Opinion

The Post contributing columnist speaks to David Shipley about persecution in Russia.

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Podcast episode

David Shipley: Tell us a little bit about the last two weeks.

Vladimir Kara-Murza: Well, frankly, the last two weeks have been completely surreal. Just a few weeks ago, I was absolutely certain that I would die in Putin’s gulag. And now I’m sitting at home and speaking with you. And I’m here with my family, and I could hug my kids, hug my wife. And I wasn’t allowed even to call them on the phone from prison.

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Vladimir Bukovsky was a prominent Soviet-era dissident and longtime prisoner of conscience who was himself exchanged in 1976 in what was the first-of-its-kind East-West exchange involving political prisoners. Bukovsky compared the experience to what a deep-sea diver feels when he suddenly bursts out from the depths of the ocean onto the surface. You completely lose your orientation. You have absolutely no idea what’s happening, and you need time to acclimate, to get back, to transition back into reality.

This is the metaphor he used, and I think it’s spot on. This is exactly how I’ve been feeling, and I don’t know how much time it will take to acclimate, to get back into some sort of normal and to realize that this is actually happening in reality instead of being some sort of a dream.

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Shipley: Can you describe a day in prison?

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Kara-Murza: It’s basically just a long “Groundhog Day” — endless and meaningless and exactly the same. Omsk, where I was imprisoned, is a city in western Siberia that has a centuries-long tradition of holding political prisoners in Russia, both in imperial times and Soviet times. Among the people who were imprisoned there was Dostoevsky back in the 19th century; in the 20th century, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was in prison in Omsk on his way to the gulag in Kazakhstan; Mustafa Dzhemilev, the leader of the Crimean Tatars, was there as well.

It is the harshest prison regime in the whole of Russia. Everything is by the second, by the minute, by the rule. Five o’clock in the morning is the official wake-up call. You attach your bunk to the wall where it stays until 9 p.m. when it’s lights out. So, you cannot lie down or sit properly during the day. You just basically walk in the small cell as much as you can. Or you sit at this very small and uncomfortable stool that basically just sticks out of the wall at a tiny desk.

I was in solitude for almost 11 months straight without any break. And I have to say, it's really not easy when you are just completely deprived of any human contact. Aristotle said human beings are social animals, right? We need communication as much as we need oxygen to breathe or water to drink or food to eat. And when you're just totally deprived of it, it is very, very difficult. I read as much as I could. And I also learned Spanish because, again, you have to do something with your time. You have to fill your head with something useful.

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In the two years and three months that I've been in prison, I only once was able to speak with my wife on the phone and only twice to my three children. This is an old, very Soviet habit of the Kremlin when they try to punish not just political opponents themselves but their families as well.

Shipley: This gets to the foundational or the existential question, which is why? Why put a human in solitary confinement in a Siberian prison a world away?

Kara-Murza: Because the enemy must be punished, right? In my case, it wasn’t just public opposition to the war in Ukraine. It wasn’t just public advocacy on behalf of political prisoners. It wasn’t just public speeches talking about the illegitimacy, the illegality of Vladimir Putin bypassing the constitutional term limits and staying in power indefinitely. This was all in my sentence too. So, we know that these things have really irritated them.

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But sort of the unspoken and unwritten charge that I was convicted of was also my involvement in the passage of the Magnitsky Act in several Western countries, beginning here in the United States. These were the laws that imposed targeted sanctions, visa and financial sanctions, on key officials of the Kremlin, on key officials of the Putin regime. There are a few things that........

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