I post this with a big ask: please share it!
There are political prisoners whose names are not mentioned often and so they have few chances of making it onto prisoner exchange lists.
In a nutshell: political prisoner Lyubov “Lyuba” Lizunova, who is now nineteen years old, was arrested along with her boyfriend Alexander “Sasha” Snezhkov in 2022, when she was sixteen and still in high school (Sasha was nineteen at the time). This is the so-called Case of the Chita Anarchists or the Case of the Transbaikal Leftist Association. Why were they arrested? For writing the graffiti “Death to the regime” on the wall of a co-op garage on the outskirts of Chita, and for moderating Antifa Telegram channels. She was the drummer, and he was the vocalist in a band. They recorded songs and played concerts. . . . Lyuba was originally sentenced to three and a half years behind bars; Sasha, to six years. They are both behind bars now: Sasha is in prison in Krasnokamensk, while Lyuba is in a penal colony in Ulan-Ude.
I have been corresponding with Lyuba. The last letter I got from her arrived yesterday, the twentieth of January.
Now here’s the bottom line.
The very same day, yesterday, a court ruled that the Transbaikal Leftist Association is a “terrorist” organization, and named Lyuba and Sasha as its organizers and leaders. This means that they could be charged with, and found guilty of, violating Russian Federal Criminal Code Article 205.5 [“organizing and participating in the activities of a terrorist organization”].
The penalty for violating this law is fifteen to twenty years in prison. If she is convicted on the new charges, Lyuba Lizunova could be released in the 2040s.
The 2040s!
She will be around thirty-nine years old.
She wrote me a letter earlier, on the sixteenth of January:
“I don’t know what to expect. […] It’s a rather hefty sentence for a social media post and a bit of graffiti, right? I’m slowly shedding my usual calm confidence that I’ll be released on 19.02.2027. Don’t think I’m complaining or being dramatic—it’s just the way it is. The prisoner transport is also not clear. I will go either this month, or in March. The trip to Yaroslavl is long: it will take two months, including stops, just to get there, and the same amount of time for the return trip. I need to stock up somehow. […] Everything is kind of shaky and unreliable. The only things which are strong are ideals, principles, and love.”
I would argue that very young people should be at the top of the prisoner exchange lists, that we should drag children, schoolchildren, and university students out of prisons by any means necessary. These prison sentences are Stalinist [in their severity].
Actually, this is my main point. What follows are personal details.
I will later publish excerpts from Lyuba’s letters if she permits it.
While Lyuba was jailed in the pretrial detention center, she studied for the Unified State Exam and managed to finish eleventh grade. (I don’t know how she managed that.) During the ten months in jail and later, during the long prisoner transport (in a Stolypin wagon and paddy wagon) to the penal colony in Tomsk and then to Chita, she read about one hundred books (all of Solzhenitsyn, Kafka, Schopenhauer, Aristotle, Frankl, and Dante—basically, whatever she could find). She has no time to read that much in the penal colony, although she has recently been reading Anna Seghers: she has only one day off, and that day she is kept busy with “squad” assignments. But she asked me to send her something to read; I’ll try to send something, I’ve never done it before. She is the “detachment artist,” so she designs all the holiday celebrations, posters, and props. She writes poetry for her own amusement and sometimes borrows a guitar from a “local lady.” In the next barracks, someone has a synthesizer.
I am including these details on purpose, as they make it possible to visualize Lyuba’s story: the daily lifestyle, including sewing and cleaning the premises; eating Dosirac instant noodles (Lyuba is a vegetarian and cannot eat the food served in the penal colony, because everything is cooked in a meat broth); and the nitty-gritty of the prisoner transports.
Strikingly, Remembrance Day for the Victims of Political Repression was observed at Lyuba’s penal colony: she drew a poster for the occasion. Actually, our correspondence and acquaintance began that same day: I chose her letter from a long list of letters from other political prisoners to read aloud at our Returning the Names event. It had a particularly poignant ring. I later realized why she takes the Stalinist crackdowns so personally. She wrote to me that her great-grandfather was a bigwig in the Chita KGB. When she was taken to FSB headquarters for interrogations, she was escorted past a stand dedicated to him, featuring a framed portrait, documents, and awards. It sounds like a movie—a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl being led down a corridor past a portrait of her great-grandfather—but it isn’t a movie.
If you have ideas about who can publicize this case, or who can help make the media cover the cases of very young political prisoners, please write to me. And write letters to them, please.
https://memopzk.org/figurant/lizunova-lyubov-vitalevna
FKU IK-7 UFSIN of Russia in the Republic of Buryatia • Lyubov Vitalyevna Lizunova (born 2006)
Source: Alexandra Selivanova (Facebook), 21 January 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader. Since letters to Russian prisoners are vetted by prison censors, they must be written in Russian or translated into Russian, something that can done more or less decently using an online machine translator. ||||| TRR
A court in Russia’s Transbaikal region has designated the informal youth group known as the Transbaikal Left Association (ZLO) as a terrorist organisation and banned its activities nationwide.
According to the ruling by the Transbaikal Regional Court, the group, which was founded in 2019, operated with its own symbols and maintained pages on social media. The court concluded that elements of terrorist activity were present in its actions, as outlined in a lawsuit brought by prosecutors, Caliber.Az reports via Russian media.
The case named Alexander Snezhkov and Lyubov Lizunova, described by authorities as the group’s unofficial leaders, as defendants. Snezhkov was sentenced to six years in prison, while Lizunova received a sentence of three and a half years. They were convicted on charges including vandalism, incitement to terrorism, and extremism.
Snezhkov rejected the accusations, stating that ZLO functioned primarily as an information platform through which he expressed his personal views. At the same time, he acknowledged that in 2022 he had asked Lizunova to prepare a post that he later published online. He said he subsequently deleted the post after realising that it could be interpreted as justifying terrorist activity, including attacks on military enlistment offices.
