When words become walls: russia's political prisoners and the unfinished sentence of dissidence
- Marie-Aude Tardivo
- 19 juin
- 9 min de lecture
From the Gulag to Putin's prisons — what the latest reports tell us, and why a translator's ear changes everything
There is a sentence Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote that I have never been able to shake loose from my mind. Not because it is beautiful — though it is — but because it is true in the way that only sentences forged inside suffering can be true. He wrote it in the margins of a life spent in the Gulag, in the Arctic cold of a labour camp, in the particular silence that descends when the state decides that a man's words are dangerous enough to warrant his disappearance. I first encountered it during my doctoral research on Soviet political dissidence, poring over The Gulag Archipelago and Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales in the original Russian — two monuments of testimony that changed not only literature, but the moral conscience of the twentieth century. I was young then. I thought the Gulag was history.
I was wrong.
The latest reports from human rights organisations confirm what many feared: the machinery of political repression in Russia has not merely survived — it has accelerated. And for those of us who have spent years translating the words of the persecuted, who have sat across a table from men and women who survived Soviet camps, the numbers are not statistics. They are sentences. Unfinished sentences.
The numbers that should not exist in 2026
As of 29 December 2025, there were at least 4,884 political prisoners in Russia and the occupied Ukrainian territories. The figure comes from a January 2026 report by the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies, authored by Martin Kragh — and it is, by the author's own admission, likely an undercount. The hardening of Russia's political climate has created more favourable conditions for a foreign policy based on coercion, threats, and military aggression.
In 2025, the number of convictions under the article on treason (Article 275 of the Criminal Code) that came into force in the first half of 2025 almost doubled compared to the same period of 2024 (115 vs. 55). Under the article on confidential cooperation with foreign nationals (Article 275.1), 24 people were already convicted in the first half of 2025.
📊 At least 4,884 - Political prisoners in Russia and occupied Ukraine
These are not abstract geopolitical data points. They are people. Writers, journalists, activists, filmmakers, lawyers, teenagers who dropped anti-Putin leaflets into letterboxes. At least 10 political prisoners, like Navalny, died in their cells in 2024.
The ghost of navalny, and what comes after
On 16 February 2024, Alexei Navalny was murdered in one of Russia's roughest prisons. He was serving a 19-year sentence for various crimes, including having founded and led an "extremist organisation" in 2011, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, famous for its uncompromising investigations into the ruling elites.
A UN Special Rapporteur, after two years of silence, denial and obstruction, stated that only an independent international probe can bring truth, justice and accountability. Russia has shown no willingness to conduct a credible investigation. In February 2026, five European states filed a formal claim alleging that Navalny was subjected to extrajudicial killing. The Kremlin denied everything. It always does.
📊 At least 10 in 2024 alone - Deaths in Russian political detention
What strikes me, translating these reports from Russian into French, is how familiar the language of repression remains. The same euphemisms. The same bureaucratic coldness. Felt unwell after a walk. Could not be resuscitated. Shalamov wrote about this kind of language in the 1950s — the way the Soviet administration transformed death into administrative inconvenience. Seventy years later, the vocabulary is identical. Only the fonts have changed.
Kara-murza, sentsov, and the lineage of witness
Vladimir Kara-Murza — journalist, filmmaker, protégé of the murdered Boris Nemtsov — survived two poisoning attempts before being arrested in 2022. Following a closed-door trial at the Moscow City Court, he was sentenced to 25 years for "high treason" and kept in solitary confinement at a maximum-security prison in Siberia. He was released in August 2024 as part of the largest East-West prisoner exchange since the Cold War, negotiated by the U.S. and German governments. Kara-Murza is a contributing writer at the Washington Post, winning the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for his columns written from prison.
I think of Natalia Gorbanevskaya, whom I had the extraordinary privilege of meeting — one of the eight brave souls who stood in Red Square in 1968 to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, a poem tucked in her pram, a KGB officer already moving toward her before the ink was dry. She spent years in a Soviet psychiatric prison. She never stopped writing. She told me once, in her quiet, precise way, that the most dangerous thing a poet can do is remain legible — to keep producing language that the state cannot distort into silence.
Kara-Murza, writing his Pulitzer-winning columns from solitary confinement in Siberia, remained legible. So did Oleg Sentsov, the Ukrainian filmmaker from Crimea who was arrested in 2014, sentenced to twenty years on fabricated terrorism charges, and who spent five years in Russian captivity before being exchanged in 2019. Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Sentsov joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces and has been taking part in multiple battles of the war. In 2024, he released Real, a documentary he filmed during a battle in the early days of the war. From prisoner to soldier to filmmaker — the arc of his life is a kind of testimony that no subtitles can fully render. Some things must be felt before they can be translated.
Anna politkovskaya's heirs: journalism as dissidence
Anna Politkovskaya (1958–2006) was a Russian journalist and human rights activist who reported on political events in Russia, in particular the Second Chechen War. She was shot dead in the lift of her Moscow apartment building on 7 October 2006 — Vladimir Putin's birthday. Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper where she worked and which had given a voice to the voiceless for decades, was shut down in March 2022, days after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Her legacy lives on, stubbornly, in the journalists who continue her work in exile — Elena Milashina, who survived a brutal attack in Chechnya in 2023, and the constellation of Russian independent media that now operate from Riga, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Paris. I translate their words sometimes. It is a particular kind of responsibility: to carry across a border, in another language, the testimony of people who risked everything to produce it.
📊 Over 50 confirmed cases - Russian journalists murdered since 1992
The gulag was not a metaphor
When I wrote my doctoral thesis on Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago and Shalamov's Kolyma Tales, my supervisor — a formidable Slavicist with a dry sense of humour — warned me against what he called "metaphor creep": the tendency of Western scholars to treat the Gulag as a symbol, a trope, a rhetorical device, rather than what it was. A system. A bureaucracy. A place where real human beings were worked and starved and frozen to death by the million.
I met Vladimir Boukovsky once, briefly, at a conference in London. He had the particular stillness of someone who has been through something that most people cannot imagine — thirteen years in Soviet prisons, psychiatric hospitals, and labour camps — and come out the other side not broken, but refined, like metal under extreme heat. He spoke about Shalamov with a reverence I recognised: the reverence of a survivor for a witness.
Myroslav Marynovych, the Ukrainian dissident I was fortunate enough to meet in Kyiv, served seven years in Soviet camps for his work with the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. He told me something I have carried ever since: that the difference between the Gulag and what is happening in Russia today is not one of kind, but of visibility. The Gulag was hidden. Today's repression is performed — broadcast, even — because the performance itself is the message. We are watching. We can reach you. Your words will cost you.
> "Each man is crossed by a line that is the border between good and evil. It belongs to each of us to choose every day on which side of that line we wish to stand."
> — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Why this concerns you — wherever you are
In 2025, the total number of politically motivated criminal cases decreased and returned to pre-war levels. However, the year 2025 saw three times more convictions in politically motivated cases than there were before the war. The repression has not diminished — it has simply become more efficient, more opaque, harder to track.
As of the latest OVD-Info data, 2,173 people are imprisoned in Russia for political reasons, with 4,796 currently facing politically motivated criminal proceedings.
And here is the question I ask myself every time I sit down to translate a testimony, a documentary, a court transcript, a poem smuggled out of a detention centre: Who will carry these words across?
Translation is not a neutral act. When I render into French the testimony of a Ukrainian poet imprisoned for writing in her mother tongue — as Irina Ratushinskaya was, sentenced to seven years of hard labour in 1983 for her poems — I am not merely performing a linguistic operation. I am making a choice about what survives. About what the world gets to know. About which silences are filled and which are allowed to deepen.
The Gulag was built, in part, on the destruction of language. Books were burned. Manuscripts were confiscated. Writers were sent to places where the cold was so severe that ink froze before it could reach the page. Shalamov wrote his Kolyma Tales on scraps, in secret, over decades. What we have of his testimony is what survived — and what survived is what was translated, carried across borders, passed from hand to hand.
That is what translators do. We carry what survives.
The audiovisual dimension: giving a voice to the voiceless
There is something specific about audiovisual translation — about subtitling and dubbing — that distinguishes it from literary translation. In a documentary about political prisoners, the voice of a witness is already present: its trembling, its pauses, its silences. My work as an audiovisual translator is not to replace that voice but to make it audible to those who do not share its language. To find, in French, the exact weight of a Russian word spoken under duress. To honour the rhythm of a sentence that was composed under conditions I will never fully comprehend.
The combination of French, Russian, and Ukrainian is rare in the audiovisual industry. I know this because I have spent years navigating a landscape where these three languages — each carrying its own history of persecution, resistance, and survival — are rarely held simultaneously by a single translator. When a French production company wants to subtitle a Ukrainian documentary about the war, or dub a Russian dissident's memoir for a European audience, the need for someone who understands not just the words but the weight of those words is acute.
That is the work I do at www.marieaude.paris. Not just translation — transmission. Not just subtitles — witness.
Chiffres clés / key figures
📊 4,884 political prisoners documented in Russia and occupied Ukraine as of late 2025 (Source: SCEEUS Report, January 2026)
⚖️ 3× more convictions in politically motivated cases in 2025 than before the full-scale war (Source: OVD-Info 2025 Overview)
✍️ 25 years — the sentence handed to Vladimir Kara-Murza for writing the truth about Ukraine (Source: Wikipedia / Washington Post, 2024)
🎬 20 years — the fabricated sentence given to filmmaker Oleg Sentsov for opposing the annexation of Crimea (Source: PEN America)
Questions fréquentes / FAQ
What is the current situation for political prisoners in russia in 2026?
According to the latest data from OVD-Info and the SCEEUS report (January 2026), there are at least 4,884 political prisoners in Russia and the occupied Ukrainian territories, with convictions in politically motivated cases tripling compared to pre-war levels. The repression has become more opaque and harder to monitor, with entire categories of cases — treason, espionage, terrorism — now shielded from public scrutiny.
Who were the key soviet-era dissidents who wrote about the gulag?
The two foundational literary witnesses of the Soviet Gulag are Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago, 1973) and Varlam Shalamov (Kolyma Tales, written across decades of secrecy). Other essential figures include Vladimir Boukovsky, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, Irina Ratushinskaya, and — from Ukraine — Myroslav Marynovych, co-founder of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, who served seven years in Soviet camps.
Why does audiovisual translation matter for human rights documentation?
Documentaries, testimonies, and films about political repression reach audiences that written reports rarely do. Audiovisual translation — subtitling and dubbing — makes these testimonies accessible across languages and cultures. A translator working with French, Russian, and Ukrainian carries a particular responsibility: to render not just words, but the historical and emotional weight of what was said, and by whom, and at what cost.
Who was anna politkovskaya and why does her legacy matter today?
Anna Politkovskaya was a Russian investigative journalist at Novaya Gazeta who reported on the Chechen wars and human rights abuses. She was murdered in Moscow in October 2006. Her legacy endures through the journalists who continue her work in exile, and through the moral standard she set: that bearing witness to state violence is not optional — it is a duty.
What is the connection between soviet gulag literature and contemporary russia?
The connection is direct and structural. The legal mechanisms, the language of repression, the use of psychiatric detention and isolation — all have direct precedents in the Soviet system documented by Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov, and others. Scholars and human rights observers increasingly note that Putin's Russia has not invented a new system of repression; it has rehabilitated and modernised an old one. Understanding the Gulag literature is therefore not merely an academic exercise — it is a key to reading the present.
Marie-Aude is a French audiovisual translator specialising in Russian, Ukrainian, and English for film and television. Her doctoral research focused on political dissidence and Gulag literature. She has met several former Soviet dissidents, including Natalia Gorbanevskaya, Vladimir Boukovsky, and Myroslav Marynovych. Her translation work can be found at [www.marieaude.paris](https://www.marieaude.paris). Her visual and poetic art practice lives at [www.metam8rph8sis.com](https://www.metam8rph8sis.com).
> "As of 29 December 2025, there were at least 4,884 political prisoners in Russia and the occupied Ukrainian territories"
> — SCEEUS Report No. 1, 2026 — Martin Kragh
> "Navalny's death reflects a widespread and systematic strategy of repression within Russia"
> — UN Special Rapporteur Statement, OHCHR
Commentaires