“They wanted to take our children away. We had to keep quiet and agree to everything”: How Coercion into Confession Works
(The names of the people featured have been changed.)
Nikolai was detained after he’d dropped his children off at kindergarten. His wife, Nina, was taken at school in front of her students. Security officers came for her carrying assault rifles and wearing balaclavas. The children thought they were terrorists and later asked their teacher whether she had been comfortable in the trunk of the car. But that came later. At that first moment, it was terrifying.
“When he was detained, I honestly thought he was already dead. That’s how they behaved. I thought he was no longer alive, that they had done something to him,” Nina recalled later. She did not begin speaking about what had happened until much later. At first, she was terribly afraid of everything. The people who detained and interrogated them ordered her to remain silent. Her own freedom and the fate of her children were at stake. Immediately after their parents’ arrests, child protective services came for the children. They did not want to hand them over to their grandmother, who had rushed there as soon as she learned that something terrible had happened to the family.
“They wanted to take the children away. We had to keep quiet and agree to everything. We signed everything,” Nina says.
Only later did she remember that, before she and her husband were detained, strange people had been walking around their large unfinished house. She also remembered that at school she had repeatedly been questioned about her attitude toward the situation in the country. At the time, she had paid no particular attention to it. Now she understands that the administration of the school where she worked knew everything and was cooperating with the security services.
Nina and Nikolai were well known in the village. Nikolai was a businessman and interacted with many people, making little effort to conceal his views. Nina worked at a school. Together, they were raising their children and building a large house in the center of the village. They had taken out loans. Everything fell apart after Nikolai’s arrest.
His wife had to shut down his business and explain herself to people. It was difficult to explain anything because the security services had forbidden her to speak about the case. At first, people at work asked what had happened. She had to avoid answering. Later, they themselves became afraid even to approach her or speak to her.
When Nikolai was sentenced, television broadcast a polished report about the detention and neutralization of an especially dangerous criminal.
“People simply cannot comprehend how something like this could have happened. Because they know him, and they know our whole family. But, naturally, no one can even think differently now. Everyone is afraid,” Nina explained.
The family moved into a small home, and they were able to pay off their loans by selling the unfinished house. Nikolai was given a lengthy prison sentence, and his wife is allowed to visit him once every four months.
Now both the children and the responsibility for supporting her husband in prison rest entirely on Nina’s shoulders.
“When You’re Older, We’ll Tell You.” How the Family of a Political Prisoner Lives Without a Father
When a person is imprisoned — especially suddenly — the life of their entire family changes. Many have to go through this ordeal alone, relying only on their closest relatives or on themselves. We are deliberately withholding the name of the political prisoner whose wife spoke about how her life changed after her husband’s arrest and trial. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of such stories in modern Russia. Tatyana P. (name changed) shared what life was like before and what it became after her husband’s arrest.
An entirely ordinary family lived in a large Russian city. The parents celebrated the birth of their son. They regularly spent time outdoors together — first going on short picnics and later taking serious multi-day hiking trips. Everything changed in 2022, when Pavel (name changed) was accused of “public incitement to engage in terrorist activities” using the Internet. He was sentenced to six years in prison for a few online posts.
When Pavel was already in the penal colony, his mother was diagnosed with cancer. She fears she may never see or hug her son again. The whole family is waiting for their loved one’s release, but the penal colony is not willing to let a defiant political prisoner go so easily. He is facing another sentence — this time for “disrupting the operations of an institution responsible for isolating people from society.” Up to five more years could be added to his unserved sentence.
“I’m not ashamed that my husband is in prison,” Tatyana says. “He didn’t steal, kill, or rob anyone. He’s imprisoned, and I know why… People like him aren’t liked — those who speak the truth. That’s understandable. Who likes the truth? No one. I don’t care what people say about me. I worry about my son. I don’t want people looking down on my child. We don’t tell our son where his father is. Pavel wants to explain it to him. I tell him: ‘Let’s wait until later, he’s still little.’ I worry he might blurt something out at school. Children can be cruel. They’ll bully him.”
Instead of the now familiar and beloved family hikes or fishing trips with both parents, Pavel and Tatyana’s son has become the child of a mother who works six days a week.
“My son constantly tells me: ‘Other moms spend time with their kids, but you’re always at work!’” Tatyana explains. “Six days a week he’s with his grandmother and grandfather. Mostly his grandfather. He takes him to chess lessons and art school.”
According to Tatyana, when her son asks, “Why did we go hiking when Dad was home, but now we don’t go without him?” she answers that, without Dad, it would be scary and dangerous to spend the night in the woods alone.
Pavel and Tatyana want to have a second child, and their son keeps asking for a little brother.
“We want to have another baby. Pavel worries that I won’t be able to manage alone: ‘How will you cope by yourself?’ But the years are passing. I can’t keep waiting either.”
According to Tatyana, their son constantly misses his father: “He says everyone else has a dad, but my dad is always working. ‘Why does Dad have a job like that?’ he asks me, and I answer: ‘When you’re older, we’ll explain why.’”
A Family Divided by War
Lyubov moved to Ukraine from Adygea in the late 1960s. She got married there. In 1970, the couple had a daughter, Viktoria, and the following year another daughter, Natalia. The family lived peacefully in a village near Kremenchuk.
Every year, sisters Viktoria and Natalia traveled from Ukraine to their mother’s homeland to visit their grandparents. In 1990, Viktoria moved to Adygea: she met a young man there, Igor, and married him. The couple had a daughter, whom they named Natasha after her aunt.
The years passed. Igor earned a good living, while Viktoria devoted herself to managing the household. They built houses in the village both for themselves and for their grown daughter. Three grandchildren were born, and Viktoria adored them.
When the events of 2014 began, Viktoria — the child of an international marriage, a woman with Ukrainian roots, parents, and a sister living in Ukraine — could not remain silent. She openly expressed her views on Odnoklassniki (a Russian social networking platform), after which her account was blocked.
“I can’t say that she called for a change of government or for any radical measures. Of course not. She understood that you can’t behave that way in this country. She spoke out like any reasonable person would. Not even because she was Ukrainian. Simply like any decent person who would not call for war or rejoice at the deaths of people in a neighboring country,” Viktoria’s sister Natalia later said.
After being blocked on Odnoklassniki, Viktoria moved to Facebook and continued commenting there on current events. In early February 2022, her husband Igor died. Ten days later, the full-scale war against Ukraine began, and Viktoria’s statements became sharper.
In April 2022, Viktoria Goncharova was arrested. More than ten security officers came to detain the 55-year-old housewife and search her home. She was accused of participating in the extremist organization “Right Sector” and spreading false information about the Russian army.
During the search, authorities seized what they described as “evidence” of a crime.
“We visited her every year. She came to visit us with her family. Naturally, she had Ukrainian flags and some Ukrainian symbols. Even embroidered shirts — she loved wearing them. All of this was presented as though she were an enemy of the people. They confiscated everything. Even a yellow-and-blue watch was seized. They decided it threatened Russia,” Natalia explained.
The trial began in March 2023. Two anonymous witnesses who testified against Viktoria were clearly familiar with her home and knew both her and her husband personally. Some statements from fellow villagers given during the preliminary investigation were not confirmed during testimony in court, so they had to be made public.
Among other things, these statements alleged that Viktoria Goncharova had sent voice messages in which she spoke negatively about the actions of the Russian army, praised Stepan Bandera, stated that she supported the activities of the extremist organization “Right Sector,” and posted material on her social media page aimed at “humiliating Russian servicemen.”
Viktoria’s son-in-law testified that she considered herself Ukrainian and a “Banderite.” Viktoria’s daughter stopped supporting her mother and stopped writing letters to her. She also cut off communication with her Ukrainian relatives.
All of this severely damaged the health of Viktoria’s mother, Lyubov Vladimirovna, who had once moved from Adygea to Ukraine and found happiness there with her family, never imagining that war would place her two daughters on opposite sides of a border.
“Mom suffered terribly because of all this. While Vitya was still in pretrial detention, she said: ‘If they give her a sentence, I’ll die.’ And that’s exactly what happened. In August 2023, our dear mother passed away,” Natalia recalled.
On May 30, 2023, the Maikop District Court of the Republic of Adygea found Viktoria Goncharova guilty of spreading “false information” about the army and participating in an “extremist” organization. She was sentenced to six and a half years in a general-regime penal colony.
The Supreme Court of the Republic of Adygea, reviewing Viktoria’s appeal, stated in its ruling that, according to a forensic linguistic and cultural analysis, the materials submitted for examination contained information alleging the involvement of the Russian Armed Forces in the events that took place in Bucha. According to the court, these statements “were presented as factual assertions about the involvement of the Russian Armed Forces in the killings of civilians and acts of sexual violence against underage Ukrainians, thereby forming a negative attitude toward Russian servicemen and Russia as a whole.” The court also stated that information from the official website of the Russian Ministry of Defense indicated that “during the special military operation in Ukraine, the Russian Armed Forces do not attack residential neighborhoods of Ukrainian cities.”
Today, Viktoria’s sister and father, who remain in Ukraine, learn about what is happening to her through volunteers in Russia and other countries, including France and Montenegro. Volunteers write letters, send parcels, and deposit money into her prison account for purchases from the prison store.
“If we were in Russia, we could visit her and send parcels ourselves. There’s so much we could do. But we are in Ukraine. Our only hope is in the people who help. We are immensely grateful to them. Complete strangers donate money, someone lends their bank card, someone orders groceries through an online shop,” Natalia shared.
Viktoria Goncharova is expected to be released in the spring of 2028. Her relatives — her father and sister — would like to bring her to Ukraine. Viktoria herself, however, wants to go home. She loves her grandchildren deeply and says she cannot imagine life without them.
But what awaits her in her native village? Living beside her son-in-law, who, after Igor’s death, now feels like the master of the house. Beside a daughter who stopped writing letters and share news about the grandchildren. Beside fellow villagers who testified in court that she was a “Banderite.”
Viktoria says, however, that she has no regrets.