Hi, this is Yulia Selikhova. Today, Verstka published my major investigation into how...

Hi, this is Yulia Selikhova. Today, Verstka published my major investigation into how and why political prisoners have gone on hunger strike over the past 20 years.

When I began working on this topic, I had a hypothesis. Intuitively, it seemed to me that after 2022–2023, hunger strikes had become almost routine. Almost every week there are reports that one political prisoner or another has refused food in a pretrial detention center or prison colony. I thought this was connected to the overall rise in persecution in the country.

My hypothesis was only partly confirmed. After compiling a huge spreadsheet of hunger strikes with nearly 300 rows, I saw that even before 2022, dozens of people had refused food — but back then they did so to protest unlawful administrative arrests.

In recent years, however, hunger strikes are no longer a search for a fair hearing, but an attempt to secure more tolerable conditions in pretrial detention centers and colonies. “After 2022, people have had less hope,” Evgeny Smirnov, a lawyer with Pervy Otdel, told me — and it turned out that this trend can be traced, among other things, by counting and analyzing political prisoners’ hunger strikes.

To work on this piece, I had been corresponding with political prisoners since last fall, trying to guess which wording would get past the Federal Penitentiary Service censors, rereading Alexei Navalny’s diary entries published after his death in the book Patriot, and speaking with experts.

The final piece is the result of our whole team’s work. Three Verstka fact-checkers checked my huge spreadsheet with six hands; the editor advised me on how to fit all the collected material into a readable text; and the distribution team thought through how to promote the piece — thank you all!

Although the topic is sad and heavy, the text turned out to be not only about darkness, but also about strong-willed and brave people who, year after year, consistently defend the ideas of justice and their own and others’ rights. Even in prison.

You can read the piece on Verstka’s website (with a VPN):

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Verstka

“From the inside, it’s simple: you have no other methods of struggle.” How political prisoners go on hunger strike and what comes of it

Verstka analyzed hunger strikes declared in detention since 2005 and found out what path is taken by people who refuse food — and sometimes water