BERLIN (news agencies) — 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 media. 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.”
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.”
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.”
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