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The Global Profile

Seven Years for Antiwar Stickers? Russian Activist Would Do It Again.

Freed in a major prisoner swap, Aleksandra Skochilenko said “the values of freedom of speech, of peace, could be more important than spending even 10 years in jail.”

Aleksandra Skochilenko, during a musical jam session she organized in Berlin in September, has just published a memoir, “My Prison Trip.”Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

Nov. 7, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET

When Aleksandra Skochilenko affixed five bogus price tags bearing antiwar slogans to the shelves in her grocery store in St. Petersburg, Russia, she did not anticipate receiving a seven-year jail sentence, much less that her term would be cut short by the biggest prisoner swap between the Kremlin and the West since the Cold War.

Now living in Berlin, Ms. Skochilenko, who goes by the name Sasha, holds that even if the experience left her psychologically bruised, she would do it again.

“The values of freedom of speech, of peace, could be more important than spending even 10 years in jail,” she said in an interview, comparing her experience with that of Antigone, the tragic Greek heroine who perishes for defying what she sees as an immoral order by the King of Thebes.

Ms. Skochilenko, who lives with her longtime Russian partner, Sonya Subbotina, is a sometime painter, musician and aficionado of 1960s American hippie culture. She has just published a memoir, “My Prison Trip,” illustrated with her own naïve, cartoonish drawings. It includes her impassioned statement in court in November 2023, just before being sentenced, a lengthy indictment of the Russian judicial system as an instrument of repression.

“How fragile must be the prosecutor’s belief in our state and society, if he thinks our statehood and public safety can be brought down by five small pieces of paper?” she said. “No one was hurt by my actions, yet I’ve been incarcerated for over a year and a half now, alongside murderers, thieves, statutory rapists and pimps. Can the supposed harm I caused even compare to those crimes?”

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Ms. Skochilenko being escorted to a hearing in St. Petersburg, in 2023.Credit...Dmitri Lovetsky/Associated Press

Ms. Skochilenko’s odyssey through Russia’s abusive, rubber-stamp judicial system started virtually from the day Russian soldiers invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. She spent that night in jail and was fined the equivalent of about $130, a significant sum to her, for demonstrating against the incursion. Undeterred, she wrote antiwar posts, organized jam sessions where musicians sang against the war and drew postcards with slogans like, “Violence is never the way out.”

She then stumbled across the antiwar price tags online and thought she could use them to reach people outside her orbit. The worst consequence, she figured, was a few more days in jail and another fine.

A 72-year-old woman perusing a display of honey and jam in the grocery store noticed that one product description on the price tag was extraordinarily long. Putting on her glasses, she was shocked to discover that it denounced Russia’s assault on Ukraine: “The Russian army bombed an art school in Mariupol. About 400 people hid there from the shelling. Stop the fighting!”

The outraged customer showed the price tag to two store employees, who laughed, so she reported the incident to the Investigative Committee, Russia’s domestic crime agency.

It was March 2022, and Russia had just passed a law that criminalized knowingly spreading “false information” about the armed forces, mandating a jail sentence of five to 10 years. Agents, working from CCTV footage, zealously tracked down the price tag culprit to set an example.

Ms. Skochilenko ended up spending two and half years behind bars before August 2024, when she became what she calls “the most ordinary person” included in a remarkable prisoner swap. The Kremlin released 24 foreigners and political prisoners, including Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, while the West sent back eight incarcerated Russian agents.

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Ms. Skochilenko, right, at a musical jam session in Berlin. Her trial and harsh sentence raised her profile, attracting a wide range of supporters, including many not usually involved in politics.Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

In September, to celebrate the book’s publication and her birthday, she organized a musical jam session like she had in St. Petersburg. Guests were also invited to write letters to political prisoners in Russia.

In Russia, her trial and harsh sentence raised her profile, attracting a wide range of supporters, including many not usually involved in politics, said Maxim Reznick, a former local legislator in St. Petersburg who fled over his antiwar stance.

“Sasha is one of those people who feels that she has to fight evil,” he said. “Everybody was appalled by the cruelty of the action taken against her, merely for price tags.”

Ms. Skochilenko, 35, was born in St. Petersburg and raised mostly in an eight-room “kommunalka*,” *one of the living quarters established under Communism where grand old apartments were shared among multiple families.

Both parents had roots in Sakhalin Island, a former penal colony in Russia’s Far East, where her father’s family were farmers and her mother’s great-grandfather had been sent as a convict. They met in St. Petersburg, where they came separately to pursue their dreams of becoming artists. They ended up working odd jobs.

Although poor, her parents indulged Ms. Skochilenko’s interest in music, starting with a small piano at age 4. Eventually, she settled on playing the electric mandolin, and after college worked in journalism, filming video segments.

Initially shocked by the criminal charge brought against her, she decided to treat the whole thing as an extended piece of performance art. She even selected a costume, an oversize T-shirt tie-dyed in rainbow colors with a big heart in the middle, telegraphing a revival of 1960s pacifism.

“I thought, OK, I am in jail,” she said, “but I need to make a cool experience from this no matter what happens.”

Judge Oksana Demyasheva treated Ms. Skochilenko harshly, refusing her requests for drinking water and vetoing the special gluten-free diet she needed because she suffers from celiac disease. The judge also periodically threatened to clear the court, once when spectators burst out laughing after a prosecutor described Russia as a democracy. Ultimately, the judge was sanctioned by the European Union.

Among the first cases tried under the new “fake news” law, the trial did far more to disseminate Ms. Skochilenko’s pacifist messages than the price tags ever could. Still, she said her time in Arsenalka, a dark, dank, women’s prison in St. Petersburg, was difficult.

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Ms. Skochilenko’s drawings at her event in Berlin. After six months in prison, she developed a serious case of PTSD.Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

After six months, she developed a serious case of PTSD, with an irrational fear of the future, which she compared to being exposed to a writhing pile of snakes. “It is a feeling that something horrifying is coming,” she said. She still suffers from constant nightmares, always apocalyptic scenarios, she said.

In July 2024, she was asked to write a request for a pardon, and soon afterward found herself transferred to Lefortovo Prison in Moscow. Not told why, locked into solitary confinement and barely fed, she started to panic. Loaded onto a bus after a few days, she and the other prisoners were informed they were part of an international exchange. She did not believe it.

The deal was driven in large part to free several high-profile American prisoners, including Mr. Gershkovich and Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine, both incarcerated on spurious espionage charges. Among the Russian agents released was Vadim Krasikov, sentenced to life in prison in Germany for murdering a Chechen separatist fighter.

She does not know why she was included, but speculates that it might be because her case drew so much attention and because she was openly lesbian at a time when Russia was, and still is, harassing its L.B.G.T.Q. community.

She and her partner are still amazed by freedoms in Germany, like being able to smoke pot in public. They plan to get married. Ms. Skochilenko misses some friends in Russia, but her mother and sister are residing in Paris. “All this immigrant stuff is cool,” she said. She is living off a stipend from a German foundation while she works on a comic novel.

Aside from her memoir, Ms. Skochilenko has also tried to channel into music her feelings about her conviction.

She wrote a rap song that refers to article 207.3 of the Russian criminal code, under which she was convicted. The song sounds much better in the original Russian. It goes in part:

My biggest crime is that I am for peace.

Here is the number of my article: 207.3

I won’t be broken and I won’t disappear even if you lock me in a cell

Freedom is everything of which I am made.

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Ms. Skochilenko, right, with her partner, Sofya Subbotina, in Koblenz, Germany, shortly after being released from prison in 2024.Credit...Michael Probst/Associated Press

Neil MacFarquhar has been a Times reporter since 1995, writing about a range of topics from war to politics to the arts, both internationally and in the United States.

Milana Mazaeva is a reporter and researcher, helping to cover Russian society.

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