Joe McConnell
“I was absolutely certain that I would die in Putin’s prison.”
It’s almost the first thing Vladimir Kara-Murza tells me after his surprise release in the largest prisoner swap since the Cold War.
The Russian opposition politician is painfully thin, due to stress, he says. He is also still in shock over his abrupt transfer from a maximum-security prison in Siberia into forced exile, after more than two years behind bars.
“It’s surreal, like I’m watching a movie,” he describes the feeling. “But it’s a good movie,” in which he finally reunites with the family he hasn’t seen since his arrest in Moscow in April 2022.
The youngest son follows him everywhere, anxious never to lose sight of him.
Vladimir Kara-Murza, also a British citizen, was found guilty of treason and sentenced to 25 years in prison for his strong and persistent condemnation of Vladimir Putin and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
He has spent the last 11 consecutive months in solitary confinement, forced to turn down his bed every morning at 5am and only given pen and paper for an hour or so a day.
“It’s so easy to lose your mind. You lose track of time, space. Everything, really,” he reveals, in one of his first extended interviews after his release. “You don’t do anything, you don’t talk to anyone, you don’t go anywhere. Day after day after day.”
He was denied access to telephone calls home and was only allowed to speak to his children twice in more than two years.
The additional punishment was even harsher, the physical one.
Nearly a decade ago, Vladimir Kara-Murza nearly died from an unknown toxin and is still suffering from the after-effects, including nerve damage. In September, he now reveals, a prison doctor gave him “a year, 18 months maximum” to live if he remained behind bars.
“After two poisonings by the FSB, I am not exactly in the right health condition for a prison with a strict regime,” he explains with an ironic smile.
Last week, Kara-Murza was one of eight Russian dissidents who disappeared from their prisons.
As lawyers and relatives raised the alarm, rumors began to circulate of an imminent exchange. The prisoners themselves had no idea.
Instead, when guards burst into Kara-Murza’s cell in Omsk, he thought they were going to “take him out to be shot,” he recalls. “I actually thought they were going to execute me.”
He was recently asked to sign a presidential pardon request, but refused to beg for mercy from Vladimir Putin, whom he calls “a dictator, a usurper and a murderer.”
Kara-Murza was transferred to Moscow and the infamous FSB prison of Lefortovo. Five days later he was taken out to board a bus and saw the other dissidents inside, each with a balaclava-clad FSB guard.
Another guard then took the bus microphone and announced that they were being taken to a prisoner exchange, without giving further details.
“No one asked our consent,” Kara-Murza says. “We were loaded onto a plane like cattle and flown away.”
The activist arrived in Germany wearing the only civilian clothes he owned: long black underwear, a T-shirt and the flip-flops he used to shower in prison.
The Russian dissidents were among a “group” of released political prisoners, along with high-profile U.S. citizens such as journalist Evan Gershkovich.
Three were former activists on the team of Alexei Navalny, the opposition politician who died suddenly in prison earlier this year. Navalny was originally supposed to be part of the complex swap.
In exchange for the dissidents, Russia got a handful of spies and criminals, including Vladimir Putin’s most coveted prey: an FSB hitman known as Vadim Krasikov, who had committed a daylight murder in a Berlin park.
The judge who sentenced him to life in prison called the murder an act of “state terrorism.”
“To all those who criticize this [swap]I would like to respectfully urge them not to think about exchanging prisoners but about saving lives,” Kara-Murza said, responding to the controversy over Krasikov’s release.
The killer was welcomed home with a red carpet and a hug from Putin himself.
“Aren’t they worth freeing a murderer for 16 lives?”
For a long time, Germany was unsafe. The delay, Kara-Murza argues, may be what cost Alexei Navalny his life.
The joy of the Kara-Murza reunion is overshadowed by the thought of the Russian prisoners who have not been released.
“I am so happy and overwhelmed to see these people free, but also very sad for so many people left behind,” his wife Evgenia tells me. “I feel guilty.”
The human rights organization Memorial lists hundreds of political prisoners and she has worked hard to get a priority group.
“There are people with serious health problems, like Alexei Gorinov who is missing part of his lung, who don’t have much time.”
Her husband speaks of those “still languishing in Putin’s Gulag” and the hope for further exchanges.
He had been free for only five minutes when he let himself go into a controversy.
In statements made shortly after his landing in Germany, Vladimir Kara-Murza argued that sanctions related to the war in Ukraine should be more targeted.
There was immediate outrage from Ukrainians, who argued that his priority in walking free was to lessen the punishment inflicted on Russia for declaring war.
Kara-Murza calls it calibration.
“I need more information,” he admits. “I realize that February 2022 has changed a lot.”
But he wants to know why a Russian human rights lawyer cannot travel to the Baltic states for a conference, when a Russian missile containing a Western-made chip can hit a residential building in Ukraine.
“The responsibility for what the Putin regime is doing is shared by Russian society, a large part of which has chosen to turn a blind eye to the abuses and repression,” he argues.
“But let us not forget the responsibility of those Western countries that for years preferred to deal with Vladimir Putin and do business, knowing full well who he was and what he represented.”
In 2022, Vladimir Kara-Murza was arrested because he insisted on staying in Russia and speaking out. Now that he has been banned from traveling, he worries about his right to call others to action there. He thinks he will feel “more limited.”
But he will continue to condemn the war against Ukraine.
“Putin cannot be allowed to win this war. Ukraine must win, and there should be more support from Western countries for that to happen,” he argues.
Historically, he argues, “windows of opportunity” for democratic change open after a “disastrous military defeat.”
As his plane from Russia was taking off, the FSB guard next to Kara-Murza told him to look out the window.
“He said it was the last time I would see my homeland.” The activist laughed. “I said, I am a historian, so I am sure I will return to my country.”
“And it will be a lot faster than you think.”
