Giving your word: Sergei Nikitin writes to political prisoners
‘We were fortunate to have these cards on our walls.’
When I was working for Amnesty International as the head of its Moscow office, I heard a story told by my London-based manager. She recalled how, in the 1970s, Amnesty International activists were writing letters to Soviet political prisoners. She used to write to a priest serving his term in a corrective labour colony in the USSR. ‘We never got any reply from the prisoners, we just received pink slips of paper – official confirmation from the colony’s officers that our card had been received. And by these slips of paper we knew that the prisoner was still there, was alive’.
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