Prisioneiros políticos de Putin - Joy Neumeyer (The New York Review of Books)

Prisioneiros políticos de Putin

Joy Neumeyer (The New York Review of Books) 

Russian human rights organizations estimate that there may be as many as 10,000 political prisoners scattered across the country’s penal colonies. Last summer, Joy Neumeyer wrote to fourteen of these imprisoned dissidents, unsure whether anyone would even receive her messages. To her surprise, some of them wrote back, enclosing heartfelt, roving reflections on their childhoods, their political awakenings, their last moments of freedom, and how they feel about their antiwar activities now. In our March 13 issue, Neumeyer writes about this “hidden archipelago of opposition that has endured and adapted” since Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In that time, the Kremlin has tightened speech restrictions to such a degree that anyone can be imprisoned for “discrediting” or “intentionally spreading false information” about the military—statutes broadly construed to include any criticism of the army’s actions in Ukraine. Some of those imprisoned have been convicted on the strength of pseudonymous social media posts.

Neumeyer, who received a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley, is a journalist and historian of Russia and Eastern Europe and has been reporting from the region on and off for the last fifteen years. Her writing has appeared in the New Left Review, The New York Times, and The Nation. Her book A Survivor’s Education: Women, Violence, and the Stories We Don’t Tell, an investigative memoir about domestic abuse, came out last year.

Last week I wrote to Neumeyer to ask about working with vulnerable sources, interviewing via correspondence, and the challenges of covering Eastern Europe in this time of upheaval.