Sasha's Open Letter from Detention Center Five

I

Hi! :) Have you missed me? I’ve really missed you! :) For almost a month, I couldn’t write a single open letter. It’s understandable: most of this time, I was under terrible stress because I was fighting for myself, for the possibility of being who I am, and even for the most basic needs of my body, such as being able to eat or use a toilet (when I need to do it and not when someone decides I can), I was fighting for medicine after a surgery… Every day was turning into torture because of the idiosyncrasies of my health and my freedom-loving nature.

And now I can finally breathe out: I have left the difficult cells and am in the peaceful atmosphere where the lack of freedom and the isolation from the loved ones are the main problem in themselves. (Is it really that a person, who is under the investigation and has not been convicted yet, must be punished with anything more than this!?)

The improvement of my conditions here has happened thanks to all of YOU! Other inmates who do not have the unprecedented support that you have given me, get a very different prison experience. If I make a complaint, I am instantly transferred to the best and most comfortable cells, and their complaints can only make their conditions worse; their powerlessness is abused because there is no one who would step in for them. At every check, shaking with their whole bodies, they reply with the standard, “Everything’s all right, no complaints.”

I am familiar with this fear: I myself come from a poorest family and in my whole creative life have not saved any capital but the social one; I have no friends in state structures or the titular party. But behind my back, the colossal civil society has risen. If only YOU could see how polite the high-profile officials are with me now. I scare them like a flame, and no one has laid a finger on me here—and it’s not because of me but because of YOU all: independent media, journalists, civil activists, performers, human rights activists, free hippies, musicians and artists, and also just peace-loving men and women with a conscience and empathy. There are more of YOU than YOU have expected; YOU are stronger than YOU think YOU are.

II

Oh, if only I could say thanks to each and every one of YOU personally—but at the moment, I’m not even able to reply to all the letters I’m receiving. And there are amazing things there that make their way to me. Incredibly talented, most intelligent and interesting people from all over the world are writing to me. I get beautiful drawings, postcards, and creative comics. All inmates here cry when they read their letters: these are tears of sadness and happiness all at once. And I cry these tears tenfold and am very worried that I haven’t replied to a half of my correspondents (and I owe everything to your support!). So far I’ve only responded to 70 “FPS-letters” [letters sent through an online system] and to just two actual letters (I’m not sure if the censors have let everything through). Please forgive me that the replies are taking so long. Still, I read every letter and am happy to see every word—it’s impossible to feel otherwise when you’re isolated!

Many people write to me that I am famous. But my loud fame only reaches me as a weak echo. Quickly, in 10-15 minutes I leaf through the many publications about me when I meet my lawyer. I read them without properly realizing or believing that all of it is happening to me: gigs and parties in my honor, the support of the brilliant artists, “The Golden Mask” [a prestigious national theater award] given to me by Ksenia Sorokina (whom I haven’t even been able to thank personally yet). It’s as if all of this were happening in a different, upside-down world. The attitude towards me here in the detention center is far from paying me any honors and respects: I have to put my hands behind my back or face the wall whenever uniformed employees pass by, and even the prison psychotherapist does not know what “The Golden Mask” is.

I keep joking with myself that it’s my award for the performance Detention in Jail. The price tags protest action is not original, even though at the beginning of the war I had a similar idea—the mockup that I saw on a Telegram-channel was made by a person whom I do not know, and however much I’d like to share a tiny bit of my fame with her or him, I’ll prefer for that person to still be in the safety of anonymity. Other people, whom I do not know, have done the same thing with the same mockup in other cities… But it was my detention—this and precisely this—as an extreme performative gesture that has made a lot of my humanistic and peaceful-loving art (music, writing, drawings) visible and has spread the ideas of pacifism, which the society today needs so much.

III

My appeal hearing is scheduled, the date is May 17. Although I don’t have much faith in it changing anything. Because the situation is absurd. My investigators suggest that I must be judged for spreading some kind of fake information—but had this case been never opened, this very information would never have reached anyone but the lady who has reported me to the police. And because of the investigation, a hundred thousand (or even more) people all over the WORLD have learned about this! Under this logic, my investigators should be prosecuted under the same charges. Or what about Proskuriakov’s [the case investigator] statement that while I’m free, I am capable of “destabilizing the society”? But in whose way would I get under house arrest, peacefully making music, embracing my beloved girlfriend and my cat? There wouldn’t have been a fraction of this fuss and disruption. If you ask me, the society has been destabilized far more by the fact that I ended up in the Detention Center No. 5. Rumor has it, even the Detention Center No. 5 is not so happy about that either—just imagine how many hours of work just checking my mail takes :o

Dear esteemed prosecution, investigations, and court, please return me to my friends and loved ones, colleagues, readers and listeners; free the Detention Center No. 5 and other potential places of my imprisonment from the necessity to retain my scandalous nature in their custody—and many-many-many people will have kind words for you!