20 June 2026
On both sides of the wall. On why prison doesn’t only lock up individuals – but entire families
by Lev Shlosberg*
Source: Novaya gazeta
We [Novaya gazeta – ed] continue to publish the prison diaries of the politician Lev Shlosberg.* Our next issue will come out when his trial has already started. At his trial, Shlosberg will be able to see family and friends. This chapter Shlosberg has named Family and Prison.
Family and Prison
Imprisonment is harder for the prisoner’s family than for the prisoner themselves.
A prisoner always knows what is happening to them. Their family and friends don’t know what is happening at any moment in the prison.
Having acclimatised to prison, the prisoner begins to feel less anxious. The protective psychological reaction of adaptation to and engagement with prison life save the prisoner from heightened daily tension and create an atmosphere, if not of safety, then of familiarity with prison conditions.
But for the prisoner’s family and friends, prison is physically and psychologically difficult. They spend every day, if not every hour, asking themselves the same questions. How are they? Are they healthy? Are they being fed? How are they sleeping? What are they eating? How are they being treated? Who is there with them? What is their mood? What are they thinking about? Do they have the strength to survive prison?
They are locked in an endless cycle of these questions, constantly on edge and unable to enjoy life. A prisoner’s family always imagine prison to be worse than it actually is. Life behind the walls of a prison is unknown and not understood and therefore frightful.
Letters from prison are always read later than they are written. The prison authorities don’t allow prisoners and their families to communicate in real time. You can’t touch hands, you can’t hug, you can’t discuss things in the usual immediate way. Uncertainty swallows a prisoner and their family. Uncertainty can be worse than receiving the worst of news because people imagine the most dramatic and tragic outcomes possible.
The closest contacts a prisoner has with their loved ones are 15-minute phone calls and three-hour visits – these are held over the phone too, but they can see each other at arm’s length through a barred window. In the first instance the contact is spoken; in the second it is spoken and visual.
A prisoner has one special care – their loved ones. They need to reassure, support, and calm them as much as possible. No one can manage this completely. Only a prisoner’s return can mend the rift.
But it is vitally important what kind of home the prisoner returns to, what state their loved ones are in and how they will see and understand the prisoner when the separation is over.
A prisoner and their family experience unfreedom in equal measure. The aim of the system is to take a prisoner’s entire world away from them. As for a prisoner’s family, the aim is to take away from them the thing they hold most dear in life: their relative. Prisoners and relatives both suffer. Suffering can destroy, dry out and weaken. But it can also strengthen, elevate and purify.
Love undergoes the most suffering. The rift of imprisonment cuts off physical communication, destroys the personal space of two people, accessible only to them. Prison pries constantly, an uninvited witness to the deeply personal bonds which bind a couple. Conversations are eavesdropped upon, letters opened and read, holding hands forbidden, being alone together forbidden. Personal communication does not become public, but it becomes transparent, to the last word.
I searched for and, I believe, found a solution. I decided to pay no attention to this irremovable transparency. I write the same letters I would write as if I were free, refusing to self-censor my thoughts and feelings, refusing to resort to Aesopian language and words void of truth with a person I love.
In life – prison included – only that which is genuine has meaning. Simulacra are false. An emotion conveyed using the language of unfreedom is meaningless and void. All living things must be called by their name. The realm of feelings is no place for masks and pseudonyms.
Prison tests all natural human feelings – primarily love and attachment to family. You mustn’t allow unfreedom to claim your feelings or encroach upon your love, you mustn’t let it take your heart.
Separation is a dangerous poison. It destroys habits and traditions, breaks down the very way of life itself, strips relationships of their bodily warmth and gentleness, the electricity of embraces and kisses, voices and looks. Separation makes personal relationships and feelings intangible as though removing the ground beneath their feet and hanging them up in the suffocating confines of prison.
Prison has never brought anyone the joy of life. When someone goes to prison, their human feelings, connections, emotions, attractions and attitudes are imprisoned with them. Prison plunges a person into an unnatural world that blocks the arteries of human nature. Imprisonment stops a person and their family from experiencing life’s essential emotions and feelings, depriving natural human communication of the necessary oxygen.
Prison instils a family with loneliness and tries to force people who love each other to experience this separation, each one alone, separated from the warmth of their loved one.
Prison tests a prisoner and their family, tempting them with solitude and forgetfulness. Surviving prison means refusing to give yourself and your family over to its power, prison’s morals and customs must never overcome your feelings.
Nothing is more resistant to unfreedom than love. Remaining wholly yourself in prison is only possible if you protect the light of love when surrounded by the darkness of unfreedom. The prisoner and their loved ones don’t undergo the test of prison side by side, but they do experience it together. You understood and felt each other at the least word, at the slightest glance, but now you have to learn to hear, see and understand each other when a prison wall has separated you.
The life of a person in prison and the lives of those who love them beyond its walls, become a road to a future reunion, the time until which can be a trying ordeal. A long separation is always difficult. You need to see, understand and accept this as the path to freedom, a path along which each step – each hour and each day – inevitably brings the moment of reunion closer, and every step renews the strength to live.
Pskov Prison Fortress
*Registered by the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation as a foreign agent.
Translated by Oscar Seecharan
