Jailed politician Vladimir Kara-Murza says authorities stopped delivering his letters
Politician and journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza, who has been sentenced to 25 years in prison and is currently in pre-trial detention, says that Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service has stopped delivering letters to him.
Kara-Murza wrote on Telegram that he was “basically blocked from correspondence” through the penitentiary service’s mail service. He says that before the weekend, he was provided with a packet of blank letters to answer, which he says happens with the letters “don’t pass the censor.” After the weekend, he learned that his answers, including correspondence with relatives and friends, had also been censored.
“My letters (both incoming and outgoing) previously often ‘got lost,’ but now it seems [the issue] has taken on a systemic character,” Kara-Murza noted. He believes that the detention center administration had no grounds to censor his correspondence and that employees were acting on “commands from above.”
Most likely, they were simply commanded “from above” to stop dealing with this willful prisoner. I know that many of my comrades have experienced the same thing with their correspondence. In this, too, we’ve now been equated with dissidents from the Soviet era. In his book Fear No Evil, Natan Sharansky shares a picture of a letter his wife sent him in jail — every line, except the name and address, are blacked out with ink. Technology has changed since then but the spirit, sadly, remains the same.