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Elena Efros, the founder of the project “Fairy Tales for Political Prisoners,” has announced its closure due to the tightening of anti-extremism legislation.

On 15 July, the State Duma passed a bill that will make it easier to designate an organisation as extremist. In particular, it will allow authorities to designate any community as extremist if any of its organisers or members has been convicted under the article on creating or participating in an extremist community (Article 282.1 of the Criminal Code).

“Such a mechanism can set off a domino effect: at first isolated cases, then the automatic spread of the extremist organisation status to the entire group, followed by a sharp increase in the number of defendants. Moreover, when a community is added to the register of extremist organisations, all the bans that previously applied only to organisations will begin to apply to it,” commented OVD-Info lawyer Eva Levenberg on the amendment.

Efros is concerned that the changes in legislation could pose a threat to the project team and members of its Facebook group.

“There are almost four thousand members in the group. I can’t guarantee that not a single one of them falls under Article 282.1. Yes, the group is closed, but still, I can’t be sure there aren’t any random (or ‘not-so-random’) people among these four thousand. And I don’t want any consequences for everyone else or for myself. Honestly, I’m just scared, sorry,” wrote Efros.

She noted that the project had lasted almost ten years and thanked its participants.

“Fairy Tales for Political Prisoners” began at the end of 2015. According to Efros’s idea, the project aimed to establish a connection between political prisoners and the outside world: it can be hard for a stranger to write a letter, but sending a fairy tale, story or other text could be a good reason to make contact.

“Now we rarely send fairy tales,” Efros told OVD-Info in 2019. “First, we ask what the prisoner is interested in, and then we select texts. We have many contributors, not only in Russia but also in Germany, Australia, Switzerland and Ukraine. They send us their articles and essays, and we forward them to the prisoners. Once the correspondence gets going, it becomes easier. You can just chat—there’s no need to include a separate text.”

Within the project, letters were sent to dozens of political prisoners.