You won't starve on prison food
02.10.2025
Hi, this is Ksenia Fadeeva.
Do you know what’s special about raising money for the Marathon? Unfortunately, for security reasons we can’t tell you the names of the people we help. Our organisers (TV Rain, FBK and Meduza) are criminalised in Russia, and the last thing we want is to harm people who are already persecuted by the state. So instead of writing “this month we helped the family of Ivan Ivanov, who is in colony No. 1” or “the mother of political prisoner Maria Petrova, who is in detention centre No. 2, came to us”, we have to write anonymously, and in screenshots of thank-you messages from relatives we have to black out people’s names and the names of prisons and towns.
But fortunately there are exceptions. Sometimes political prisoners manage to get out and leave Russia.
This is Evgeny Bestuzhev, an activist and human rights defender from St Petersburg, a former political prisoner and one of the people you helped.
Evgeny is a political scientist who worked at the Higher School of Economics in St Petersburg. He has been an activist since the 1980s, took part in the democratic movement from perestroika onwards, was an assistant to State Duma deputy Vitaly Savitsky, co-chair of the St Petersburg branch of the Solidarity movement and coordinator of Democratic Russia. In a word, a true patriot of his city and his country.
Evgeny was in his home city of St Petersburg on 24 February 2022. On the day the war began, he went to protest outside Gostiny Dvor. Evgeny couldn’t stay silent: he was very active on social media and posted against the war. In the summer of 2022 he was summoned to the prosecutor’s office to explain his posts. When he was summoned a second time, he decided to leave for Georgia.
In November 2022 Bestuzhev returned to Russia. Three days after he got back, his home was searched, and after a night in a temporary holding cell (IVS, where suspects are kept until a court decides on a preventive measure), the court sent him to Kresty pre-trial detention centre, where he spent two years.
After two long years of investigation and trial, Evgeny was given a suspended sentence of 5 years and 3 months and released in the courtroom. The prosecutors were evidently unhappy with a sentence so lenient by today’s standards and could have appealed to turn it into real prison time. Evgeny didn’t wait for that and left Russia for Lithuania.
I spent two years in Kresty in Petersburg, from November 2022 to November 2024. Honestly, without the support of people who cared it would have been very, very hard.
I know that money for my prison account was raised with the help of the Marathon. That helped a lot and was very convenient, because food in parcels gets “spoiled” and broken during the checks. That doesn’t happen with the prison shop. Take instant noodles: if they come in a parcel, everything gets shaken out of the packet and the seasoning isn’t allowed in at all, so it was better to buy them in the prison shop from my account.
What did I usually order?
Tinned food in foil — not in metal cans but in soft pouches — stewed meat, for example. It made the soups at lunch more filling; otherwise they were completely empty. I ordered cigarettes (unfortunately I started smoking in prison — the setting encourages it), vegetables and fruit, which came both from the shop and in parcels.
You won’t starve on standard-issue prison food — lunches were not bad. Breakfast, of course, was disgusting, and dinner so-so. But what you really miss is greens, fruit, vegetables, fibre. I spent two New Years in the detention centre. I ordered sweets, treats and wafer cakes from the shop.
Hygiene items weren’t easy either. The toilet paper they gave us we used for hunting mice — throwing the rolls at them. In one cell I was in, a mouse turned up; he behaved well and we even fed him, but then he brought his friends and that’s when it started… well, a crowd always behaves worse. I even put up a photo of a cat, thinking it might scare them, but no luck.
And of course you really need stationery: notebooks, pens, envelopes. I wrote a lot — one pen lasted me two weeks. I improved my English and German, and out of boredom I nearly learned Italian. I read all the time, except that philosophy books are “not recommended” literature there and psychology is banned.
Medicines were sent to me from outside. The prison does have medicines, but only for emergencies. If you have no relatives, friends or just caring people to help, things get tough, and there are many such people (who are left without help).
Evgeny adds that it isn’t only the parcels that matter, but knowing that people remember you and support you:
It’s very important to know that someone came to the prison, someone brought a parcel… What matters is that people are involved. And besides parcels, letters are just as important. The letters we receive matter enormously. Usually people who go to prison lose their social ties. They lose friends; many relatives stop talking to them. For me it was the other way round. I’d never had such contact with so many different people as I built up in the detention centre and after my release. So it turns out that by ending up in those grim places I didn’t lose my social ties — on the contrary, I gained them, I grew a whole network. In these hard times people have shown who they are; it’s become clear who is who.
And I am very, very grateful to everyone who donates for political prisoners and to everyone who writes letters. Your help is simply invaluable…
Evgeny Bestuzhev
We look forward to the moment when we can publish a huge report naming all the former political prisoners you have helped over the years of the Marathon. When hundreds of people, prisoners of conscience, are free, we’ll be able to share their stories with you without fearing for their fate. We understand how important it is for you to know who you are helping.
Unfortunately, those times haven’t come yet, and we’re asking for your support again.
To keep helping political prisoners at even the current level, we need to raise at least 3,000,000 roubles a month; right now we raise only 1,400,000. If everyone who reads this letter set up a recurring donation to the Marathon of even 5 euros, we could help every month all the political prisoners and families who have turned to us.
Thank you for being with us!
Kind regards,
Ksenia Fadeeva