Unbroken: Aleksandra Skochilenko and the Power of One Queer Voice
When Russian artist and musician Aleksandra “Sasha” Skochilenko slipped five small antiwar price tags onto grocery shelves in St. Petersburg, she never imagined it would cost her seven years in prison. Yet what the Kremlin meant as punishment became a global act of resistance — and a reminder that Lesbian truth-telling is still dangerous in many parts of the world.
Now free and living in Berlin with her longtime partner Sonya Subbotina, Sasha says she would do it again. “The values of freedom of speech, of peace, could be more important than spending even ten years in jail,” she told reporters — echoing Antigone, the ancient heroine who defied the law to honor what was right.
Skochilenko’s quiet rebellion — replacing price tags with small notes about Russia’s bombing of a Mariupol art school — was met with one of the harshest sentences under Moscow’s new “fake news” law. She endured years in a damp women’s prison, denied food she could safely eat, and developed PTSD from isolation. Yet she emerged with something the regime could never confiscate: her art, her humor, and her love.
Her new memoir My Prison Trip, illustrated with her own colorful, cartoon-style drawings, chronicles the absurdity and cruelty of Russia’s justice system. It’s part testimony, part punk performance piece — a work of survival by a woman who once said, “I’m for peace, for freedom, for love — and for the right to sing about it.”
In Berlin, Sasha and Sonya are finally planning to marry. She calls Germany’s openness “a dream you have to keep pinching yourself to believe.” Her music and art still bear the same rainbow-bright spirit that landed her in prison — and that now electrifies queer audiences around the world.
At Your Lesbian World, we celebrate Sasha Skochilenko not only as a political dissident, but as a Lesbian artist who turned punishment into power. Her story reminds us: every act of courage, however small, can become a love letter to freedom.
