Copyright The New York Times
When Aleksandra Skochilenko affixed five bogus price tags bearing antiwar slogans to the shelves in her grocery store in St. Petersburg, Russia, she did not anticipate receiving a seven-year jail sentence, much less that her term would be cut short by the biggest prisoner swap between the Kremlin and the West since the Cold War. Now living in Berlin, Ms. Skochilenko, who goes by the name Sasha, holds that even if the experience left her psychologically bruised, she would do it again. “The values of freedom of speech, of peace, could be more important than spending even 10 years in jail,” she said in an interview, comparing her experience with that of Antigone, the tragic Greek heroine who perishes for defying what she sees as an immoral order by the King of Thebes. Ms. Skochilenko, who lives with her longtime Russian partner, Sonya Subbotina, is a sometime painter, musician and aficionado of 1960s American hippie culture. She has just published a memoir, “My Prison Trip,” illustrated with her own naïve, cartoonish drawings. It includes her impassioned statement in court in November 2023, just before being sentenced, a lengthy indictment of the Russian judicial system as an instrument of repression. “How fragile must be the prosecutor’s belief in our state and society, if he thinks our statehood and public safety can be brought down by five small pieces of paper?” she said. “No one was hurt by my actions, yet I’ve been incarcerated for over a year and a half now, alongside murderers, thieves, statutory rapists and pimps. Can the supposed harm I caused even compare to those crimes?”
