Meet the volunteers bringing education to Russian political prisoners through letters
More than three years into the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian prisons continue to fill with people jailed for speaking out against the war and the authorities. As of August 2025, more than 1,700 people were behind bars on political charges, according to the human rights project OVD-Info. Their mail is censored, making contact with the outside world painfully limited. Yet, something unexpected has begun to slip through the cracks: sketches and diagrams, math problems, philosophical texts, and even language exercises. Behind these handwritten lessons is a new volunteer-run initiative that connects inmates with teachers around the world, turning education into a quiet form of resistance in a country where open dissent can cost people their freedom. For Meduza, journalist Inna Bondarenko explains how the project brings education — and a glimpse of hope — to Russia’s political prisoners.
When Sasha (name changed) opened the envelope in his prison cell, he didn’t know what to expect. Inside lay several pages and an assignment: “Can you estimate the pressure you’d create by stepping on the ground — on the moon? To keep it simple, let’s assume you have flat feet.”
Jailed for speaking out against Vladimir Putin, Sasha is learning aerodynamics by mail. His lessons are organized by Free Auditors, a volunteer project that teaches political prisoners through a letter‑exchange network. As Russia’s prisons fill with people jailed for their speech and the country’s political opposition scatters, the Free Auditors initiative is an example of how ordinary people can rally around safe — yet profoundly political — causes. The project’s organizers see every mailed worksheet as a “weapon of the weak”: an everyday act of resistance when open protest is too risky.
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Free Auditors, like many Russians émigré initiatives, was born at a kitchen table — this one in Berlin in 2023. Its founder, Elina Novopashennaia, moved to Germany in 2021 to study linguistics and cinema. Elina had never considered herself an activist. But all that changed when opposition politician Alexey Navalny was arrested in January 2021.
In the weeks that followed, Elina joined Telegram groups for volunteers to coordinate 3:00 a.m. drop-offs of food, power banks, and hygiene kits for people detained at pro-Navalny protests. “I was amazed that people would drop everything to help a stranger,” she says. “It showed me how Russians can self‑mobilize when they believe someone is in need.”
During that first kitchen table talk in 2023, Elina and her friends discussed the ever-tightening repression back home: new laws, harsher sentences, fresh arrests. Headlines that once would have stunned them had become normalized, fading into background noise. Still, the diaspora kept finding ways to help political prisoners, from raising money and hiring lawyers to organizing letter‑writing nights. Writing to inmates had become a go‑to act of solidarity for Russians abroad, with gatherings dedicated to the practice held every week worldwide.
What hadn’t yet become routine was the jailing of children. After Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian authorities began regularly convicting teenagers on charges such as terrorism, sabotage, and state treason. That jolted Elina and her friends. Stripped of an ordinary adolescence, these kids were also cut off from learning. But if the state wouldn’t teach them, maybe someone outside could.
A casual question from Elina’s friend — “Why not teach prisoners?” — both thrilled and terrified her. “If I commit to this,” she remembers thinking, “I have to see it through.” She spent the next year researching prison rules, partnering with diaspora civil-society groups, and learning from initiatives supporting political prisoners in Belarus. Elina formally launched the project in the summer of 2024, recruiting volunteer teachers — some seasoned activists, others simply moved by the idea — both inside and outside Russia.
Today, the project has more than 30 teachers, each paired with prisoners based on the subjects they’re interested in — from history, chemistry, and foreign languages, to programming, dialectology, and even sewing. Volunteers include undergrads, master’s students, and PhD candidates from institutions like Moscow State University, Russia’s Higher School of Economics, the Sorbonne, Oxford, and Columbia.
To find potential students, Elina and her colleagues pull names from databases maintained by organizations that track political prisoners — lists that grow by the day as new, draconian sentences are handed down. According to OVD-Info, a Russian human rights organization, over 1,700 people are currently imprisoned in Russia on politically motivated charges. Offenses range from “discrediting the army” in social media posts to membership in “undesirable” groups like Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.
Teaching through censorship
Each student-teacher pairing within Free Auditors starts when either a prisoner or their family or friends contact the project’s team with a subject request. These requests are remarkably diverse: one student even asked for Elvish language lessons. Volunteers then pair the student with a suitable teacher, and the exchange begins. Teachers print lesson packets and mail them in; prisoners reply by hand. To keep this flow going, the team relies on donations: about 27,000 rubles ($335) covers nearly 100 letters for 28 students. The teachers and students exchange letters about once a week, though the timing depends on each prison facility — and its censors.
Officially, Russian censors block anything that could supposedly hinder an investigation, aid a crime, encrypt a message, or reveal state secrets. In practice, they also withhold letters containing profanity, insults to officials, case details, foreign words, talk of war or politics, and even the names of cellmates. Sometimes censors block mail simply to punish a prisoner. In 2023, opposition politician Vladimir Kara‑Murza said prison censors had effectively cut off all of his written communications, even though his messages to family contained nothing that even Russia could construe as sensitive.
In the face of this strict censorship, Elina’s team thoroughly researched best practices and came up with their own creative ways to keep the letters moving. Volunteer teachers have learned to navigate the restrictions: for example, replacing the phrase “Putin to the Hague” with code phrases like “Sutin to Sague,” or providing Russian translations alongside foreign‑language texts so censors know exactly what they’re approving. Now and then, even passages that blatantly criticize the Russian authorities make it past the gatekeepers. One workaround: swap the name in question for Voldemort, as one student did in a letter to Elina after finishing Harry Potter:
In truth, the tyrant [Voldemort] is a quivering creature, terrified of any hint of uniqueness. He lies in wait for the next brave soul, eager to crush them at the first chance — and in doing so, only breeds more courage. Consider how deeply he fears those he persecutes, and how small he truly is.
Even when letters slip past the censors, there’s another complication: prisoner transfers. It’s not unusual for inmates to be moved from region to region or shuffled between prisons, and their mail doesn’t always follow. At times, political inmates simply “disappear,” forcing families to hunt down their whereabouts on their own.
‘I forgot I was in prison’
By now, more than a thousand letters have already passed through bars as part of Free Auditors. For many prisoners, they are a lifeline. One of them wrote to their teacher:
I can’t describe my joy. I got your letter and, for a few hours, forgot I was in prison. Only when lights-out came three and a half hours later did I snap back and remember where I was — but the joy and good mood you gave me lasted a whole week. For that, I’m grateful.
Another one of the prisoners chose to study political science. His first lesson, on Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, concerned an issue that’s painfully relevant inside a cell: the limits of the state and the problem of justice. His assignment was to consider John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance”: What rules would you choose for a society if you didn’t know the position you’d be born into?
“I’m all good, there’s nothing to complain about. How are you?” he started his letter. Then, he turned to the question: “I believe that equal distribution of goods and equal opportunities are very important,” he wrote. “But it’s very important not just to take and ask for things, but also to give.”
Free Auditor volunteers are already looking to the future. They want the lessons to count for Bologna Process credits so that, once released, former prisoners can enroll abroad with recognized coursework. And when every political prisoner is free? “Then we’ll throw a huge graduation party,” says Elina. “Until that day, we will keep teaching.”
Story by Inna Bondarenko