters, they’d wither away behind bars. Others say that the expectation of receiving letters if they were ever arrested had helped them to hold onto their principles when they were still on the outside. Their questions were mostly ordinary, some quirky. Which movies have you seen recently? Have you been to any concerts? How many electric cars were sold this year? Can you send me the latest memes?
The somewhat prosaic, light tone of most letters is partially motivated by the need to circumvent censorship. Several sites provide advice on how to give your letter a higher chance of making it past the censors. Politics, the war, and Putin are off-limits, while less obvious proscriptions draw a grim picture of the dictatorship: no emojis, no foreign words, and no literary references are allowed.
As I read the letters, I grew certain that put together, they could make up a new literary genre, or at least a new sub-genre of prison letters, where censorship hastens intimacy. The opening question in one of the letters was, “How was your birthday party?” But censorship isn’t the only reason content focuses on mundane topics like sports, travel, family dinners, or requests for colorful postcards — as if these people, from their cells, were gathered around the barbecue at a neighborhood cookout. Positive subjects make prisoners feel like they’re part of the outside world and make it easier to bear the blows of constant abuse.
They say the first letter is the hardest. When I attempted mine, I hit a roadblock after the first few sentences. I took my mind off it by googling Dmitry. The first result that came up was his rap sheet, which I already knew: He’d participated in protests against the war in Ukraine, but his main charge was photographing bridges. Unlike other political prisoners I’d googled, his name appeared in several news stories, including in an investigation by the Russian BBC into counterintelligence activities in the Far East. It reported that in 2023, six people had been arrested on suspicion of treason, some of whom were accused of selling Russian nuclear weapons information to China.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, a growing number of Russian citizens has been arrested on trumped up charges and later accused of crimes, such as treason, that would justify a more serious sentence. It was easy to find Dmitry’s photos of bridges in his portfolio. Last March, he received a 12-year sentence for photographing strategic infrastructure for Ukraine. In one of his letters, Dmitry wrote that “the country is split between those who had the misfortune of losing their freedom and those who had the misfortune of taking it away,” recalling Stalinist Russia, which was divided between people who were repressed and people who acted as informants.
They say the first letter is the hardest. When I attempted mine, I hit a roadblock after the first few sentences. I took my mind off it by googling Dmitry. The first result that came up was his rap sheet, which I already knew: He’d participated in protests against the war in Ukraine, but his main charge was photographing bridges.
The war in Ukraine has even divided families, according to Giulia De Florio, president of Memorial Italia, the Italian branch of a Russian NGO that protects human rights and historical memory. It was launched in Moscow in the late 1980s and has now been partially closed by the government. “The war has united the Ukrainian population,” she explained to me. “But it has fragmented the Russian people by splitting families between those who support it and those who do not, especially when a family member ends up behind bars.” Political prisoners often become estranged from family and friends, who cut ties out of disappointment, anger, or fear of being associated with them. Isolation begets isolation.
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Before returning to Dmitry’s letter, I reviewed the pictures he took. Vladivostok has two very photogenic, cable-stayed bridges: The Russki Most, which is very long, looks especially beautiful in the fog or under a flock of flying seagulls. The Zolotoy Most, standing pearl-white against a night sky, reaches across a bay leading to the Sea of Japan. But before diving into a search that would take me away from the letter, I stopped. I wouldn’t be able to write about bridges anyway. If Dmitry wanted to, he could do it himself.
The prisoners sometimes seem less worried about censorship than those who write to them. Ilya Yashin, a dissident who was freed in a prisoner swap with the United States in early August, wrote whatever he wanted, yet his letters made it out of prison. When I asked De Florio how this was possible, she said, “The censors might be lenient because they have a modicum of humanity — after all, they’re people too. All of them, including judges, can decide how far to go with the tools at their disposal. On the other hand, it could also be a political strategy: Repressing all dissident voices may not serve the people in power, because total repression attracts more attention. The prisoners’ posts and letters don’t represent a real threat to the government, but if these people are totally silenced, or disappear, that news would reach the West.”
Even so, I felt like my letter — coming from Italy — needed to be immaculate. I felt the need to stop and think after each line I wrote. I wanted to ask Dmitry an innocent question: “What’s it like to live in far eastern Russia, on the border with such different countries?” But even the word “border” could be risky in a letter to a person sentenced for espionage. This is why many people end up talking about nature: a safe subject, but broad and evocative. I wanted to approach my question with caution — and maybe I would never find the right way to ask it. So I decided to talk about myself, and to be safe, I didn’t mention my time in Moscow, at least to start.
Dear Dmitry,
I grew up in Sicily — maybe that’s why my favorite tree is the pomegranate. My parents planted one when I was born. At my elementary school, all the children had to memorize a poem where a pomegranate tree symbolizes a painful and poignant experience. That’s when I realized it was my plant. Pomegranates have a certain oriental beauty, don’t they? They never could have originated in Northern Europe, with those crowns and all those seeds like a myriad of ruby cushions. It’s a Pasha fruit. Over the years, my father has grafted my pomegranate tree with other Mediterranean varieties, but I don’t think he has altered the original plant. After moving to new cities so many times, I, too, feel grafted. What about you?
I’m still awaiting a response, but I know that it takes a long time. Sooner or later, I’ll receive a white envelope from the Vladivostok prison with my address framed by black lines and boxes, as if caged. I speak Russian and write it easily, but most people writing such letters don’t. One human rights organization working to overcome this linguistic barrier is OVD Info, which translates and sends messages and images into Russian prisons for free as part of a project called Letters Now. Its latest initiative, launched last August, is a site that lists political prisoners and their addresses in order of who receives the fewest letters. They are listed, that is, in order of loneliness.
This article was originally published in Il Post.
✺ Published in “Issue 24: Bodies” of The Dial
