23 August 2024
by Sara Jolly
Sara Jolly reviews Auto-graph, Russian Political Prisoners answer 13 questions from Boris Akunin by G.S. Chkhartishvili, translated and updated by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov, e-book, $3, pp400, BAbook.org, March 2024
In his introduction to Auto-graph, Russian Political Prisoners answer 13 questions from Boris Akunin, G.S. Chkhartishvili, writing under his own name, rather than his pen name of Boris Akunin, explains the genesis of this unusual e-publishing project. He had previously carried out an online survey of creative people, asking them 13 ‘simple yet difficult questions that reveal personality.’ The results of this survey were published as an e-book, with all proceeds going to the children’s hospice, Dom s mayakom, (The House with a Lighthouse) in Moscow.
So, when Chkhartishvili was approached by a group of volunteers who support political prisoners in Russia, and asked to write a letter to be sent to detainees held in prisons and pre-trial detention centres, he came up with a counter proposal: he suggested that he should send the same set of 13 questions (that he had used in his survey of creative people), to political prisoners ‘so that readers would see not some abstract “prisoners of conscience” but real people. Readers would learn what they think and feel. And want to support them.’
He therefore wrote a letter to all such prisoners, praising their fearlessness and asking them to respond to the enclosed set of 13 questions. In the final paragraph of his letter to the prisoners he writes:
Please know that few people today have the courage to stand up for their beliefs at the cost of their own freedom, but there are many who have deep respect for you and would like to express their support. Let these people get to know you (and you personally) better. In the hope that the darkness will dissipate and you will again be free.
The letter was forwarded by the volunteer supporters’ organisation to hundreds of political prisoners. It is not known how many letters actually reached the prisoners, nor how many replies to the questionnaire were binned by prison authorities.
However, Chkhartishvili did receive enough replies to compile a 400-page book featuring responses from 72 political prisoners, ranging from high profile names such as the late Aleksei Navalny, and the recently released Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin, to individuals completely unknown to the wider world, some from remote corners of Russia. The e-book was published in Russian on Chkhartishvili’s website in October 2023 (Book 1 and Book 2). The English translation, edited and updated by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov was published in March 2024. All proceeds from the book are being donated to organisations helping Russian political prisoners.
The material is arranged in two ways: Part 1 of the book contains 13 short chapters, each devoted to a selection of answers to each of the thirteen questions. So you can see, for example, how Kara-Murza, Navalny and many other prisoners answered Question 1: ‘How would you define yourself? Who Are You?’ or Question 5 ‘What brings you the most joy in life?’ The answer to this question from Sergei Ozerov (sentenced to eight years in a strict regime penal colony for ‘preparing to commit a terrorist act’) is piercingly vivid:
When I was in Butyrka [the largest of Moscow’s remand prisons]], I didn’t see the sky or sun for over a year (our window faced a solid fence). Then they took me to court: when I got out of the van, I saw trees, leaves, sky—and my legs gave way.
Question 10, ‘Do you have a favourite maxim?’ elicits this reply from Ilya Yashin:
‘Be realistic. Demand the impossible’ – apparently a student slogan from the 1968 événements in Paris. Dmitry Talantov quotes Boris Grebenschikov’s wry ‘We’ve already won. It’s just not that noticeable yet’ and Kara-Murza cites Sakharov: ‘In the end, the moral choice turns out to be the most pragmatic.’
As to Question 11 – ‘Which of the books you have read is the most important to you?’ Navalny cites The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and science fiction novels by the Strugatsky brothers are the choice of several respondents.
While Part 1 gives a kind of snapshot of answers to individual questions, Part 2, which seems to me a more satisfying way of presenting the information, has a chapter on each of the 72 participants, with each individual set of answers preceded by a short biography of the respondent, including details of their alleged crimes and the kind of sentence they are serving. Usually there is also a photo of the prisoner, often one apparently taken during a court appearance. The biographical material has been mainly been provided by Memorial Human Rights Centre.
The 72 prisoners featured range in age from 19 to 66. The oldest, 66 year-old Boris Kagarlitsky, professor, writer and creator of the YouTube channel Rabkor, had already spent a year in Lefortovo prison in 1982 for ‘anti-Soviet propaganda’. He is currently serving a five year sentence in a general-regime penal colony for ‘justifying terrorism’.
Nineteen year-old Maksim Lypkan was arrested in February 2023, two days after an interview he gave to Radio Liberty, expressing his complete opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, was published online. After a year on remand he has been released from criminal liability and been ordered to undergo compulsory treatment in a psychiatric hospital.
Two friends, Pavel Krisevich and Vladimir Sergeev, both originally from Omsk, were on their way to an unsanctioned anti-war protest in Pushkin Square on 6 March 2022 when they were detained. They had planned to commit suicide during the protest. Instead they swallowed lethal quantities of methadone in front of the police and were rushed to hospital to have their stomachs pumped. They were subsequently charged with ‘preparation of a terrorist act by a group’ and each sentenced to lengthy years in a strict regime penal colony, with the first years to be spent in a cell-type prison.
There are ten women among the respondents, including playwright Svetlana Petriychuk, the author of the play Finist, The Brave Falcon, and theatre director Evgenia Berkovich, who staged an award-winning production of the play, based on the true story of Russian women who were recruited online by Islamists and who ended up in Russian prisons when they returned from Syria. In May 2023 Petriychuk and Berkovich were detained and charged with ‘publicly justifying terrorism’. In July this year they were both sentenced to six years’ imprisonment.
Shokhista Karimova grew up in Uzbekistan and was working in a café kitchen near Moscow when she was rounded up in 2017, with eleven others, accused of being the accomplices of an Uzbek man who blew himself up on the St. Petersburg metro. The Memorial Human Rights Centre studied the case and found that at least nine of those convicted were innocent. Karimova is serving a 19 year 11 month sentence in a general-regime penal colony.
What unites all these diverse people is their extraordinary fund of personal courage; in their answers to the final question, ‘What is Russia to you today?’ most of them express a passionate love for Russia, its language and culture, its natural beauty, its people; many of them are sustained by the firm belief that the country will, sooner or later, throw off the current reign of terror. There is a poignant simplicity to the late Aleksei Navalny’s answer:
[Russia is] a place where I understand everyone and feel at home. A country where my language is spoken and my people live. I’m able to separate the country from the government, so in these dramatic times I love Russia no less than I always have.
This moving compilation gives a fascinating, kaleidoscopic insight into the very varied backgrounds and mind-sets of these prisoners of conscience, and leaves one lost in admiration for their individual acts of bravery and resilience. Their collective testimony makes inspiring, rather than depressing reading.
I shall end this review by passing on Chkhartishvili’s request to the reader which concludes his introduction:
It would be wonderful if, after reading this book, you could write a personal letter to one of the respondents. For their address, please write to kr**********@***il.com.
