From a dining car to prison for 6.5 years. The story of political prisoner Mikhail Simonov, 64, a railroad worker who is jailed for two blog posts

Since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion in Ukraine, the number of political prisoners in Russia—especially those opposing the war—has exploded. Much of our effort goes towards simply finding these people in prisons. Sometimes, other political prisoners help us with that. That was the case with Mikhail Simonov, a pensioner who received a severe sentence for two anti-war posts on social media.

Last winter, almost by accident, Mediazona reporters came across mention of 63-year-old Mikhail Simonov. At that time, we knew only one thing: he was in a pre-trial detention centre, charged with spreading “fake news” about the Russian army. This charge alone made him a political prisoner.

We attended Simonov’s court hearing and saw a confused elderly man who obviously did not fully understand what was happening. Nevertheless, he tried his best to defend himself. We also saw his court-appointed lawyer who openly sabotaged his defence.

It became clear that Mikhail, who wasn’t a public figure, could not reach out to human rights defenders and urgently needed a proper lawyer. A lawyer was found quickly, but it took more than a month to locate Mikhail in Moscow’s detention centres. Usually, when you need to find someone, knowing only the city where they were arrested, you send letters to all the jails there. When you receive a reply, you know where the person is being held.

As it turned out, Mikhail Simonov was in Butyrka, a famous and very old pre-trial detention centre in Moscow. However, when we wrote to Butyrka, they responded that he wasn’t held there: immediately after our letter arrived, Mikhail was suddenly told to gather his few prison belongings and was transferred to another jail.

Fortunately, it turned out to be the Vodnik pre-trial detention centre, where Mikhail met another political prisoner, Dmitry Ivanov, with whom I was also in contact. “I found him,” Dmitry wrote to us with joy. He knew that Mediazona had been searching for Simonov for weeks.

Ivanov fondly called Simonov his “comrade in charge.” They were prosecuted under the same article of the criminal code: spreading “fake news” about the Russian army. Simonov, unaccustomed to attention behind bars, gratefully accepted the support. But they met when Dmitry Ivanov’s trial was coming to an end: the prosecution had requested a nine-year prison sentence for him.

“Mikhail is 40 years older than me,” Dmitry wrote us. “He has been seriously ill for several weeks. He isn’t sleeping well. And he doesn’t have any hope for a better future. When he learned how much time the prosecution was requesting for me, he said that such a term would mean a life sentence for him.”

When our first letter reached Mikhail, asking if he would like another defence counsel, he replied instantly: “You have no idea how much I need a proper lawyer, but I don’t know where to get one.” By that time, he had already gone through two court-appointed lawyers. One had persuaded him to plead guilty; the other had simply extorted money from him. As Simonov wrote to me, it was “a six-figure sum,” although the attorney was obligated to work without charge.

We also asked if he would like us to send him anything: food or other goods. “Is that the most important thing in my situation? Of course, the old man wouldn’t mind some tobacco and sweets, but never mind that... It’s a bit embarrassing,” Mikhail wrote back. He crossed out the phrase about sweets, but it was still possible to make out the writing.

After multiple attempts, we finally established that he lacked two things: chocolate and books. At first, Mikhail was embarrassed, denied it, and even promised to return the money for the parcels after his release, “sooner or later.” But eventually, we were able to overcome this embarrassment.

Mikhail shared his life story: he is originally from Voronezh, a city on the Volga River 480 kilometres south of Moscow. Before his arrest, he had lived with his wife in Belarus and had two daughters and four grandchildren. He was a railway worker who worked in a restaurant car on a long-distance train, occasionally passing through Moscow, where he didn’t even have a home. Between shifts, he slept either directly in the train car or at Moscow friends’ homes. He was arrested at one such apartment on November 9, 2022. Law enforcement officers broke in to conduct a search, cutting through the door with bolt cutters.

The reason for this was two posts Mikhail made on VK, Russia’s biggest social network. He wrote them in March 2022, in the first month of the full-scale war.

“Killing children and women, we sing songs on Channel One. We, Russia, have become godless. Forgive us, Lord!” read the first post. The second one had the words “Russian pilots are bombing children” above a photograph of the Mariupol Drama Theatre.

Expert linguists for the prosecution tried to find a so-called “motive” for “political hatred” in the railway worker’s posts. They tried so hard that they decided to examine his pre-war posts as well. For example, phrases like this: “There is no forgiveness for Putin’s crimes.” Or: “Two tyrants agreed to destroy Belarus.” And four other posts in which he criticised Putin and Lukashenka.

As the prosecution puts it, “two concerned citizens and social network users” found these posts. Their names were Anna Gell and Natalia Plotnikova. Though not acquainted with each other, they allegedly “accidentally came across” Mikhail Simonov’s posts “discrediting the Russian Armed Forces” on the same day. Without collusion, both women decided to contact the Investigative Committee.

As Anna Gell said during her interrogation, she doesn’t like it when people publicly speak out “against the authorities and the state.” Plotnikova complained to the investigator that she was annoyed by—quote—“the huge lump of liberalism” on social media. In court, she cried and said she did not believe in the Russian army’s crimes in Ukraine.

It took three attempts to open the case against Simonov. Twice the investigator Tarasova refused to initiate the case “due to the lack of corpus delicti in the actions of Simonov.” Only when her superiors grew tired of her persistence was the case simply transferred to another investigator, Semenova. It was on her orders that Mikhail Simonov’s home was searched and he was immediately sent to a pre-trial detention centre.

The investigation and trial of his case took four months. In spring 2023, prosecutor Bogatyreva asked the court to sentence Mikhail to seven years in prison, explaining that his posts contained “not peace signs and flowers, but calls for the collapse of the Russian Federation.”

When Simonov heard the prosecutor’s speech, his face initially changed. But he quickly composed himself and delivered a stunning closing statement. Among other things, he said:

“I have always believed and still believe that human life has unconditional value and should be the first priority, although in our country they do not think so. But I was brought up this way. Let me give you a small example from my childhood, which I have always remembered. My mother was a little girl in besieged Leningrad. She told me how she took her dead parents on sledges along the Neva River to bury them. How she then experienced this terrible Great Patriotic War, the World War, and hoped that this was the last war. I still have these words in my head—from a song or something—‘My darling, what if there were no war.’ Mom used to say that too.”

The court was unmoved by these words—and on March 30, 2023, Simonov was sentenced to seven years in prison, exactly as requested by the prosecution.

After the verdict came the difficult transfer to the penal colony in Pokrov, Vladimir region, 110 kilometres or 68 miles from Moscow. Simonov was taken there via Nizhny Novgorod and Chuvashia. But there were positive developments too. Mikhail, along with four other Russian political prisoners, was awarded the Boris Nemtsov Prize for “courage in defending democratic rights and freedoms.” Dozens of people wrote to him with words of support. Volunteers collected donations for him. European students learned of his case and even organised events in his support. In January 2024, the Court of Cassation reduced his sentence by six months, to six and a half years in a penal colony.

Life in prison is obviously very difficult for 64-year-old Simonov. His letters sometimes convey despair. He writes that he tries to “withdraw into a shell”—on such days he often dreams of his train, his restaurant car, and the railway. Mikhail began composing poetry in prison. It’s very dark: he writes about the black sun outside his window, black robes on people around him, and a black bird that calls for him. He says, “prison has already settled inside me.”

He desperately needs support. The best way to provide this is to write him a letter.