Back in the USSR

“MY DEAR Arif, after 36 years of life together we’re in different cells in different prisons. Perhaps you’re unaware, I can bear it all: Terrible physical pain (I’m already coming down with pneumonia from the cold water), pressure from a hardened prisoner and even visits from those jackals in the prosecutor’s office. Most difficult of all is you are not nearby. For 36 years we have almost never been apart!”

So wrote Leyla Yunus, a human-rights defender, from her prison cell in Azerbaijan to her husband in August 2014. The day of the couple’s initial detention, April 28th last year, in Soviet days marked the takeover of Azerbaijan by the Bolsheviks in 1920. The legacy lives on. In keeping with Soviet tradition, the Yunuses were arrested and charged with espionage and treason as well as tax evasion and embezzlement. A year later they were given a show trial. Another of Mrs Yunus’s letters could have been written in Stalin’s day. “I was dragged by my feet into solitary confinement without explaining a reason. I heard from Arif that he had also been assaulted during the first days of his arrest.”