Sometimes, when the good guys win, triumphs deserve to be savored.
The August 2 press conference in Bonn, Germany, where three just-freed political prisoners—Vladimir Kara-Murza, Andrei Pivovarov and Ilya Yashin—spoke to the press and supporters, is a reminder that there is more to Russia than Vladimir Putin and his odious regime.
Like all 16 prisoners released by Russia in last week’s historic prisoner swap, these men were taken hostage by the brigands in the Kremlin, dragged through a semblance of a legal procedure and sent off to prison camps from which they didn’t expect to emerge.
But these three were also Russian-born politicians, political dissidents who fell afoul of Putin’s regime after criticizing the invasion of Ukraine.
Throughout this ordeal, all three have said they received thousands of postcards and letters from Russian citizens they didn’t know. Signed and containing return addresses, these letters and postcards can lead to prosecution under the same articles of the Russian Criminal Code that were used to prosecute the prisoners to whom these letters are addressed.
Each of these pieces of correspondence is a reminder that Putin’s program of beating Russian society into submission hasn’t worked.
Undoubtedly, contracts for books about last week’s prisoner exchange are getting inked right now, since the story features a veritable parade of larger-than-life characters, good, bad and sickening. The spectacle of Putin’s hostages being exchanged for Russian operatives—including, notably, a cold-blooded murderer linked to the Federal Security Service (FSB) espionage services, plus several others whose FSB affiliation was revealed after they returned—harkens back to the prisoner exchanges of the 1970s and 1980s.
The apparent parallels to Cold War prisoner exchanges raise a tantalizing question: Is Putin finally caving in to pressure from the West, as his Soviet forebears did, before their regime finally imploded? Could it be that sanctions against Russia are having an effect and Putin’s regime is starting to bend?
These questions matter because thousands more people remain in Russia’s prisons or are facing repressions from Putin’s government.
Historically, Soviet dissidents maintained lists of those facing prosecution. The Chronicle of Current Events, an underground news publication that covered the Soviet government’s repressions against society, was one of the wonders of the dissident era. The Chronicle’s journalists used the state-of-the-art technology of their time: typewriters, onion-skin paper, and carbon paper for typing carbon copies.
Today, a database of individuals who are facing repression is maintained by an offshoot of Memorial, a Russian-based organization that shared the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize and was shut down by Putin. This document can be perused by anyone who speaks Russian or knows how to use an AI translation tool.
Memorial’s list, with detailed and often heartbreaking information, ongoing updates, and infographics, is broken up into four groups:
- 432 political prisoners incarcerated for religious beliefs, mostly either Jehovah’s Witnesses (whose religion was declared in 2017 to be an “extremist organization” requiring “liquidation”) or members of an Islamic group called Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islam, declared a terrorist organization in a 2003 ruling of Russia’s Supreme Court. (This decision has come in handy in the annexed Crimea, where accusations of belonging to this Islamic group are being used as a means of repression against Crimean Tatars.) Altogether, Memorial regards 235 individuals serving prison terms in connection with Hizb ut-Tahrir as political prisoners.
- 333 political prisoners incarcerated for issues other than religious beliefs.
- 633 individuals persecuted but not incarcerated.
- 134 likely victims not included in the list.
Alas, no detailed data exist on the estimated 19,000 Ukrainian children who have been abducted and adopted away to Russian families or placed in orphanages. These abductions are the reason the International Criminal Court last year issued a warrant for Putin’s arrest. Presumably, these lists will be made public by the government of Ukraine or emerge in the ICC proceedings.
The American movement to free Soviet Jews was so successful because organizations in the U.S. protested and lobbied on behalf of individuals in the USSR, often “adopting” refuseniks and prisoners.
In the finest tradition of Soviet dissent, at the August 2 press conference, the three just-freed politicians mentioned the names of individuals who should have been released alongside them:
- Igor Baryshnikov, 65, probably needs help more urgently than most. Convicted for speaking out against the invasion of Ukraine, Baryshnikov is dying of cancer and receiving no care.
- Three members of the legal team of Aleksei Navalny, the politician likely killed on Putin’s orders—Vadim Kobzev, 41, Aleksei Lipzer, 37, and Igor Segunin, 46—are facing prosecution for “membership in an extremist organization,” which consisted of passing information about Navalny.
- Aleksei Gorinov, 63, a Moscow politician convicted under an article prohibiting dissemination of “false information” and now accused of “public expression of support of terrorism.”
- Mikhail Kriger, 64, a participant in the Memorial movement and owner of a groceries delivery business, convicted and sentenced to seven years of imprisonment in a case stemming from a Facebook post critical of the government.
- Maria Ponomarenko, 45—a journalist and activist accused of slander against the government.
- Daniel Kholodny, 26, former technical director of the Navalny LIVE news channel, accused of “membership in an extremist organization.”
As Putin takes his country back to Communist-era repressions, shouldn’t we, in the West, make use of well-tested tactics of the past? It’s not simple to act on, but it’s logical: Maintain economic pressure on Putin’s regime, advocate for Russian citizens facing persecution—and continue to help Ukraine.
Paul Goldberg is the author of The Dissident, a novel, and president of the Union of Councils for Jews from the Former Soviet Union (UCSJ). Anastasia Aseeva is the executive director of UCSJ.
Featured image: freed prisoners Vladimir Kara-Murza, Andrei Pivovarov, and Ilya Yashin at a press conference in Bonn, Germany. Photo credit: TV Rain via Youtube.