The last time I spoke with Vladimir Kara-Murza he was on the screen of a Zoom webinar, talking about the harm that corruption and dictatorship in Russia had done to the world, and standing in what appeared to be a coat closet.
In one of the many roles he held prior to his April 2022 arrest in Moscow, Vladimir joined Human Rights First as a senior advisor on the use of Magnitsky sanctions to promote accountability for human rights abuse and corruption.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine that February, Vladimir began crisscrossing Europe to meet with as many of his fellow activists and politicians as he could to strengthen opposition to the Putin regime’s brutality at home and in Ukraine, before returning to his native Russia. In late March, he agreed to join us from Berlin for a virtual panel discussion that I moderated about how a failure to confront corruption had fueled crisis and tragedy in Afghanistan and Ukraine.
Because he was overbooked and dashing between engagements, Vladimir had to set up his laptop in the nearest free space he could find after a meeting that had run long – and so he spoke eloquently about Western complicity in Russia’s kleptocracy with a rack of empty coat hangers dangling behind him. In the coming months, those of us who had worked with Vladimir remembered this image as a testament to his commitment to taking every opportunity and working with every partner to call out abuses and uphold human rights.
After he returned to Russia, Vladimir kept up his energetic output in the media, continuing to offer frank talk to international outlets about Putin’s “regime of murderers.” But that regime soon arrested him, setting in motion a sham judicial process that ended with Vladimir convicted of spurious charges of treason and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
In support of his wife Evgenia, we and many other friends of Vladimir did what we could in the following months and years to press the U.S. and other governments to advocate for his release. It helped that Vladimir had deep and bipartisan support in Congress, and was occasionally able to smuggle out Pulitzer Prize-winning op-eds about the Putin regime’s abuses – op-eds that we imagined him writing from the isolation of a prison cell about the size of that coat closet.
But especially after Alexei Navalny died in Putin’s custody this February, the words of a Game of Thrones villain were never far from my mind: “If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention.”
It was a pleasure to be proven wrong, then, by Vladimir’s release in a broader prisoner swap last week that saw several other Russian political prisoners and wrongfully detained Americans freed as well. Vladimir had clearly been thinking along similar lines, telling his family and President Biden last week, “I was sure I’m going to die in prison.” He and his fellow released prisoners have expressed their anguish that so many of their peers remain there.
But good news is rare and must be celebrated when it comes. Whether or not Vladimir ends up resuming his breakneck pace of advocacy, it is a source of relief and joy to see him reunited with his family, and to see at least one injustice come to an end.
