Siberian Woman Overcomes Addiction After 5 Years in Prison
Yulia dreams of helping people on a more professional level, and to do that she plans to train as a psychologist
Blogger Yulia Dubrovina (née Nesterova) from Novosibirsk has walked a difficult path marked by addiction, drug distribution, and five years in a penal colony. Today Yulia is clean, has found love and married, is raising two daughters, and runs a social media blog. Over several months, thousands of new people subscribed to her page, and her audience now numbers 19,000. NGS correspondent Nastasya Medvedeva spoke with Yulia about her childhood, addiction, prison, family, and why what she fears most is not hate but losing her connection with her daughter.
Yulia was born and raised in Omsk but now lives in Novosibirsk
“I Didn’t Understand Sober People”
The Siberian woman notes that she did not immediately realize she was addicted
Yulia was born and raised in Omsk. Her parents divorced when she was about a year old. At first she was raised by her mother and grandmother; later a stepfather appeared in the family. According to Yulia, her mother worked a lot, and her relationship with her stepfather was difficult. The girl was not allowed to go out with friends, wear makeup, or dress the way she wanted. She recalls feeling very self-conscious about her appearance and deeply unhappy.
What the protagonist regrets most is the lost time with her first daughter
“I wore glasses and had a short haircut. At school the boys teased me by calling me Harry Potter. When all the girls started wearing makeup, I wasn’t allowed to. Even my backpack was the lamest in the class — a plain black one, while everyone else had bright ones. Honestly, I have no good memories from my childhood,” Yulia sighs.
The young woman is married and raising a small daughter
At the same time, little Yulia’s life included sports and hobbies she didn’t particularly enjoy but in which she achieved success. For example, the Siberian girl practiced taekwondo and even became a regional champion.
The protagonist’s plans include helping people on a more professional level
Yulia’s first problems with addiction appeared around the tenth grade. She skipped classes and drank beer with a group of older kids, and later drugs appeared too. But Yulia remembers her first experience of using as unpleasant: she didn’t like the altered perception and just wanted to eat and do nothing. Yet she couldn’t tell her friends that.
“I was so easily led that I was completely afraid, embarrassed, and unable to express my desires, feelings, and emotions. I didn’t even listen to myself or hear myself. Now I understand that I didn’t like it at all and didn’t want it,” Yulia admits.
Gradually alcohol and drugs became part of her life. When the girl moved away from her parents, started working as a waitress, and gained more freedom and her own money, using became regular.
“I stopped getting pleasure from sober life. I didn’t understand sober people. I needed to talk, laugh, and socialize only with people who were ‘in the know.’ If someone didn’t use at all, my friend and I would laugh at them. We dreamed of going to St. Petersburg just to party hard there,” she recalls.
“I Bloody Loved It”
At some point drugs stopped being an experiment. Yulia began to understand that she had become addicted, but she didn’t try to stop.
“I thought my life was a junkie thing. I thought I would use drugs my whole life and die from them. And I bloody loved it,” the Siberian woman admits.
In 2013 she stopped using because she became pregnant and was afraid of harming her child, but after giving birth she returned to drugs and quickly reached a severe state — in 2018 Yulia was detained on charges of drug distribution. She was sentenced to six and a half years in a penal colony, but in the end served five years and one month.
Before her imprisonment Yulia had managed to go through rehabilitation, but she believes that at the time she was not yet ready to give up her addiction for good. In the colony she found herself forcibly isolated from her usual life and from using, and this helped her.
A conversation with another inmate became a turning point for her. The woman was not addicted and told Yulia that people with that lifestyle often return to the colony or die from drugs. After that Yulia began working the “12 Steps” program, reading literature for anonymous addicts, and talking with other women who were also trying to stop using illegal substances.
“I simply wanted to change my life. I didn’t yet know what exactly to change or how, but I understood that change was needed. I read literature, we talked for hours with other girls like me, supported each other,” she recalls.
“Someday I’ll Explain Everything to Her”
While Yulia was in the colony, her daughter was raised by her mother. It is the loss of closeness with her child that the Siberian woman today calls the hardest consequence of her past life. After her release she had to rebuild her relationship with her daughter. According to Yulia, the girl reacted sharply for a long time and called her a traitor.
“I didn’t take her to first grade, I wasn’t at her kindergarten graduation, I missed many important moments. She still isn’t as close to me as, in my understanding, a daughter and mother should be. For her, the mother is more likely my mother,” Yulia says with bitterness. “There were moments when I would go into the bathroom and cry after conflicts with her. I felt hurt, though I understood that she is a child and this is her defensive reaction.”
The relationship is gradually changing. They spend time together and travel, but Yulia tries not to force her attention on her daughter. The girl does not yet know that her mother used drugs and was in a colony. The family explained her mother’s absence by saying she had gone away to work.
“Someday I’ll explain everything to her,” Yulia says.
After her release, Yulia deliberately decided not to return to Omsk. Her mother and older daughter were already living in Novosibirsk, while her old crowd remained in her hometown.
“It was dangerous for me to be in Omsk. There’s still an apartment there where I lived and used, where almost my whole life happened. The same people are there, the same things are going on. Living there is like going back into a swamp. I didn’t want to risk it,” she explains.
After her release, Yulia found a job as a seamstress almost immediately. She says she didn’t spend long thinking about how to rebuild her life — she simply started doing what she could.
“I just need to do, do, and do something every day on a regular basis. So it wasn’t like I gradually rebuilt my life. I just started living quickly,” she says.
At work, Yulia immediately told the truth about her past, and it did not become an obstacle. She still maintains a wonderful relationship with one of her former bosses, who helped her after her release.
In Novosibirsk the young woman got married. She had known her future husband before prison: they lived in the same district of Omsk. Back then the man did not support her lifestyle and they barely communicated. After her release Yulia wrote to him herself, and a few months later he came to Novosibirsk. According to the Siberian woman, her husband is understanding about her past and does not reproach her for what happened.
“He’s honestly shocked by how life has tossed me around, but he’s very proud that I found the strength to get out of all of it with, as we see it, minimal losses,” Yulia admits.
“There Are Many Addicts”
Yulia is currently on maternity leave caring for her second child. She has registered as self-employed and is developing her blog. The main source of strength for her has become life itself. The Siberian woman admits that for the first time she feels inner harmony and does not want to return to the state in which she constantly suffered and was dissatisfied with herself.
“In the past I had no life. I had constant self-digging, self-dissatisfaction, self-flagellation, self-disappointment. Now I don’t suffer. I have such harmony with everything: with my body, soul, emotions. It would be scary and strange to take it all and trade it away, to lose it,” Yulia says.
The Siberian woman started her blog in April 2026. Initially her goal was not fame but the opportunity to earn money online and not drop out of active life during maternity leave. At first Yulia talked about herself, and then she began making short videos about life in the colony. One of the first such videos got about 400,000 views.
Later she began telling her story from childhood: showing photographs, recalling different periods of her life. The audience was especially moved by her account of relationships in the colony, and the number of followers began to grow rapidly.
“I knew I would succeed, but I didn’t expect it to happen so fast. In a few days I gained almost 15,000 people,” Yulia says.
She now has 19,000 subscribers. According to the blogger, along with the new audience come dozens of messages from addicted people and their relatives. Particularly often the messages come from codependents — people who live next to someone with an addiction and don’t know how to help them.
“There are a lot of addicts, and a lot of codependent relatives write. They don’t know how to get out of this state and ask for advice. I support them and help as much as I can,” she says.
Hate comes too. In the comments Yulia is called a junkie and judged for her past. The blogger takes criticism calmly: she herself knows perfectly well that she made mistakes, and her subscribers aren’t telling her anything new.
“All my life I’ve heard from all sorts of people what a messed-up person I am. So what they write to me now doesn’t scare me. I understand that people will write about such topics. I started the blog myself so that addicted people could find strength and motivation in my stories, and codependents could understand that they too need to change something,” the young woman reasons.
What hurts her most are comments about her daughter. Yulia acknowledges her responsibility for what happened but doesn’t want to endlessly return to the past.
“I want to explain that I didn’t choose such a fate for anyone. And I didn’t choose such a fate for myself either. I was once little too, and back then I certainly didn’t plan to use drugs, I didn’t want to sit in prison. As a child I dreamed of a completely different life,” she says.
Yulia plans to continue developing her blog and in the future to get a psychology education, since she sometimes lacks professional skills when subscribers tell her about their problems.
“I often lack scientific terms when explaining a particular situation. For example, I know what to call something in junkie slang, but not in proper language,” Yulia says.
There are many people in Novosibirsk who try to help others. Novosibirsk resident Anastasia helps children understand people with disabilities. Twelve years ago she literally began rebuilding her life from scratch.
