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’.

After perestroika, prisoners of conscience in Russia could receive letters of support from Amnesty activists from all over the world. I remember Grigorii Pasko, a prisoner of conscience, visiting my office after his release. ‘I received hundreds of cards from many countries; I decorated my prison cell walls’, he told me. ‘We did not get a Christmas tree there but we were fortunate to have these cards on our walls instead.’

British Quakers have been involved in the care of prisoners from the earliest days of Quakerism. We all remember Elizabeth Fry visiting prisoners in Newgate Prison. So I wasn’t surprised when, recently, Friends from my Meeting asked me to give a talk about the human rights situation in Russia, and said they wanted to write postcards to Russian political prisoners. Quakers are faithful to established traditions, so the idea of sending a message via the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service For Online Letters was less appealing to them than writing postcards and sending them by post.

I gave a talk on peaceful protests in Russia, and the laws the Kremlin has made to suppress anti-war protests in the country. I chose eight political prisoners in Russia to whom Friends could write postcards. The website ‘Rights in Russia’ helped me to collect the information. But the Friends were disappointed that, according to the censorship rules of the Russian penal system, no messages written in code, or encrypted in any way, are allowed. And letters to prisoners have to be written in Russian otherwise they would be classified as ‘encrypted’.

Fortunately, I, together with another Russian-speaking person, helped Friends to write short messages in Cyrillic; we also helped with writing the addresses in Russian on the envelopes.

On the next day the letters started their long journey to Russian penal colonies and prisons. It takes sixty days now for a letter to get to Russia. I hope they’ll pass the censors.

‘Rights in Russia’ is online at www.rightsinrussia.org.

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