Number of Women Behind Bars as Result of Political Charges in Russia has Risen from 53 in 2022 to More than 200 Now, Verzhevatova and Graf Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 23 – The number of women in Russia behind bars after being convicted on political charges has risen from 53 in 2022, the first year of Putin’s war in Ukraine, to more than 200 now, according to Liliya Verzhevatova and Sasha Graf, who add that the real numbers are certainly even higher as some families of those convicted choose not to advertise that fact.

            The LGBT activist and founder of the Women’s Term project respectively say that women convicted of political crimes do not live in a separate world but suffer all the problems other women behind bars do: abuse, lack of medical care, and total dependence on guards (posle.media/article/zhenshchiny-v-zaklyuchenii-ot-zvonka-do-zvonka).

            But Verzzhevatova and Graf says that “political status does change a female prisoner’s position within this system, adding additional layers of control and pressure to all these other standard features of Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service. Parole is “effectively off the table,” they add; and political face “closer scrutiny, harsher censorship and hostility from prison staff.”

            According to the two activists, the prison authorities rarely keep the politicals as a group separate from non-politicals but they do try to make sure that those convicted of one kind of political charge are kept separate from others convicted of the same thing lest solidarity grow among them.

            One of the most intriguing findings of this research is that women sentenced to relatively short terms behind bars tend to cooperate with the guards but those sentenced to longer ones are less inclined because such convicts can no longer really imagine life outside prison and thus see no reason to try to impress their guards by going along.

            While most ordinary prisoners are either indifferent to the politicals, some oppose them for their anti-war views. Others, however, see that the latter are “doing time for nothing,” or cooperate with them because the political often have better support networks outside prison and have skills that can help the ordinary prisoners deal with the legal system.

            Social hierarchies which existed outside prison life typically break down, and some rights activists now have dropped the word “political” in their descriptions of prisoners because the differences between the two groups are far less significant than the similarities between the ordinary prisoners and the politicals.