Review of Numbers. A film by Oleg Sentsov and Akhtem Seitablayev, Ukraine-Poland-Czech Republic-France, 2020.

A court in Baku recently sentenced a 22-year-old activist to ten years in jail after he spray-painted “No to Dictatorship” and “Happy Slave Day” on a statue of Heydar Aliyev, the former president.

33-year old Ildar Dadin is a former security guard who got married in a Moscow detention centre last February. Cameras were not allowed for the short ceremony but journalist Anastasiya Zotova, now his wife, came out smiling to the well-wishers and reporters waiting in the snow. At that point, Dadin had been under house arrest or behind bars for a year, having neither had any previous convictions nor a particularly high pubic profile. The judge at Moscow’s Basmanny Court had sentenced Dadin to a total of three years of prison.

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On December 8th 1986 at 23:50, in the hospital of a watch factory in the town of Chistopol, Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, Anatoly Marchenko, a Soviet prisoner of conscience, died at the age of 48. He was transferred to this hospital from prison after his health deteriorated dramatically as a result of a hunger strike that he declared in August of the same year and continued for several months. He wrote in his letter, which was published 12 years after his death: “Since August 4th I have been on a hunger strike, demanding a stop to the torture of political prisoners in the Soviet Union and their release.” He was buried unnamed under number 646.