Putin will fall when we least expect it, says freed dissident
Political change in Russia usually happens suddenly, unexpectedly, when nobody sees it coming, and nobody is ready for it, a freed dissident says.
As he stood alone in his tiny punishment cell in Siberia, serving the longest sentence handed down to a Russian political prisoner since Stalin’s purges, Vladimir Kara-Murza was certain that he would never see his wife and three children again.
A long-time opposition activist, Kara-Murza was arrested outside his home in Moscow in April 2022. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison on treason charges based on comments he made about Russian war crimes in Ukraine, including during a speech in Arizona.
In late July, he was led from his cell in the middle of the night without explanation. A friend and ally of Boris Nemtsov, the opposition politician who was shot dead near Red Square in 2015, and Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader who would later die in an Arctic prison, Kara-Murza had survived two poisonings widely believed to have been ordered by the Kremlin. Now he feared the worst.
“I thought I was being led out to be executed,” he said.
Instead, he was freed as part of a prisoner exchange that included Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter jailed for 16 years on trumped-up espionage charges.
“Until six weeks ago I was sure that I was going to die in that Siberian prison,” Kara-Murza told The Times before a meeting with Sir Keir Starmer and David Lammy, the foreign secretary, in London.
When President Putin unleashed a crackdown on dissent at the start of the war, Kara-Murza, a dual British-Russian citizen whose family home is in Washington, could have fled Moscow. Instead, after a brief trip to the United States to attend his eldest daughter’s 16th birthday party, he flew back to Russia to make a stand.
Loathed by the Kremlin for his successful lobbying in Washington for the Magnitsky Act, under which the United States sanctions Russian officials involved in human rights abuses, Kara-Murza had sensed that his arrest was inevitable. Yet he felt he had no choice but to try to lead by example.
“How could I call on my fellow Russian citizens to resist Putin’s dictatorship if I didn’t do it myself, if I was sitting somewhere far away, in safety? This would be hypocritical,” he said. “It’s not enough for a dictatorship to try to instil fear in citizens. It’s also up to citizens, each individual person, whether he or she chooses to be afraid or not.”
Yet during his incarceration, he admitted, he was tormented by regrets over his decision to return. He was allowed infrequent phone calls to his family last year but these were stopped in January. Even if his wife, Evgenia, had been allowed to visit him, she could not travel to Russia over fears that she too would be arrested.
His release was set for April 2047, when he would have been 65, but he said that health problems caused by his poisonings meant there was little chance he would have lived that long.
“As a human being, as a father, as a husband, you know, I regretted it every single minute of every single day that I was not allowed to call my kids, that I couldn’t hear my wife’s voice on the phone,” he said.
The son of a Russian opposition journalist, Kara-Murza moved to Britain with his mother when he was a teenager. He studied history at Cambridge but returned to Moscow after graduating. While incarcerated in Siberia, he was made an honorary fellow of Trinity Hall in recognition of his bravery.
He may be free but Kara-Murza has not forgotten about the thousands of political prisoners who remain locked up in Russia and Belarus. “For many of them, it’s a matter of life and death.”
He said he was proud of the Russians who continue to protest against the war, despite the risks they face. More than 20,000 people have been arrested across the country for opposing the war since 2022, and at least 300 protesters are behind bars, according to OVD Info, a human rights group.
“In these conditions, does anybody expect large numbers of people to speak out? I did and got a 25-year sentence in prison. I don’t think you would find many people who would be prepared to pay such a price,” he said.
“[But] what amazes me, and makes me proud of my country, is that there are so many people who are doing this; tens of thousands who have openly protested against this war, despite the repression, despite the fear.”
He was criticised by Ukrainians after his release when he called on the West to carefully target its sanctions against Moscow to ensure that they hit Putin’s regime and not ordinary Russians. “I never called for annulling of sanctions. But they should be calibrated in a way that they target the Putin war machine and the Putin war economy and make it difficult and ideally impossible for it to continue conducting this murderous, aggressive war against Ukraine.”
These may be the darkest days for Russia’s opposition movement, whose leaders are all dead, in prison or in exile, but Kara-Murza is sure that Putin’s regime will eventually collapse. “Political change in Russia usually happens suddenly, unexpectedly, when nobody sees it coming, and nobody is ready for it,” he said.
Yet he is concerned that if change does come, Russia could make the same mistakes as in the 1990s, when former servants of the communist regime, including Putin, an ex-KGB officer, were allowed to take up positions of power.
“This time, there will need to be a genuine reflection, a genuine moral cleansing, including accountability for those who have committed war crimes in Ukraine,” he said. “We will need to make sure that this evil never, ever comes back again.”
The Times
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