BEHIND BARS, RUNNING WAS FREEDOM

Alsu Kurmasheva was jailed in a Russian prison on false charges. Separated from her family with no end in sight, she turned to the one thing that kept her hope alive.

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ALSU KURMASHEVA RIPPED the strings off her face mask and carefully threaded the soft ends through the eyelets of her running shoes. The Puma Velocity Nitro 2s were in good condition—her husband Pavel had given them to her only five months ago—except that her captors at the SIZO-2 detention facility in Kazan, Russia, had confiscated the laces.

“How am I supposed to walk with my shoes flopping?” she asked a guard. No answer. There was rarely an answer to any question. She realized the jailers didn’t want prisoners to walk freely, but to shuffle around the exercise courtyard in defeat.

Alsu wouldn’t surrender so easily.

What if she yanked the strings off her mask and fashioned makeshift laces out of them? The experiment worked. Alsu could walk in an almost normal stride around her basement cell. She silently exulted in the small victory against her captors, which meant far more to her than increased mobility.

Day 9 of her detention had been the hardest one so far—nine hours of relentless interroga-tion. Now that she’d had a taste of a Russian prison—she was issued no pillow or blankets and received no packages or letters up to that point—the security forces apparently thought she might be weakened and demoralized enough to confess her guilt on the bogus spying charge. But she wasn’t guilty of anything, other than being a journalist and naturalized American citizen visiting family.