Aleksandr Filatov with his wife, Yelena, and their two sons in front of the penal colony where the believer was serving his sentence, July 2026.
On July 9, 2026, Aleksandr Filatov, the father of two minor children, convicted for his faith, was released from the penal colony. He was separated from his family for five years. His wife, Yelena, says: "Neither love for God nor the love between my husband and me has suffered; on the contrary, it has grown stronger and more tender."
According to Aleksandr, the penal colony is the kind of place where hardship, and sometimes pressure from others, is common. "Do not let yourself be gripped by fear or dwell on what bad things could happen. That only saps your emotional strength," the believer explained after his release. "Yes, being in prison is unnatural. You just need to shift your focus to something positive." In the colony, Aleksandr proved himself to be a conscientious worker — the only electrician in his unit. He was respected for his professional qualities.
At the time of Aleksandr's arrest, his younger son was only 2.5 years old. Yelena managed the children on her own and brought parcels to the pretrial detention center. Whenever she had a chance to visit Aleksandr, she tried to bring the children, especially the younger one, so he would not forget his father. "Every time, we sang a children's song together," she recalls. "Afterward, the staff would tell each other in surprise that we sang during the visit." Aleksandr made crafts and toys for his loved ones from available materials, as well as greeting cards, puzzles, and wrote poems.
"In the first six months, Sasha and I saw each other only three or four times — each for no more than an hour," she recalls. Letters became the main means of communication: Yelena and Aleksandr wrote to each other every day. At first, calls were not allowed at all, and only later — once a month for 15 minutes.
On the eve of his release, Aleksandr was sorting through a bag of letters from all over the world: over his time in custody, he received more than 8,500 of those. "I cannot tear them from my heart," he said.
The reason Aleksandr was deprived of freedom was his discussion of the Bible with fellow believers. In December 2022, the Oktyabrskiy district court of Krasnoyarsk sentenced the believer to six years in a general regime penal colony for "organizing the activity of an extremist organization."
