Helena Bakhmut. Life after prison.

Many people ask why, when I got out of prison, I didn’t get acquitted and didn’t make money for slandering a crime.

There, behind the barbed wire, the prisoners are writing tons of appeals and cassations in the hope that a fair trial will bring to light false victims and corrupt investigators-prosecutors, but none of us knows in what danger our loved ones are at large.

When I was released, I had only one goal – to reach the Constitutional Court and get my acquittal, but after hearing from my son that he had been threatened several times and even beaten, my hands dropped from maternal impotence.

My son told me: “Nothing can change, no one will return you for two years and three months of captivity, and even if you are acquitted, all your friends and relatives will treat you like a prisoner!”

A familiar prisoner-journalist advised: “There are NO acquittals in our country, many take risks, but lose their families. The best cassation is an interview in some kind of program like Blablakhov* and the like.”

Many years have passed since my release, but I am still psychologically broken by prison and even more distrustful of people.

Very often I wonder how my life would have turned out if I had agreed to the investigator’s conditions before the falsification of the criminal case against me. Perhaps I would also be engaged in business and bought those premises for the next pharmacies. Perhaps I would also have had a bunch of hypocritical friends, girlfriends, relatives around me and would never have known that they would all “merge” when they found out that I was in trouble. I would also go to restaurants every day and be dissatisfied with their food, and then I would also be dissatisfied with paying a nutritionist and a fitness trainer for their incompetence. And the worst thing is, my son would never have learned independence and continued to delve into gambling addiction.

Of the huge crowd of relatives, friends and girlfriends in prison, only my son and grandfather helped me.

My dear and beloved grandfather, who replaced my parents, did not wait for my release for 6 months and went to heaven, but left me a material pillow so that I could recover psychologically for several years. Thank you, dear, you are always in my heart and soul!

But sometimes I think what would have happened to me after my release if not for the help of my grandfather. I would definitely go back to prison or to a convent, because people like me are “forced prisoners” at large, strangers to the family and society, besides beggars without means of subsistence after the zone.

In Rostov prisons, the charity organization “Gloria Jeans” gives out gifts to prisoners for the holidays New Year, Christmas and Easter in beautiful bags with their logo. I recently found out that this company helps with employment for female prisoners. Perhaps this information will help someone.

Now I want to thank not only my son for keeping me in prison, but also those people from the FSIN system who took care of me and did not let me break down from the injustice of the judicial system.

Thanks also to those managers who now believed in me and gave me the opportunity to work in their organization, despite my stigma – “prisoner”.

The prisoners who were framed are not dangerous to society, they are only psychologically broken by the betrayal of their family.

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