BERLIN — BERLIN (AP) — Andrei Pivovarov knows that 42 days have about 1,000 hours.
Mental arithmetic and silently marking the remaining milestones of his sentence helped the Russian opposition politician survive more than three years in prison, most of which he spent in complete isolation.
“You have no one to talk to, so you think of reasons to celebrate,” Pivovarov said in an interview with the Associated Press. He also became fond of a scrap of his wife’s letter that he made into a bookmark.
Pivovarov was released on August 1 as part of the historic prisoner exchange between East and West and is now seeking a new life in Germany, where he is reunited with his wife Tatjana Usmanowa.
Of all the dissidents Russia has released, 42-year-old Pivovarov has spent the longest time behind bars. He had only about a month left to serve when he was taken from prison in northern Russia and flown to Germany. Usmanova had already begun preparing her apartment in St. Petersburg for his return.
The new reality of the world around him, which was rapidly expanding from a small, lonely cell, overwhelmed him at first. The knowledge that he would not see his homeland for a long time made him depressed at first.
But it’s getting easier, he said, and “the colors are getting brighter every day.”
Pivovarov was arrested in May 2021 – almost a year before President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine and escalated his crackdown on dissent to unprecedented levels.
He was taken off a flight from St. Petersburg to Warsaw while the plane was taxiing on the tarmac. Authorities accused him of activities on behalf of an “undesirable organization” – an opposition group he led – and he was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison.
Pivovarov, who was used to spending short periods in prison, said he realized soon after his detention that it was likely to be short-lived, so he told himself he needed to stay focused and alert – a state of mind that he said helped him endure the rigors of confinement.
Pivovarov served his sentence in Penal Camp No. 7, a notoriously harsh facility in the Karelia region. Also imprisoned there were tycoon and later opposition politician Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Putin critic Ilya Dadin, whose reports of beatings and abuse there made international headlines in 2016.
Immediately after his arrival in January 2023, Pivovarov was isolated from the other inmates and remained so until his release.
He described strict conditions in which officials forced him to follow every rule to the letter, even if it made no sense.
His belongings – food, books, clothing, the files on his criminal case – were weighed to ensure he did not carry more than the permitted 36 kilograms. Minor infractions such as an unbuttoned shirt resulted in punishment. A camera monitored his movements in the cell.
“You have half an hour to brush your teeth. But I only need 10 minutes to brush my teeth and shave. So I started reading a book,” and immediately a guard appeared and made him a note because he had “read a book during the time allotted for brushing his teeth,” Pivovarov recalls.
He also had to clean his cell for two hours every day, regardless of whether it was dirty or not.
Laughing, Pivovarov said he had become an expert at extending mindless wiping into a process that satisfied prison officials and “looked very natural on surveillance cameras.”
Last year, Pivovarov and Usmanova married in a brief ceremony in prison.
While it wasn’t the most romantic setting, it provided Usmanova with the opportunity to see him, including on extended visits where they could spend several days in an apartment-like unit at the facility.
Throughout the trial and subsequent detention, according to Usmanova, she was repeatedly told by various officials that she was “nobody to Andrei.”
“I was excluded from court hearings, Andrei was not even allowed to request a call from me,” she recalls.
It took them weeks to compile the documents, and in July 2023, Usmanova wore a simple white dress to the brief ceremony performed by a registrar in the penal colony’s kitchen.
Usmanova said it was the first time she was able to hug Pivovarov since his arrest more than two years ago.
When he was taken back to his cell, an officer told him, “Whether you are the groom or not, cleaning is not going to take care of itself,” and he went back to mopping.
What made him continue?
A bookmark of a cat that he made from one of Usmanova’s letters and kept without the prison officials noticing. He counted how many thousands of hours of his sentence remained. He watched the news on state television and tried to find out what was really going on outside. He read letters of support. He walked in circles in the prison yard to get some exercise.
With the help of his lawyers, Pivovarov also kept prison officials on their toes by filing complaints about their actions or threatening to do so. The tactic often worked, he says, because penal colonies competed with each other to avoid as many reprimands as possible from the authorities.
Usmanova, herself a former opposition activist, moved to Latvia after the war in Ukraine, but regularly returned to Russia to send Pivovarov care packages and visit him in prison.
She carefully selected the contents of the packages to keep him healthy in a place with poor food and little daylight, and sought advice from doctors and fitness experts.
She was also prepared for things to take a turn for the worse, even as she prepared her St. Petersburg apartment for his release in September.
“Every minute I was expecting a call from the lawyers telling me that Andrei would not be released and that another criminal case would be opened against him,” she said, referring to a common practice among political activists.
Both intended to stay in St. Petersburg, especially since Pivovarov would have to expect parole conditions even after serving his entire prison sentence.
But the exchange changed all their plans.
Like other exchange participants, Pivovarov did not know he was part of an exchange until he was put on a bus to a Moscow airport. His deportation took place without his consent and he said it was hard for him to see the streets of the capital from the bus window, knowing it would be the last time he saw them for a long time.
This sadness continued in the first few days after the exchange, he said.
“I have never felt like a person in my life who has no home and doesn’t know what will happen next,” he added.
Usmanova also said that it was a stressful time for her, even though she was now reunited with her husband. She had lived in uncertainty for three years and moved to Latvia. Now it was “unclear what awaited her in Germany.”
But the more days he counts since his release and the clearer the next steps become, the less frightening the future looks, says Pivovarov.
He plans to resume his political activities against the Kremlin in order to “make those who expelled me regret it,” he said.
He also wants to show the German government that the political risks it took with the prisoner exchange – the exchange of the convicted Russian assassin Vadim Krasikov for the released dissidents to Moscow – were not in vain.
Pivovarov said he wanted to show his hosts that “the guy they took in showed the authorities who deported him that this will be their undoing.”
