On July 3, from inside Russian prison colonies, 11 political prisoners—including Marxist sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky, anti-war student Darya Kozyreva, and anarchist mathematician Azat Miftakhov—made an urgent appeal to world leaders: Any ceasefire or peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine must include the mass release of Russia’s political prisoners and Ukrainian civilian hostages.

“There are at least 10,000 of us,” they declare. “We are all punished for one thing—for taking a civic stance.”

Ilya Shakursky, Andrei Trofimov, Alexander Shestun, Alexei Gorinov, Vladmir Domnin, Anna Arkhipova, Artem Kamardin and Dmitry Pchelintsev were also among the signatories.

Their plea comes from within a justice system that imposes long sentences for oppositional expression, where verdicts are decided in advance and acquittals in political cases are nonexistent. It underscores the authoritarian turn Russia has taken since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than three years ago. Since then, the regime of President Vladimir Putin has passed more than 60 new repressive statutes on top of the 50 already enacted since 2018, weaponizing the legal code to squash dissent.

The charges before the current judicial system—whether “justifying terrorism,” “discrediting the armed forces,” or participating in “extremist” groups—are designed not to prosecute real crimes but to enforce obedience. The scale of repression doesn’t match Stalin’s, but the motive is the same: clamp down on critical expression, whether deliberate, inadvertent, actual or potential. The result is a Kafkaesque machine that imprisons thought and crushes opposition.

Boris Kagarlitsky is perhaps Russia’s most prominent leftist intellectual, a Marxist critic of both Western imperialism and Putin’s domestic authoritarianism. In 2023, he was sentenced to five years in a penal colony. His offense? An ironic comment, on his popular social media channel, about the Crimean bridge explosion, a joke he admitted landed poorly. But irony is no defense in Putin’s Russia. Prosecutors argued that Kagarlitsky was “justifying terrorism.”

Others received similar or harsher punishment. Darya Kozyreva, then just 18, was sentenced to more than two years for laying flowers at a monument to Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, deemed an act of “discrediting the army.” It could have been worse: calling the Special Military Operation a war can result in 10 years in prison. Artist Sasha Skochilenko faced years in prison for replacing supermarket price tags with anti-war messages. Though she was later freed in a rare prisoner exchange, her case typifies the criminalization of expression.

The talented pianist Pavel Kushnir wasn’t so lucky. He died five days into a dry hunger strike in a prison cell on Karl Marx Street in Birobidzhan. He was accused under the article on “public calls for terrorist activity” and jailed for uploading four blurry anti-war videos on his YouTube channel, which had five subscribers.

Kagarlitsky’s case drew international attention. Kushnir was almost unknown, like thousands of other activists, artists, teenagers, socialists, anarchists, communists, and pacifists—imprisoned in obscurity, often under abysmal conditions.

According to Memorial, the human rights group now banned in Russia, there are at least 3,000 known political prisoners in the country—the highest number since the Brezhnev era. Some human rights monitors estimate that the real number of politically persecuted individuals exceeds 20,000, including many in occupied Ukrainian territories. The Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group has documented more than 5,000 cases of enforced disappearance in these regions.