Another 126 believers continue to serve real prison terms.
Sergey Melnik, 53, a Jehovah’s Witness from Volgograd, spent more than four years and nine months in prison. His sentence for his faith ended on December 18, 2025. He left the correctional colony in Kirovo-Chepetsk, from where he took a train home the next day.
Melnik was first behind bars in May 2019 — he was placed in a pre-trial detention center after a search; later, he was sent back to the detention center after the verdict was announced.
“The hardest part was enduring isolation and worrying about my family. I didn’t know what was happening with them,” Melnik recalls. “No letters, no visits, no phone calls.” Later, Sergey was allowed to correspond. “In letters, we could chat about everyday things and feel as if we were together,” Melnik added. “Through friends, I even managed to send my wife bouquets with cards.”
He had been in the colony since March 2022. There, he could keep in touch with relatives through short phone calls. Family and friends continued writing to him, and by a few months before his release, the number of letters reached 5,000. Melnik tried to reply to each one, dedicating his weekends to this.
While in prison, he trained as a cook and worked in the cafeteria. “At first, it was hard even to do chopping, memorize recipes and their sequence, but then I got the hang of it and started doing everything quickly,” he said.
The work was physically demanding: he had to get up earlier than others and spend the whole day on his feet, serving more than a thousand inmates three times a day. This workload didn’t stop Sergey from loving cooking: he prepared meals together with other inmates in his unit and shared unusual recipes with them.
The attitude of colony staff and inmates toward Melnik was friendly; many were surprised by his optimism and cheerful nature. “The guys there called me ‘the man with the smile.’ They used to say: ‘You walk into the cafeteria, see Sergey standing there smiling, and that means our day isn’t going to waste,'” recalls Melnik.
As of 20 December 2025 15 of Jehovah’s Witnesses have been released from Russian colonies. Another 126 believers continue to serve real prison terms.
