My Prison Trip

In March 2022, Sasha Skachilenko, a young musician and artist from St. Petersburg, left five paper price tags with anti-war texts in a supermarket near her friend's house. She could not have anticipated what a whirlwind of repression this tiny act of defiance would unleash. Two weeks later, the police raided Sasha and sent her to a pre-trial detention center. A team of investigators, judges, prosecutors, and experts spent two years proving in seventeen volumes of the case that five pieces of paper were a serious threat to national security and an expression of hatred and hostility towards the Russian army. The "Case of the Five Price Tags" became a symbol of the absurdly cruel repression by the Russian authorities against those opposed to the war in Ukraine. And Sasha unexpectedly found herself among the most famous Russian political prisoners and a heroine of the pacifist movement, recognized around the world. Sasha recounts everything that happened to her in the diaries she kept from the first to the last days of her imprisonment.