6 June 2026
On the first letters received in prison and the hundreds of strangers on the outside
by Lev Shlosberg*
Source: Novaya Gazeta
A chapter from the prison diaries of Lev Shlosberg. Author’s title: ‘Letters in Prison’.
I received my first letters on day four of my time in prison. On 9 December, I was handed printouts of 33 messages that had arrived through Zonatelecom [Translator Comment: or ‘ZT’, a Russian email service for maintaining communication with prisoners and convicts]. I took the stack of paper, sat down on the bed and started to go through it, first looking at the senders’ names only. A warm feeling spread through my hands, one I could not compare to any other. I have never been to prison before and have never received a letter while in prison.
Communication with the outside world had been on hold since the evening of 5 December. There was a total vacuum of information around me: I knew nothing and heard no news. All I did was think – about my family, about myself, my friends and freedom, and this new chapter of my life and the life that went on beyond the prison walls. And it was from that place, beyond these walls, from the life that went on just outside, now completely inaccessible, that I received the letters.
For a moment, I forgot where I was. Seven letters alone were from Zhanna. Among the rest were letters from people I know and those I don’t know, who by 5, 6, 7, and 8 December had already visited the Zonatelecom website, found me on there, and written to me.
Now in my third month of imprisonment, I’m in touch with several hundred people, most of whom use ZT, though letters started to arrive via Russian Post as early as December. Delivery speeds, of course, don’t compare, one being ten times faster than the other.
As one kindred soul wrote to me in an early letter, about the Zonatelecom app, “This is what a people’s messenger really is, not Max”.
I never knew most of the people who wrote to me in prison, and if it weren’t for my imprisonment (or misfortune, I should say), I would never have learned of their experiences in life.
I well remember the first letter that reached me by Russian Post: it was written by pensioners from a tiny village in Porkhovsky district, near Slavkovichi, whose name I hadn’t heard of. Perhaps I had passed through the place, if a road led there. It read: “It’s strange to watch what is going on now in our country, where you have people being sent to prison for acts that are not crimes… It turns out there are good people, who possess human qualities and logical thinking, and who can defend their point of view, which is very important for people who think like you. My husband and I support you and fully share your position.” It then goes on to more personal matters. This means that although state propaganda, in its own Pskovian tongue, reached the Porkhovsky hinterland, it evoked this very human reaction.
The point of imprisonment is essentially to isolate a person from society, to sever the personal and social ties that, like threads, connect the individual to their life. A person is plucked from their natural environment in order to weaken them and make them vulnerable, cutting off the oxygen of human communication. Letters sent to a prison connect an individual with a life that is fenced off from them by physically insurmountable walls. Nothing helps a person in prison to preserve their humanity like letters.
In this age of electronic communication, letters have vanished from everyday modern life. Instead of letters, we write messages to each other – short and abbreviated like telegrams – and we hardly stop to re-read our words. We often don’t even correct errors, which saves us a matter of seconds, yet in doing so we miss out on priceless time engaged in human communication.
In the history of Russian and world culture, correspondence between people has produced volumes of great literature no less engrossing than world-famous novels and stories.
The culture of correspondence has become an integral part of world culture, preserving for future generations impressions of people that are true to life, in the author’s telling, and with them the era in which these people lived.
My home archive contains correspondence with friends (or rather, letters from friends to me) from when I was working away from Pskov and when I served in the army. It includes notebooks of various sizes, hand-sewn with simple threads, sometimes with envelopes. I was reminded of those cherished notebooks here in prison as I read through and answered the letters. You could say that I now live for letters and responding to them.
At the same time, a technological paradox has arisen in my life: I receive emails through Zonatelecom in the form of nice printouts of typewritten text, but I answer them by hand, with a simple ballpoint pen, That is, I communicate with people via a 21st-century service, using only a writing implement from the last quarter of the 20th century.
When I write to someone I know, I picture their face; and when I read a letter from them, I imagine their voice. When reading and writing letters, nothing disturbs me — neither the sounds of the prison, nor the lack of light, nor any extraneous thoughts — I lose myself entirely in the letter; I seek and find the necessary words just as a writer chooses them for a work of fiction. For me, writing letters has become a creative activity in prison.
Some of the correspondence from the first wave remained a one-off: a person responded to my misfortune, I replied, and there have been no further letters as yet. At the same time, a letter arrives almost every day from a new correspondent. The assumption that everyone wishing to write would do so within the first month has not been borne out: letters from new writers arrive constantly.
Some of my correspondents have been a revelation to me.
- One writer is a native of the North, an engineer now living in Moscow, a descendant of political prisoners. His grandfather served his sentence in logging camps in Komi, and later, as a civil engineer, helped build Novy Urengoy. His grandmother is of Volga German descent.
- A mother of many children from Moscow region writes; one of her four children is a special boy, a person with special needs. In her third letter, she sends me her story ‘The Sacred Unicorn Alyosha’, which contains love, suffering, understanding, despair and joy. If I were a publisher, I would, with the mother’s consent, publish this account. In part, it’s a sermon.
- A woman writes from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky; she used to work for a forestry enterprise and later as a laboratory assistant at a scientific institute of hunting studies. She writes about Kamchatka, her native land, her beloved forests, volcanoes and earthquakes, about the people she has met in her professional life, about her hobbies (small pets and fish), heavy snows and trips on fishing skis.
- A history student from Perm, currently completing his master’s degree in Nizhny Novgorod, writes on sophisticated topics in cultural history; his father was a veteran of the Afghan War who passed away prematurely, unable to recover from the trauma he suffered in Afghanistan.
- A woman from Kazan writes; her young daughter composes wonderful fairy tales, and her mother can barely keep up with writing them down for the young author. She dreams of bringing her daughter to Pskov and showing her the city, which (her mother is certain) will be a source of inspiration for the girl.
- A film director, the son of close friends of mine, writes exquisite letters on the philosophical and cultural foundations of human existence, with references to classical and contemporary art from various countries and eras.
- A party colleague, a native Muscovite, with whom I only had a passing acquaintance, exchanging greetings with a nod of the head, writes; and now his letters are enough to fill two books — one on family history, the other reflections on Russian culture, mostly literature, but also painting and cinema.
- Many public figures write — entirely personal letters, as if we were sitting side by side and talking. This correspondence has given me a second wind in prison. I didn’t know it could be like this, but now I do.
In almost every third letter I come across the same thought: ‘Thank you for not leaving and having staying with us; this is very important to us.’ Here I am in prison, and people write: ‘having stayed with us’. They do not separate themselves from the prison, nor the prison from the country. They are not physically beside me, but they are with me.
I leaf through eight folders of letters and reread lines I know well, sometimes suddenly discovering new nuances in a letter. I love to take letters from one person and read them straight through, from the first to the last, and see how our conversation developed — from an introduction to broad reflections and stories. Prison has brought the Russian epistolary genre into my life — letters from mind to mind, from heart to heart.
Before my imprisonment, I myself wrote letters and postcards to political prisoners. Some of them have now sent me their warm responses to me in prison via their friends and relatives.
Now I would write many more of those letters.
Many of my correspondents wrote that they hadn’t written long letters for a long time, or had never written them at all, and now a situation had arisen where they themselves needed these letters. These letters embody a need for sympathy and compassion, for recognition and trust, a need for action and deeds, for a justification of one’s life here and now, when almost nothing can be said aloud, but one can write to a person who, of course, has it harder than you, but you write to this physically distant person, find pure, heartfelt words and realise: you have said something very important for yourself and thereby lifted the stone of silence from your heart.
Pskov Prison Fortress
* Listed in the ‘foreign agent’ register.
Translated by Lindsay Munford and Simon Cosgrove
