Vladimir and Evgenia Kara-Murza -- Their Struggle for Freedom and Fight for Democracy in Russia

Nicole Hawkins:

Mere months ago, Russian activist and journalist Vladimir Kara Meza thought he would die in Siberia where he was imprisoned for speaking out against Russian president Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine. This week he sat with his wife Evgenia and staff at the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas as a free man where he told us about his experiences in prison, his joy when released and his fight for democracy in Russia, a country he loves and refuses to give up on. His wife, Evgenia bravely advocated for Vladimir’s release, during his more than two years in prison, and her efforts undoubtedly played a pivotal role in her husband’s release from prison in the August 2024 prisoner exchange between the U.S. and Russia. Hear more from Vladimir and Evgenia on his struggle for freedom and their fight for democracy in Russia. On this episode of “The Strategist” presented by the George W. Bush Presidential Center.

Andrew Kaufmann:

It is safe to say that Vladimir Kara-Murza is one of the bravest people to come through here. He really is. After starting his career as an author and journalist in Russia, he later became part of the opposition to Vladimir Putin in Russia. He spoke up against Putin aggression in Ukraine long before the current assault back in 2014 and after his outspoken colleague Boris Nemtsov was murdered, Vladimir was poisoned, not once – but twice – but he survived. And when Putin then went on a full invasion of Ukraine, that didn’t stop him from criticizing Putin, which led to his arrest and sentenced to a Siberian prison for high treason. So what does he do from solitary confinement in prison in Siberia? He keeps on fighting. He was able to communicate with the outside world through his wife Evgenia in many cases, and won a Pulitzer Prize as well as the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize. Finally, just a few months ago, he was released from prison as part of a multi-country prisoner exchange. And so please welcome Vladimir Kara-Murza and Evgenia Kara-Murza. And we’ve also got David Kramer here, our executive director of the Bush Institute, always, always on hand to ask all of these smart questions. And so I think I’d love to, we need to talk about the beginning, but I’d love to talk about the present for a second as we sit here today on October 21st, 2024, do you both feel safe?

Vladimir Kara-Murza:

First of all, I want to thank the Bush Center of the Bush Institute for the hospitality for hosting this conversation for the opportunity to visit, but also first and foremost for the support and the solidarity over these past two and a half years. The Bush Institute and a very good friend, David Kramer, executive director, were part of this coalition of NGOs led by Natalia Arno, my friend, from the Free Russia Foundation in the campaign that was led by my wife Evgenia to free, not just me, but other political prisoners who were in Putin’s gulag. And as you know, this prisoner exchange that happened on August 1 was the largest East-West prisoner exchange since the time of the Cold War and also the first in nearly four decades, to include not just western hostages on intelligence but actually Russian political prisoners.

And this was an amazing victory. And to me this still feels like a miracle because up until three months ago, I was confident that I was going to die in that Siberian prison. And this exchange was made possible by the relentless efforts and the relentless advocacy from so many good people in democratic nations that showed that at the end of the day, international public opinion matters and international public opinion is stronger than any dictatorship can ever hope to be. And you are all a very big part of that. And David and the Bush Institute, and for this, I want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart.

To your question about safety, I’ve been in Russian opposition politics for the last 25 years. I came to work with Boris Nemtsov, who was the leader of the pro-democracy opposition in Russia, former deputy prime minister once seen as a likely future president of Russia’s most effective and most prominent political opponent of Vladimir Putin. And he was assassinated on Putin’s orders, literally in front of the Kremlin in February of 2015, nearly 10 years ago. So I came to work with Boris back in (19)99, and I’ve been doing this for a quarter century and safe is not a word we associate with opposition politics in Russia.

We know what happens to people who dare to publicly oppose this regime. We know that today’s Russia holds more political prisoners than the whole of the Soviet Union. So that’s 15 countries put together did towards its later period in the middle of the 1980s. We know that people who oppose this regime are murdered on Vladimir Putin’s direct orders. When I say that Putin is a murderer, I don’t mean this just in some sort of a general sense, I mean this in a very literal sense. He personally orders political assassinations of his opponents. He personally ordered the assassination of Boris Nemtsov. He personally ordered the assassination of Alexei Navalny which did not succeed in 2020, but which was completed in February of this year. I was myself twice poisoned by the same FSB death squad that targeted Navalny first in 2015 and in 2017, and then given a 25 year sentence, basically a life sentence, or a death sentence if you put it that way, in a maximum security prison in Siberia. So we know what happens to political opponents of the Kremlin, and these things happen not just within Russia’s borders, but well outside of them too.

So to be completely honest with you, I just try not to think of this because you can’t live being paranoid, right? But also more importantly, because I know that what I’m doing is the right thing. I know that Russia, a country that is my home, a country that I love dearly and care for dearly deserves better than to live under a murderous, corrupt, aggressive dictatorship. I know that Russian citizens, just as citizens of every other country on the face of this earth, deserve to have rights and freedoms and human dignity with which every human being is born. And I’m going to continue working towards that goal regardless of the risks or the dangers we face. And even more importantly, beyond sort of the personal perspective, I’m not just a politician. I’m also a historian by training, by education, and we know the trends and the way the history develops.

History is a science just as much as physics or chemistry, except there it’s more, you know, figures and equations. In history, it’s more about the models and the trends of historical development. We know that the arc of history bends towards liberty. It may not bend as fast as we’d like, but the direction is unmistakable. You know, if we look at the map of Europe, let’s say 35 years ago, which is nothing by historical standards, you’ll see that half of Europe were living under various authoritarian or dictatorial regimes. If you look at the map of Europe today, you’ll see only two dictatorships – Putin’s Russian and Lukashenko’s Belarus.

And I have no doubt that the day will come when there’ll be no more dictatorships on the European continent when Russia will become a democracy. And what’s important in answer to your question is that that’s going to happen regardless, even if Putin kills off all of us.  All it means is that others will come and take our place. Some of these young people who turned out into tens of thousands in February of this year to demonstrate after the assassination of Alexei Navalny for the demonstration of commemoration, but also protest tens of thousands of people marching through the streets of Moscow, chanting no to war in Russia without Putin knowing that there’ll be filmed by police operatives and FSB agents and still people went. Or, it may be somebody from those hundreds of thousands that lined up also in February of this year to sign the nominating petitions for the only anti-war candidate who tried to run in Russia’s so-called parliamentary election, and I remember getting many, many letters in prison in February about these lines and how important it was for people to see how many people there are in Russia who believe in the democratic and peaceful future for our country. And again, most of them were young people. And so even if Putin kills off all of us, others will come in our place and he won’t be able to stop the tide of history. Nobody ever has been able to, and he will not be an exception.

Kaufmann:

The arc of history is driven in so many ways by strong women. And Evgenia, I think your story is as remarkable as Vladimir’s. Can you talk some about what you’ve experienced and your role in securing this freedom?

Evgenia Kara-Murza:

Thank you very much again. I want to second what Vladimir said about your warm welcome here. Thank you so very much for having us here today and for giving us this opportunity to speak to you, to tell us what we feel is important.

My role – I never wanted to be a public figure. Never, never ever in my life. Vladimir was the one living on the road, traveling across the world, advocating for the Magnitsky legislation, advocating for targeted sanctions against human rights violators, and speaking on behalf of numerous political prisoners in Russia. Because even before the full scale invasion of Ukraine, according to very conservative estimates, we had over 300 political prisoners. Nowadays, this number is staggering. And every time he would come home, I would look at him and I would say, how can you live like this? This is absolutely awful. I would never ever be able to do this.

But then, you know, Vladimir was arrested and thrown in prison and sentenced to 25 years of strict regime. I love this quote from Eleanor Roosevelt who said that “A woman is like a teabag. You never know how strong she is until you put her in hot water.” And it’s true that I’ve been sort of living this quote for many years. Because time and again, life has demanded that I stand up and fight for what I hold, the dearest for my family, for my loved ones, for my country, for, you know, we all have a little world – that’s our loved ones, that’s our closest circle. And we all have the big world. And in Russia’s case, it is very clear how these two things are interconnected. I know that for as long as this regime is sitting in the Kremlin, my little world will never be safe.

I cannot run away from a bully. I cannot hide from assassins. I have to stand up and face those bullies with courage. And that is the only way I can imagine doing this. That is the only way. I also am a mother to three children, and I realize clearly that I’m not going to be able to leave them a perfect world. No matter how much we work, no matter how much effort and time we put into this, we’re never going to be able to leave our kids a perfect world. But we can teach them to become fighters. We can teach them to be warriors for what is right, to stand up with courage and determination, to be resilient, to be courageous, and to fight for what is right – that we can teach them. And I believe that you can only teach your kids by example. You can give them long lectures, and they’re going to go in one ear and live out the other. We have three teenagers at home – I know. The only way to teach kids is by your example, by doing the things that you want them to learn how to do.

So that I really had no other options. I could not even think about Vladimir’s work stopping. And I have been incredibly lucky talking about women’s strength to work with incredible colleagues like Natalia Arno, the founder and president of the Free Russia Foundation. That foundation, you know, it emerged at Natalia’s kitchen table after the annexation of Crimea, sort of as a response to the first act of aggression against Ukraine by the Putin regime. And the first initiatives of the Free Russia Foundation were connected with the defense of Crimean Tartars persecuted in Crimea after the annexation. Today, the Free Russia Foundation has representations as offices or so-called reform spaces, physical spaces, to bring Russian speaking community together in, oh my God, in Brussels, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, in Budva, in Vilnius, Tallinn, and Warsaw. And what am I forgetting? I mean, we are everywhere and we are not a political party. We’re a civil society organization that supports and promotes and encourages all kinds of pro-democracy and anti-war initiatives, working in very close connection with people on the ground in Russia.

We depend on the work of those journalists who are still reporting from Russia, working very often anonymously, but they’re still there. Meduza alone uses over 150 journalists on the ground. We very much depend on the work of Russian lawyers who represent not only Russian political prisoners, but help us locate and represent Ukrainian POWs in civilian hostages. And these out of about 4,000 swapped, 4,000 Ukrainian POWs that returned to Ukraine as a result of those POW exchanges, over 900 were found, located, represented, and put on those exchange lists by Russian lawyers. So we know what Russia can be. We know because we work with these people, with these people who are the faces of that different Russia, a peaceful democratic Russia that would respect the rights of its own citizens and live in peace with its neighbors. And it is because we know all these people and we work with them that we believe in this, that we believe in this possibility.

And yes, women make a big part of it. And I am very happy to be here today and to be able to show you a small glimpse of that Russia through our work, through my husband, because I’ve been very lucky in marriage because I married my best friend and we’ve been together for over 20 years. And it has always been founded on mutual respect and admiration. But I’m also a good student of my husband. And he, throughout all these poisonings, throughout this persecution, throughout this imprisonment, he has always remained an optimist. And like Winston Churchill said that “I’m an optimist. I don’t see much point in being anything else.” And this is true, but I also learn a lot from him as a historian. And I know that his optimism is not an optimism of a person who just doesn’t know better, but his optimism is well-founded on those lessons from history. And I am so very happy to be surrounded by such incredible people like my husband or Natasha. And I am incredibly grateful to have such amazing allies as David here and the entire Bush Institute to have such amazing allies in our fight. Thank you very much.

David Kramer:

So I want to take both of you back a little over two and a half months ago. You were in solitary confinement. 11 months of that, you were getting an inkling that something might be in the works. Take us back to that time when you first found out each of you respectively, that you were about to be released as part of a exchange involving 24 people.

V Kara-Murza:

Well, for me, this whole saga began in the last week of July when one day out of the blue, it was suddenly taken from my cell, escorted to a prison office by two prison officials and told to write a request for pardon addressed to Vladimir Putin. No explanations, just that’s what it was. I said, I’m never going to write anything to Putin, never going to ask him about anything because I did not consider him to be a lawful president of my country. I consider him to be a dictator, a usurper, and a murderer. And on top of that, I’m not the criminal. Here he is. The criminals are those who have started the war in Ukraine, not those of us who were in prison because who were opposed it. So the prison officials weren’t too happy with that response. So they asked me if I would put that in writing, but I was very happy to do, put that all in writing, added the sentence that I very much hoped to live to see the day when Putin is put on trial for all these crimes signed, dated, and gave it to them.

Hope that kept the piece of paper somewhere. That was it. No explanation, nothing returned to my cell.

And then on Sunday, July 28th, so that’s five days before the exchange, I was suddenly woken up in the middle of the night. You’re not allowed as a prisoner, you’re not allowed a watch or clock in a cell. You’re supposed to be totally disoriented. But I saw it was dark outside in the window. And I asked these guys, so a group of prison officials just barged into my cell while I was sleeping, asked what time it was, and they said, 3:00 AM. And they told me I had 10 minutes to get up and get ready. And at this moment, I was absolutely certain I was going to be let out and be executed and jumping ahead on the plane during the exchange, we sort of shared experiences how each of us had had this situation and three or four others thought the same thing. So I guess it was done in the same way for everyone, or at least for most people.

But instead of the forest nearby, they took me to the airport. And I have to say that’s an experience that I cannot even describe in any legible words because once you’ve spent 11 months straight in solitary confinement without being able to as much as say hello to anybody suddenly being burst in the middle of a busy civilian airport, it was a regular airport almost because a big city, a million plus people, and of course I was handcuffs and on the police escort, but it was a normal airport with, you know, cafes and shops and families and kids running around. It was crazy. So they put me on a plane, flew me into Moscow. About this time last year when I was the other way from Moscow to Omsk. Took me three weeks in the sleeping carriages and transit prisons on the way.

This was a much quicker ride, three hours back on the plane. I need this to say they do not usually fly prisoners in Russia on planes. So something seemed really weird here, but I had no idea what it was in Moscow. I was taken to Lefortovo, which is a name well known from literature, the notorious KGB prison that once held Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vladimir Bukovsky and the Natan Sharansky and so many other high profile opponents of the Soviet regime. No explanation. Again, solitary confinement held incommunicado. I was not allowed to let my family or my lawyers know where I was. And in fact, as I now know from January, they were still being lied to that I was in Omsk while I was already in Moscow.

And at this stage, I’m thinking that there’s going to be a new criminal case because that’s usually the reason they bring somebody who is already a prisoner to Lefortovo is to initiate a new case, sort of struggle to think why they would initiate a new case against someone who already has a 25 year prison sentence, which is not possible to survive anyway. But the system doesn’t always work on logic, right? It has its own sort of internal dynamics and okay, this is what I’m thinking, but nothing’s happening. No interrogations, nothing at all. I’m just sitting in that cell.

It was a five star hotel though compared to Omsk. Because I had a bed, like in Omsk, the bunk gets attached to the wall at 5:00 AM and then for the whole day, you can either just walk in a small circle or sit or try to sit at this really uncomfortable stool that hangs out of the wall in Omsk, only given a paper and pen to write for 90 minutes a day. Then it’s taken away again. There’s a certain number of books that you’re allowed to have. One, if it’s a punishment cell, two, if it’s an isolation cell, and so on. In Lefortovo, nobody cared. I had a bed I could lie on. I had as many books as I wanted. I could write all day. It was paradise.

I know how that sounds. But everything’s in comparison, right?

And day after day goes by and nothing’s happening. And finally on the morning of August 1 the deputy director of the Lefortovo prison, an FSB Lieutenant colonel comes into my cell with a few staff members that bring all my bags from storage and they tell me to take off my prison uniform and to put on my civilian clothes. And all I had in terms of civilian clothes with me was the T-shirt in which I slept my long johns that I would put underneath my clothes because in Omsk it’s minus 40 in the winter when you’re taking outside for walks, so you have to put something underneath your clothing not to get totally frozen out. And I had my rubber flip flops that I would go to the prison shower in.

And so this deputy director of Lefortovo looks at me and says, “Why don’t you have any normal civilian clothes?”

And I said, look man, “I’m serving a 25 year sentence in solitary confinement, in a maximum security prison in Siberia. Why would I need civilian clothes?”

Nothing to respond to that. Just said again, whatever, put it on. So I put it on and just to sort of underscore how surreal everything was that same evening I would meet German chancellor Olaf Scholz wearing that T-shirt, the long johns, and the rubber flip flops for the prison shower. So I get escorted downstairs and there’s a row of men, plain clothes faces covered in black balaclava masks. This is the FSB spetsnaz, the Alpha group, the elite special service of the Russian Federal Security Service, pretty intimidating site, like something out of a Hollywood movie. And then they lead me to some kind of a bus that’s parked in the internal courtyard of the prison. They tell me to get up on it. They get into the bus, the windows are blackened, so it’s really dark. There’s no light. I see that in every row there are more men in black balaclavas, so more FSB spetsnaz operatives.

But next to each of them, I saw a familiar face, a friend, a colleague, a fellow political prisoner, a people who’d been serving time in prisons all around Russia. And I was the moment I knew. Because there could only be one reason why all of us would be on the same bus together in Moscow. A very quick ride to the airport, running red lights with a police escort, breaking all the traffic rules. We were all boarded up on a government plane. This is of Vnukovo, the government airport, which I’m sure you’ve been many times in your capacity as U.S. government official because that’s the official terminal in Moscow Airport where all the delegations come into. That’s where we’re flown out of on a government plane. Three hour flight.

Nobody told us where we’re going, but there’s a flight map. So you could see there’s south, southeast Ankara, Turkey. So that’s where the actual exchange takes place. So we get bordered onto one bus, the prisoners that Putin was getting in exchange, his spies, his hackers, and of course the prize, his hitman, the FSB assassin, who was serving time in prison in Germany. They boarded onto another bus. They went up to the plane, we saw them from their backs walking up into the same plane that just took us here. And then we were driven to some sort of a government terminal building reception area, a big room, long tables, coffee, tea, biscuits on it. We were still wearing whatever we were. And just as if things couldn’t get any more surreal than they already were, a lady walks up to me in a suit holding a cell phone and she asks, “Are you Mr. Kara-Murza?”

I said, “Yes, I am.”

So she said, “I’m from the U.S. Embassy in Ankara. The president of the United States is on the line waiting to speak to you.”

And she hands me the phone. And at that moment, I just thought, I’m going to give up trying to understand what’s happening here. And then I take the phone, I hear the president’s voice. So I tried to say something. I hadn’t used the word of English in two and a half years. I hadn’t used much Russian either because I was in solitary confinement, but had to think of something to say. And then he passed the phone to my kids and to Evgenia, who with him in the Oval Office. And I wasn’t allowed to phone them when I was in prison. This was the old Soviet policy where they punish not just the political opponent, political prisoner, but the families too. So I was not allowed to call. And so this was the first time in a long, long time that I heard the voices on the phones. And I don’t think I’ll be able to find words in any of the languages that I know to describe the feeling.

E Kara-Murza:

Well, when Vladimir was imprisoned, because he had for so many years advocated on behalf of other Russian political prisoners, I realized that I could not, there was not even an internal discussion with myself. I knew that I couldn’t make it about himself. I couldn’t make it about just Vladimir because I know how he feels about other people behind bars in Russia. So for a long time, for those two and a half years, it was me continuing Vladimir’s work, speaking on behalf of political prisoners in the Russian Federation, not just Vladimir.

I made, this was important to me to tell the stories and name the names of those people who brave enough to stand up and say, “No. I’m not okay with this.”

To me, this was the Russia that I love. And to me, this is the Russia that I wanted for the world to see. So to me, it has always been and will remain the fight for all of those of our compatriots who are behind bars in Putin’s gulag. And I was running around with this list by Novaya Gazeta, a Russian independent media that was banned closed down in Russia, and they had to flee the country. But these journalists continue their work. And there actually many of those journalists from Novaya Gazeta who stayed behind in Russia continuing their work on the ground. So they put up a list of Russian political prisoners with serious medical conditions whose lives are in danger on a daily basis because it is very common that people are denied medical care in Russian prisons that are being tortured, physically tortured.

Vladimir told you about the psychological torture that the regime often uses, especially in high profile case like that of Vladimir, because when they know that a person is very well known worldwide, they understand that if they try to torture him physically, there’s going to be a huge outcry. So they use psychological torture depriving him of the right to call his kids, for example. And that is absolutely unbearable when you know that the father of your kids is calling you, but you cannot talk to him because you don’t want to take those precious minutes from your three kids and you have to divide those 15 minutes between three kids. So I stood there with a watch and I had to physically take the phone away from one kid and pass it to another so that to make sure that each of them got their five minutes, and that was what two calls in two and a half years.

So that torture is real. As is solidary confinement.

Ukrainian POWs don’t leave solitary confinement, that’s how they’re held all the time. With Russian political prisoners. They use this as a method to isolate these people because they understand that even behind bars, these people, they continue the work. It’s funny, Vladimir, at the very beginning, Vladimir spent a few weeks with five other prisoners in the same cell in Moscow’s pretrial detention center. And there was a TV on the wall with propaganda pouring out of it, pouring out of it. Because even behind bars, people cannot be left alone. They have to be under the influence of propaganda on a constant basis, on a continuous basis. So there was the TV on the wall, and Vladimir was there in a cell with five other prisoners, small time crooks, I dunno, they were not political prisoners.

Vladimir had a book by Bukovsky. So he spent a few weeks in that cell, the entire cell read Bukovsky. They switched from watching propaganda to listening to concerts of philharmonic orchestra. And they were discussing the war in Ukraine and the crimes of the regime in Russia, which shows that when people are offered access to independent news, when they’re being taught and explained, propaganda is not as effective. This is why the regime goes after every single independent media in the country. That’s why now 26 journalists are already on the criminal persecution and many of them are behind bars. This is why many journalists are forced to do their work on anonymous basis. So this is the Russia that I want the world to see, and this is why I was running around with that list by Novaya Gazeta, trying to convince governments, democratic governments around the world, including the U.S. government, of the need to send a signal to Vladimir Putin.

I would come and say, this cannot be just about Vladimir. Yes, Vladimir is a dual Russian, UK citizen, and he is a green card holder in the U.S. But it should not be based on that. This advocacy should be based on the values, on the value of human life, the basis of any democracy in the world. You have to stand up for, to fight for the lives of those who are fighting for the same values that you are given as citizens of a free country. So I said it would be absolutely important for this exchange to be a group exchange, to send a message to the Kremlin that you know who the real criminals are, and you’re going to be standing with those who are fighting against these criminals, and who represent a different Russia – a potential of a different Russia, and that is also, of course, an absolutely, tremendously, important symbolic gesture of solidarity with Russian civil society.

And I am still amazed that it worked honestly, because for so long, the real politics seemed to be the driving force behind anything. And I mean, look at the war in Ukraine, the full scale invasion war of aggression in the middle of Europe is the result of over two decades of impunity that Vladimir Putin has enjoyed while committing the same crimes again and again, but he was time and again let off the hook. He was time and again allowed to get away with it. With the invasion of Georgia in 2008, with the second war in Chechnya before that, with the annexation of Crimea in 2014, with the bombings of Syria, civilian population in Syria, and while all the while squashing peaceful protests in Russia. So if he’s allowed to commit war crime in Syria and Chechnya, why not in Ukraine? If he’s allowed to annex the part of Georgia and Crimea, why not the entire country?

So this is the result of that realpolitik, where the interests have always outweighed human rights. So you know what? I am very heartened that this exchange happened, not just because I got back my best friend and the father of my children, and not be only because our our ranks now have an incredibly committed, fearless human rights defender, but also because maybe, there is a crack in this, you know, maybe actual values can outweigh the realpolitik.

Maybe even in today’s world, we can achieve that. We can go back to basics, and remind the world what democracy is about. But I didn’t have any. It’s like I was not on the inside of the exchange. I was just running around with that list saying that these are the people whose lives are in danger. Please save these people. Get them out.

And I was talking about Alexei Gordon – the municipal deputy, who got years in prison for calling for a minute of silence for killer killed Ukrainian kids. I was talking about Maria Ponomarenko, Siberian journalist who got again, years in prison for posting about the war crimes committed by the Russian army in Ukraine. I was talking about Yegor Balazeikin, a 17 year old sentenced to six years in prison. Now all this is 18. The boy is 17 for a failed attempt to set a conscription center on fire in protest against the war. I was talking of Zarema Musaeva, who was just transferred to a hospital to receive urgent medical care because her health is failing.

So I am happy that this exchange happened, but I out of all that list, only two people with severe medical conditions ended up in the exchange. And that was Sasha Skochilenko, the artist from St. Petersburg who switched price tags as a local supermarket with antiwar messages, who was sentenced to seven years, I think. Right? She was serving her unlawful sentence with a whole array of medical conditions. And Vladimir was on that list as well, because following the two assassination attacks, he developed polyneuropathy, a medical condition that, even under Russian law, should prevent a person from being held behind bars, because it can lead to paralysis. Yet he was not only behind bars, he was serving his sentence in solitary confinement, in strict regime, and his health was failing.

So, that advocacy will have to continue.

We will continue fighting for all of those whose lives are in danger, and we will continue to bring forward that day when the regime collapses. But answering your question, David, about the actual exchange – again, I was not on the inside. I did not know it was coming.

I heard from several governments in early summer of this year that they got the idea. That they thought the group exchanged was the right thing to do. I was like, “Oh, okay!” And I could just, you know, barely breathe. And it’s like, okay, well, maybe a few more years, and something will happen. I never really expected that it would happen so quickly.

And that week, the week of the exchange, a few days before the exchange, we started noticing that political prisoners began disappearing from penitentiary institutions where they’d been serving their sentences. Ilya Yashin, Kseniya Fadeeva, Lilia Chanysheva, Andrei Karlov, Andrey Pivovarov, the lawyers were told that they had been sent on a transfer, that they were being transferred, without any particular details. But in Vladimir’s case, we were repeatedly told that he was still in Omsk. So, I understood that something was happening, and we were asking ourselves, what it was, because this, there is, of course, always a risk that something worse than imprisonment can happen.

People have been known to die in Russian prisons.

And to tell, well, according to official data, official state data, at least 2500 people die yearly within the Russian penitentiary system (because) of medical conditions. Well, I mean, Alexei Navalny died of a medical condition, didn’t he? We all know that he was actually murdered.

People die of suicides, and Maria Ponomarenko, who went through punitive psychiatry, that Siberian journalist that I told you about, went through punitive psychiatry for her opposition to the war, who was tortured in prison is very close to suicide today.

And of other reasons as the official documents state, whatever these are, the reasons might be. So we knew that something was happening, and we of course, hoped for the best, but we were repeatedly told that Vladimir was still in Omsk, and the letters sent to him, sent to Omsk were delivered, according to the authorities. So this, we thought that whatever was happening, it was Vladimir was not involved in that.

But on the eve of August 1, I received a call from the White House inviting the kids and myself to meet with President Biden, on the following morning. I asked about the reason for this visit, and I was told that they were not able to share any more details. So you can imagine the night I spent. And then on the morning of August 1, the kids and I went to the White House, and that’s where we saw the families of U.S. citizens whom the U.S. government had been fighting to bring home. And that’s where and when I realized that this that they would not have called us there unless they had some good news to share with us.

Kaufmann:

So real quick, I think we’d love to hear just how the Washington Post and that whole correspondence happened while you were still in prison. And why did and why was that allowed to happen? How were you able to make that happen? And then we’ve got time for one, one quick question after that.

V Kara-Murza:

Sure. So the only way I could communicate with the outside world was through letters.

Obviously, didn’t have any phones or computers or anything like that. I had one and a half hours a day that I was allowed to have pen and paper only. So everything, all the work you need to get done in a day, which includes preparing for court hearings, reading letters you receive from from the outside, responding to those letters, making notes from books, anything else you need to respond to journalists who would send questions. All that has to be stuffed in the 90 minutes timely pen and paper is taken away, and again, you just sit there and stare at walls. And without any irony, I can say that if there is one thing that the previous generation of Russian political prisoners, of Soviet political prisoners will be envious of us for is the fact that there is now a well functioning, again, no irony, a well functioning prison correspondent system where people actually can write to political prisoners.

And by the way, while we are on this note, I often get asked, and especially when speaking to public events and audiences such as this one, what can people do to help?

And I always say, please write to political prisoners.

There are ways to do this now. There are human rights groups that make it possible that facilitate these electronic letters. For example, OVD-Info, which is a leading human rights group in Russia that has a special page of the project called “Letters Across Borders” that facilitates the writing to Russian political prisoners. And I’m sure there are other human rights groups who do this for other countries as well. And it really matters.

I think only somebody who’s been in this situation can appreciate how much hope and light and warmth there is in that, you know, sheet of paper that gets handed to you by the prison guard through the feeding slot in a cell door. Because it’s really important for political prisoners to know that they’re not forgotten and not ignored and isolated. Because the prison system – that’s what it makes you feel, and that it was all for nothing. Nobody cares, nobody knows about you, and these letters are really our lifeline.

So anyway, that was my way of communicating, and it was the same way that I would get my articles out to the Washington Post. I’d been a contributor and writer to the Washington Post for many years before. This is not something I began in prison, but it’s something that was a question of principle for me to continue while I was in prison, because the point of this was to shut me up, and I wasn’t going to be shut up.

And so I would write these pieces, send them out to Evgenia by this prison correspondence system, and then she would get them to the to the Washington Post for publication. We would sometimes pass some information with the lawyers on their regular visits, but we had to be really careful about that, because we know what happened to the lawyers of Alexei Navalny. The three lawyers of Alexei Navalny who are in prison and on trial now themselves, because they acted as his lawyers and because they held pass information. So we were really careful about what information would go via that route.

So the prison correspondence, the official prison correspondence system, was the preferred way of communicating. And I have to say, by the way that you know, in that two years, three months that I was in prison. I was in 13 different penitentiary institutions around Russia, from Moscow to Omsk, including the transit prisons on the way Evgenia says, I was given a guided tour of the modern day gulag to see it from different angles and different viewpoints. And the way the censorship operates.

Needless to say, all these prison letters go through the censorship system – so the prison officials read it going both ways, and a lot of letters didn’t make it to me or from me outside. But the way this censorship system operates is very different in different institutions. It’s like, what one hand doesn’t know what the other one is doing. And the two extremes that I’ve experienced was like the worst censorship was in Moscow. This was Vodnik the pre trial detention center number five, where I was before and during my trial, where the censor(ship) was just, I mean, it made absolutely no sense.

I mean, for example, the prison rules say that all correspondence has to be in the Russian language so the Censors can read it. Okay, that makes sense. But you know, when somebody would put P.S. in the letters? Everybody knows what P.S. is, but she would scribble it out like this, because it was not Russian. These were foreign letters, right? A P and S from Latin alphabet. Well, there was one time when a friend of mine went to the library of the Russian Academy of Sciences and he copied an article written by the eminent 19th century Russian historian Vasily Klyuchevsky about the relationship between Russia and Western Europe in the 19th century. The article was from 1886 and he wrote me several quotes from this article in a letter, and he’s got censored out by the censored pretrial detention center number five, an article by a historian from 1886 that was literally scribbled out with his black big marker pens. This was one extreme, an idiotic one, I would add as well.

But the other extreme, sort of in a good way. This was when I was in Siberia, in Omsk, at a maximum security prison in solitary confinement, so the strictest conditions that could possibly be. And one day I get this letter from from a French engineer, somebody I don’t know personally. He must have heard about my story on the media, or read one of Evgenia’s many interviews with with French media in her perfect French. And then he decided to write a whole letter just to express support and solidarity. It was a letter in French, and he got to mean full, and I was able to read it. They just brought it without a single mark. And so, I guess you can do a whole study on the way Russian prison censorship operates, and how it’s just totally inconsistent. But, you know, frankly, it’s things like that that sometimes make the difference between keeping or losing your sanity when you have these lifelines to the outside world. So again, I would, I would urge, and I would ask everyone to please take some, you know, a few minutes from the busy schedules every day, or once a week, or something, whatever, whatever works, whatever, whatever is possible. To write a letter to the political prisoners. It’s really, really important.

Kaufmann:

Well, we’ll ask one last, final, very quick question. You’ve studied – you both studied freedom in Russia, from the you were around for the fall the USSR, up through today, what does the word and you’ve had freedom taken from you in the most extreme sense. What does freedom mean to you today?

V Kara-Murza:

Well, to me, of course, that’s such a amazingly wide phenomenon that we can just spend just a two hour conversation talking about that. But to me, I guess, because of all the experiences that I’ve had in my country and in my own life, I think freedom means the freedom to be able to voice your opinions without having any consequences for it. I think the best way that this has ever been expressed was by George Orwell, who once wrote that freedom is the ability to say the two plus two equals four, if you can do that, everything else is possible.

Kaufmann:

Amen!

V Kara-Murza

And the biggest sort of, the biggest factor telling us that we don’t have freedom in Russia today is that it’s not possible to say the two plus two equals four. You cannot call a war a war. You cannot report the facts, you cannot tell the truth. You cannot talk about the civilian casualties in the war and Ukraine, people are in prison just for saying this, just simply, for stating the truth, for saying the two plus two is four. And so everything we do is directed at bringing forward that day when it will be possible to say in Russia that two plus two is four and not face any consequence for it, I have no doubt that they will come.

Andrew Kaufmann:

Evgenia?

E Kara-Murza:

Well, no one could phrase it better than Vladimir just did. Well, honestly, to me, freedom is just that to know that you are safe in voicing your opinion, to know that you are safe to raise your kids as you see fit, that you’re not at the beginning of the full scale invasion. There was a case of Alexei Moskalev and his daughter, Masha. Masha drew an anti war picture at school, and the police came knocking on their door, and they threw her father in prison, and she was sent to an orphanage because of a of an anti war picture drawn at school.

My son did the same, and he was about the same age. He was 10 when Vladimir was imprisoned, and he brought home from school an anti war picture with a small Ukrainian soldier. Right? You know, there’s sweat running down his face, but he’s got this smile on his face, and he’s running forward with the Ukrainian flag. And Daniel, our son, added some quote from Star Wars about do or not, something like be courageous, to do whatever I don’t remember, but I was not concerned that the police would come to knock on our door, and I could send my kids, and still can send my kids to school every day knowing that they’re safe in expressing their opinion, That they’re safe to say what they think. And if they do not accept something done by this government, they can say it, and they can go and vote. And our oldest one is 18, and she’s gonna, that’s gonna be her first election. Just, in what? What is it? Two weeks? Yes. So she’s gonna go and vote, and that’s gonna be her voice added to the election result. So that’s what freedom is, honestly.

Kaufmann:

Exactly from its earliest days, the Bush Institute has always said that we will stand by people that are fighting for freedom around the world. And I think that, I hope that continues to be true long into the future. I know it is today, and we couldn’t be more honored to have had you all here. Thank you so much.

Hawkins:

Thank you for listening. Learn more about the Bush Institute’s work to support freedom and democracy abroad at bushcenter.org/freedomanddemocracy