Telegram Chronicles — Letter from Yulia Galyamina

(Originally posted on Facebook on March 10, 2022)

Recently, I wrote about Yulia Galyamina, an activist who’s been arrested a few days ago. She’s serving her 30-days sentence now, and she’s managed to dictate a letter, which was posted on Telegram. Here’s my quick translation of it:

“Sakharovo — first political prison in Russia.

I want to tell you how people are managing here in this prison. How they are managing with their freedom taken away.

There are twenty-five girls in our section. Some ended up here for carrying a bouquet of flowers, some for graffiti calling for peace, some were grabbed during protests. Most of them are younger than me. They are students.

We spend all day talking. In the morning we exercise.

Also, we read a lot. All the girls get books in their care packages, so we have a whole book club here. My husband sent me some of his favorite detective fiction. He’s been wanting me to read it for a while. I guess he figured I’d be bored and desperate enough to do it now. Little did he know! I have a lot of choices here: novels, nonfiction, poetry.

During our walks, I talk with the artist Katrin Nenasheva; we’ve gotten to be good friends. There are so many journalism students here that I ended up giving them a whole lecture on how to recognize manipulations in text. One woman is a psychologist, so she did a bit of training with us. She taught us how to manage stress.

I know that these girls’ mother are very afraid, afraid that here in Sakharovo their daughters have to mix with a “bad crowd.” Even my own mother has been asking whether I’d been placed with “hooligans and bandits.”

So, to the mothers of these brave girls I have the following to say: Don’t worry! Your girls are in the best possible company. True, the food here is lousy, the beds are hard, plus there’s the sense of lost time — but the people here are great!

Sakharovo is the first political prison in Russia. I hope it will be the last one. I hope that my girls, my cellmates, will be free and that together we’ll continue to work on changing Russia. I hope that we won’t allow any more political prisons.

I know that a few days ago at the OVD Brateevo [a certain police station in Moscow], some brave girls — just as young, smart, and wonderful as my cellmates — were tortured. I also know that they didn’t get scared, even when faced with ugly, inhuman abuse. They stayed strong and bore the horror with dignity.

Russia is a home of many such brave girls, who love their country and are ready to give up a lot to make it better. It’s possible they can do it all themselves. Possible. But it would be better if they didn’t have to do it alone. It would be much better if we all could come to their aid.

We can be better, right?”

#telegramWarChronicles