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.”

On August 13th the trial ended with Mrs Yunus sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison and her husband to seven years. As prosecutors read out a list of unlikely charges in a stifling hot courtroom, Mrs Yunus comforted her husband, who was lying on a bench inside a glass cage—too unwell and weak to sit up or comprehend what was going on. He had collapsed twice during closing arguments.

Political prisoners are nothing new in today’s Azerbaijan, run by Ilham Aliev, its authoritarian president. But the Yunuses’ case is especially egregious. They are veterans of the Soviet dissident movement and still the country’s most prominent civil-rights activists. In the early 1980s they worked for a samizdat newspaper, Express Chronicle. In the late 1980s Mrs Yunus was at the forefront of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms, which held out the promise of a free and dignified life. When Soviet tanks rolled into Baku in 1990 in a desperate attempt to stop the crumbling of the empire, she led a national independence movement.

In recent years Mrs Yunus has run the Institute for Peace and Democracy, the country’s best known human-rights group. Mr Yunus is a scholar of the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. According to Thomas de Waal, a Caucasus expert who worked with him in the past, Mr Yunus was a rare voice in Azerbaijan more interested in facts than the attribution of blame. He had travelled to Armenia to investigate the conflict. The contacts he made there led to the charges of treason.

It is hard to see how the Yunuses alone could be a threat to Mr Aliev. But their imprisonment is most likely intended as a warning to others. “They are planning to wipe us out in agony. Why is that? So that our agony and our deaths become a lesson for all. Fear must live in the hearts of citizens,” wrote Mrs Yunus.

Western reaction has been muted, partly for fear of pushing Azerbaijan even further away. After years of trying to balance Russia and America under the rule of Mr Aliev’s father, a former Communist Party boss, the country has adopted anti-Western ways and increased repression.

Mr de Waal notes that the shift became apparent in 2013 after a visit by Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, during which he conveyed to Mr Aliev the benefits of siding with its large neighbour. Since then Azerbaijan has copied Russian laws banning foreign funding of NGOs and parrots Kremlin lines about “national traitors” and “American hegemony”.

The revival of Soviet clichés prompted Mrs Yunus to invoke an old slogan to describe her goals. It was used by Soviet dissidents protesting the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968: “For your freedom and for ours”. The Yunus case has attracted little attention in Russia including among liberals. A pro-Kremlin website accused the West of “politicising” the trial. They would know about such things in Moscow.