Longest-held Russian dissident freed in swap says ‘colors get brighter by the day’ in his new life

BERLIN (AP) — Andrei Pivovarov knows there are about 1,000 hours in 42 days.

Doing the math in his head and quietly marking milestones left in his sentence helped the Russian opposition politician survive more than three years in prison, much of it spent in complete isolation.

“You have no one to talk to, so you come up with causes” for celebration, Pivovarov said in an interview with The Associated Press. A scrap of a letter from his wife fashioned into a bookmark also became precious to him.

Freed on Aug. 1 in the historic East-West prisoner swap, Pivovarov now is figuring out a new life in Germany, where he reunited with his wife, Tatyana Usmanova.

Of all the dissidents Russia released, Pivovarov, 42, spent the most time behind bars. He had only about a month left to serve when he was plucked from the prison in northern Russia and flown to Germany. Usmanova already had started readying their St. Petersburg apartment for his homecoming.

The new reality of the world around him, rapidly expanding from a small, solitary cell, overwhelmed him at first. Knowing he won’t see his home country for a long time initially left him depressed.

But it’s getting easier, he said, and “colors get brighter by the day.”

Life inside a notorious prison

Pivovarov was arrested in May 2021 — nearly a year before President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine and intensified a crackdown on dissent to unprecedented levels.

He was pulled off a flight from St. Petersburg to Warsaw while the plane was taxiing on the tarmac. Authorities accused him of carrying out activities on behalf of an “undesirable organization” — an opposition group he ran — and he was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison.

Pivovarov, who was used to spending short stints in jail, said he realized shortly after his detention that this one was unlikely to be brief, so he told himself to stay focused and alert — a mental state he says helped him endure the challenges of imprisonment.

Pivovarov served his sentence in Penal Colony No. 7, a notoriously harsh facility in the Karelia region where tycoon-turned-opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky was held, as was Putin critic Ilya Dadin, whose accounts of beatings and abuse there in 2016 made international headlines.

Immediately upon arrival in January 2023, Pivovarov was isolated from other inmates, and stayed that way until his release.

He described strict conditions in which officials made him follow every regulation to the letter, even when it made no sense.

His possessions — food, books, clothes, the files of his criminal case — were weighed, making sure he didn’t have more than the allowed 36 kilograms (79 pounds). Minor infractions, such as an unbuttoned shirt, brought punishment. A camera monitored his movements in the cell.

“You’re given half an hour to brush your teeth. But it takes me 10 minutes to brush and shave. So I started reading a book,” and a guard immediately appeared and wrote him up for “reading a book during the time allocated for brushing,” Pivovarov recalled.

He also had to clean his cell for two hours every day, whether it was dirty or not.

With a laugh, Pivovarov said he became an expert at stretching pointless mopping into a process that would satisfy prison officials and “looks very natural on surveillance cameras.”

A prison wedding

Last year, Pivovarov and Usmanova were married in a brief ceremony in the prison.

While not the most romantic setting, it allowed Usmanova to see him, including on longer visits when they could spend several days in an apartment-like unit at the facility.

Throughout his trial and subsequent imprisonment, Usmanova said she was told repeatedly by various officials that she was “no one to Andrei.”

“I was barred from court hearings, Andrei wasn’t allowed to even apply for a phone call to me,” she recalled.

It took them weeks to assemble the paperwork, and in July 2023, Usmanova wore a simple white dress for the brief ceremony officiated by a registrar in the penal colony’s kitchen.

Usmanova said it was the first time since his arrest over two years earlier that she was able to hug Pivovarov.

When he was brought back to his cell, he said an official told him, “Whether you’re the groom or not, the cleaning won’t take care of itself,” and he resumed mopping.

A bookmark from home

What kept him going?

A bookmark with a cat he made from one of Usmanova’s letters that he kept without prison officials noticing. Counting how many thousands of hours left on his sentence. Watching the news on state TV and trying to decipher what was really happening on the outside. Reading letters of support. Running circles in the prison yard for exercise.

Aided by his lawyers, Pivovarov also kept prison officials on their toes by filing or threatening complaints about their actions. The tactic often worked, he says, because penal colonies compete with each other for the fewest reprimands from authorities.

Usmanova, a former opposition activist herself, moved to Latvia after the war in Ukraine but regularly returned to Russia to send care packages to Pivovarov and visit him in prison.

She carefully selected what was in the packages to keep him healthy in a place where food is poor and natural light is scarce, getting advice from doctors and physical fitness experts.

She also was prepared for things to take a turn for the worse, even as she arranged their St. Petersburg apartment for his release in September.

“Every minute, I was expecting a call from the lawyers saying that Andrei won’t be released, that there will be another criminal case against him,” she said, noting a common practice with political activists.

Both intended to stay in St. Petersburg, especially since Pivovarov was set to face parole-like restrictions even after serving his entire sentence.

But the swap changed all of their plans.

Finding a clear path ahead

Just like others in the exchange, Pivovarov didn’t know he was part of a swap until he was put on a bus to an airport in Moscow. His deportation was 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 in a while to see them.

That sadness persisted for the first few days after the swap, he said.

“I have never in my life felt like a person who has no home, who doesn’t know what’s going to happen next,” he added.

Usmanova also said it’s a stressful time for her, even though she is now reunited with her husband. She lived with uncertainty for three years and moved to Latvia, and now it’s “unclear what lies ahead” in Germany.

But as he counts the days since his release and the next steps become clearer, the future looks less scary, Pivovarov said.

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 faces from the prisoner swap — trading convicted Russian assassin Vadim Krasikov to Moscow for the freed dissidents — were not in vain.

Pivovarov said he wants to demonstrate to his hosts that “the guy who they took in showed the authorities that expelled him that it will come back to haunt them.”