Transcript for Vladimir Kara-Murza: Russian Imprisonment and Fighting for Democracy

Recorded remotely.

Host, Nicole Carroll: This is the Pulitzer on the Road podcast connecting Pulitzer Prize winners with audiences around the country. I'm your guide, Nicole Carroll. I’m a member of the Pulitzer Prize board and a faculty member at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. 

Each spring, 23 Pulitzer Prizes are awarded for distinguished journalism, books, drama and music. On this podcast, we talk with many of the winners and hear the stories behind their prize-winning work. 

In April 2022, Vladimir Kara-Murza was arrested in Russia for speaking out against the war in Ukraine. Vladimir — who served as the deputy leader of the People's Freedom Party in Russia — is a politician, historian, and writer. While he was being held in prison in Siberia, Vladimir was still suffering the health consequences of two poisonings that he believes were at the hands of the Russian government. 

Vladimir Kara-Murza: I was absolutely certain that I was going to die in that Siberian prison. 

Nicole Carroll: Then, in early 2024, almost two years into his imprisonment, he learned of the death of another opposition leader, Alexei Navalny …  

Vladimir Kara-Murza: It was a Friday evening, the 16th of February, and I suddenly heard Alexei Navalny’s name on the radio in my prison cell, which was astonishing because, of course, names of opposition leaders are not allowed on on state media. And suddenly I heard his name and I jumped up to listen. And then they said something like, ‘lost consciousness coming back from his walk.' And, you know, 'death occurred at such and such time.' I don't think I'll be able to find words to to describe what that felt like. Look, Vladimir Putin has been not just imprisoning, but murdering his opponents for years. 

Nicole Carroll: From solitary confinement in Siberia, Vladimir managed to write opinion columns for the Washington Post, where he warned of the dire consequences of dissent in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and insisted on a democratic future for his country. Then, on a day in May, Vladimir learned he had won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Commentary for these opinion columns. 

Vladimir Kara-Murza: My lawyer came to see me on his weekly visit. I was sitting there in that small room separated by glass. And he told me that I'd won a Pulitzer Prize. And, of course, I was certain that I would never be able to to see it or to accept it in person. 

Nicole Carroll: But then, to his shock, in August of 2024 Vladimir was released as part of the US prisoner exchange with Russia. And he was able to accept his Pulitzer at the award ceremony where he said a few words. 

Vladimir Kara-Murza: The prisoner exchange in August that saved sixteen human lives from the hell that is Vladimir Putin's modern day gulag, was a miracle. But it was in many ways, a human made miracle, made possible by the relentless advocacy of so many good people in democratic nations, including many in this room. 

Nicole Carroll: On this episode of Pulitzer on the Road, Vladimir Kara-Murza is in conversation with Anne Applebaum. Anne won a Pulitzer for her book, Gulag, in 2004. She now serves on the Pulitzer Board and recently published a book titled, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators who want to run the world. 

Vladimir and Anne will talk about what it's like to oppose the Putin regime inside Russia, where he worked with leading dissidents such as Boris Nemtsov. They'll also discuss how Vladimir managed to write his columns from prison, and why he believes that democracy and freedom are inevitable for his homeland, Russia. 

Anne Applebaum: Vladimir, good morning. It's actually my afternoon, but It's great to be here with you trans-Atlanticly. 

Vladimir Kara-Murza: Hello, Anne. It's always good to speak with you in whatever format. Very happy to join you for this podcast production. 

Anne Applebaum: Before doing this, I was trying to remember where we first met, and I actually couldn't place it. I feel like I've known you for a long time, but I couldn't pinpoint why that is. You've been a presence in my life without me remembering the exact moment. 

Vladimir Kara-Murza: I think I could say the same thing and I wouldn't be able to remember either. I know it's been a long time. And we have many mutual friends... 

Anne Applebaum: Yes. 

Vladimir Kara-Murza: ...one of whom was Vladimir Bukovsky, an eminent Soviet-era dissident and somebody who was very important in my life. And we certainly met in his presence as well many times. 

Anne Applebaum: That's so funny that you said that, because I actually wanted to begin with something that I remember Vladimir Bukovsky saying, about how being a dissident in any society requires a particular kind of personality. You’re probably best known to this audience for your columns, for the fact that you were imprisoned in Russia and then released. But of course, you've been part of politics or interested in politics for much longer than that. Could we start with you reflecting a little bit about where you're from and where your attitude to life comes from? 

Vladimir Kara-Murza: I think it's a little bit of everything in my case. I’m a Muscovite, a fifth generation Moscovite. Moscow is my home, always has been and always will be, even if I'm temporarily unable to to be there now. I think family history may have something to do with that, too. My grandfather was also a historian and a journalist. His name was Alexei Kara-Murza. He was arrested in 1937 under the infamous Article 58/10 of the Penal Code, the anti-Soviet agitation propaganda, sent to the gulag in the Russian Far East in the Khabarovsk region. 

And a few months before my own arrest, I went to the state archive or the Russian Federation, and I went to read his file, which has been declassified, and it's available in the archive. And his indictment by the NKVD in 1937 read that he was being arrested for expressing hostility towards the leaders of the party and the government. This is a direct quotation. And when I was arrested and tried and had my sentence pronounced, one of my criminal offenses was expressing a hostile attitude towards the top leadership of the Russian Federation. So it was actually astonishing to me, also as historian, to see -– well, similar is probably not a strong enough word. I mean, these people are literally taking phrases out of the NKVD documents at the time of Stalin’s great terror and putting them into their indictments and sentences today. 

And then, of course, a life formative experience for me was August 1991. I was only ten at the time, so I always regretted. I was too young to participate in those events. To me, those three days in August ...

Anne Applebaum: These were the demonstrations in Moscow that eventually brought down the Soviet Union. 

Vladimir Kara-Murza: Right, the attempted hardline coup d’etat that actually ended up turning into a democratic revolution when the Soviet regime fell in three days, And, you know, when that coup began on the morning of the 19th of August 1991, it seemed that the plotters had everything on their side. You know, of course, these were the top leaders of the Communist Party, the KGB, the Soviet military. They had the entire government and party apparatus. They had the propaganda machinery, you know, the newspapers, the television channels, radio stations and so on. They had the world's foremost machine of repression. That was the Soviet KGB. And, of course, they had the tanks which they sent to occupy central Moscow. And the people, you know, the Russian citizens, Muscovites who were opposed to that coup were not armed with anything except their own dignity and their determination to stand up for their freedom. And so people went out into the streets in the tens of thousands. In the hundreds of thousands. And my father was one of those people who spent all three days and three nights at the barricades by the Moscow White House. And so when the people went out into the streets and stood in front of the tanks, the tanks stopped and turned away. And to me, this was, as I said, a life formative experience, because the lesson of those days will stay with me for as long as I live. And that that lesson to me is that however strong an authoritarian regime may seem, if enough people are willing to stand up to it all, that strength becomes meaningless. 

Anne Applebaum: Do you think of yourself primarily as an activist or a journalist? How did you transition from somebody who was thinking about these ideas and wishing to be part of it to somebody who wrote columns and commentary? 

Vladimir Kara-Murza: So I always aspired to enter politics, and I always wanted to be in politics because I wanted to change my country for the better. And you know, I think the path we choose in our life is obviously, you know, influenced and determined by our own interests and principles and predispositions. But it's also very important what people we meet along the way. And to me, such a meeting that had a profound impact on my life happened actually a little more than 25 years ago. 

It was in the autumn of 1999, just as Putin was coming to power. I met with Boris Nemtsov and I began to to work with him, he was former deputy prime minister of Russia, once seen as the most likely successor to President Boris Yeltsin, and who then became the most prominent, the most well known, the most effective leader of the democratic opposition under Vladimir Putin, and who was gunned down in front of the Kremlin in February 2015. And when I began to work with Boris Nemtsov back all those years ago, we still had democracy in Russia. We had a real parliament with real opposition. We had real independent media. We had a pluralistic, competitive political process. We had real elections. And then I was a candidate for the Russian parliament myself in the election in 2003. 

2003 was in many ways a turning point on the road of Russia's transformation from the imperfect democracy we had back in the nineties to the authoritarian system that Putin has built today. 

Anne Applebaum: 2003 is quite an early date to start talking about changes in Russia. I mean, I was working there at that time and I remember the takeover of television and I remember the arrest of Khodorkovsky. And to me, those were important turning points where you saw the end of it wasn't it wasn't really even just about democracy. It was about the end of the rule of law. It was about ending a system where there is respect for law and where there is a certain modicum of free speech. 

Vladimir Kara-Murza: Three major things happened in 2003 that sort of helped cement this transition. In June of that year, the Putin government shut down the last independent nationwide television network TVS. So effectively monopolizing all the airwaves for the regime, for the government. 

In October of that year, Putin arrested Mikhail Khodorkovsky, at that time, Russia's richest man, founder and head of the Yukos oil Company, also somebody who was a philanthropist, who financed, you know, opposition parties and and civil society groups and independent media, which was obviously not very welcome in the Kremlin. So his arrest was this sort of very demonstrative step to show to everybody else in Russia's business community that if you behave like him, you'll end up like him, too. 

And then in December of 2003, we had an election, a parliamentary election that was famously described by the Council of Europe observation mission as, and I quote, “free, but certainly not fair.” End of quote. It was sort of a transition election in the sense that it was still free in a sense that we could participate. You know, I could be a candidate. There were pro-democracy opposition candidates on the ballot, but it was not fair in a sense that the result was predetermined. 

And following that election, any real opposition was expunged from the Russian legislature. And the Russian parliament became, in the unforgettable words of Boris Gryzlov, its then speaker and one of the founders of Putin's United Russia Party. We all remember that famous phrase: Parliament is not a place for discussion. I think that's one of the phrases that will go down in future history books to describe the Putin regime. 

And so, you asked what I consider myself? In a normal situation, I would say I am an opposition politician. But I think that is a term that is unfortunately not applicable to Russia today because, you know, opposition is a term that belongs to free societies, because members of the opposition sit in parliaments, they debate in television studios, they participate in elections. In my country, people who oppose this regime are either in exile, in prison or dead. 

Anne Applebaum: But it took a very, very long time, I think, for the rest of the world to begin to see Putin as threatening – around about 2007 or 2008. I actually made a speech in Germany where I talked about Putinism as an ideology. And I listed some of these changes and the way in which he was, at that point, he had created the system of managed democracy, where he created fake political parties. And there was an attempt to kind of mastermind a kind of puppet show for people. And I anyway I described this at that in the speech, and people came up to me afterwards and they were furious at me. They said, you know, it's not an ideology. You know, he's a pragmatic person. You know, he's someone we do business with. You're creating hatred against him. What's wrong with you? 

I mean I actually don't mean to blame the Germans at all because you could have heard those comments in almost any European country or North American country at the time. Why do you think there was such a difference between the way Putin was seen by people like you inside Russia? Why did it take people so long to understand it? 

Vladimir Kara-Murza: You know, there's this myth that is being pushed by some people, both in the West and in Russia, very often for reasons of self justification, the myth that there was some kind of a quote unquote, “early Putin,” who was a modernizer, a reformer, a believer in cooperation with the West and and so on, and then something just went wrong along the way. Putin was Putin from the very beginning. In fact, I remember the exact day when I understood just who this man was and what direction he was going to take our country. 

It was a 20th of December, 1999. He was still prime minister. And It's the day when the Russian security services still celebrate the founding of the Bolshevik secret police in in December of 1917. Because, of course, the present Russian security services traced the line of succession directly from the Soviet KGB. And on that day, Vladimir Putin, then still prime minister, went to Lubyanka Square, the headquarters of the FSB, former KGB, to officially unveil a memorial plaque to Yuri Andropov. Now Yuri Andropov was someone who epitomized the worst of the worst of the Soviet system, as a long time chairman of the Soviet KGB, he really made it a priority to suppress and put down and tried to destroy dissent inside the country. He was the one who set up this infamous fifth chief directorate to go after dissidents. He was the one who expanded the horrendous practice of punitive psychiatry when dissidents were declared mentally insane and kept in torturous conditions in so-called special psychiatric institutions. I had no more questions after that day. 

Anne Applebaum: Yeah, it's interesting. I remember this very well. And of course, the symbolism was very important and turned out to be important as the years went on, because Andropov was somebody who believed that even tiny, small groups of intellectuals who are having free discussions or even seemingly obscure groups can suddenly become a mob or a revolution. And he was. And that created a kind of paranoia about dissent and a need for control. 

Vladimir Kara-Murza: And he was right, by the way, because those teenagers who read samizdat and listened to Radio Liberty in the 70s were the people who went to the barricades in the Moscow White House in 1991. 

Anne Applebaum: Right. Putin got that paranoia, I think, from him. I mean, I think there's a direct line from Andropov in his way of seeing even, you know, even small intellectuals as being a great threat to the state. And the way that Putin spoke, about protesters as spies or traitors or, anybody who expressed any kind of an opposition idea was potentially an enemy of the state. But why was it so hard for the outside world to see it? What do you think is the explanation for that? 

Vladimir Kara-Murza: It wasn't hard to see. They didn't want to see it. You know, we mentioned Vladimir Bukovsky during this conversation. He once said, sort of commenting on on the Western policies towards the USSR that for too many Western politicians, frying their morning bacon on Soviet gas is more important than any human rights concerns. And half a century has passed and nothing has changed. People who didn't see it, did not want to see it. It was absolutely clear from the very beginning. 

But to your question about Western leaders — there is there's a lot of talk in these last almost three years now that the full scale war in Ukraine has been going on about, you know, so-called collective guilt or so-called collective responsibility, that, you know, there is a view which I completely reject, but there is a view that some people put out there that, you know, all Russian citizens are responsible for what the Putin regime is doing in Ukraine. But If people want to talk about collective responsibility, that's also not forget about the collective responsibility of Western leaders who for so many years chose, deliberately chose, to turn a blind eye on the domestic repression and authoritarian abuses that were already going on full scale inside of Russia in order to continue dealing with Putin, trading with Putin, buying oil and gas from Putin, you know, finding some sort of a modus operandi with him on the international arena while independent TV stations were being closed and people were being jailed and elections were being rigged. You know, Western leaders push reset buttons with him or, you know, invite him to international summits and roll out red carpets and so on and so forth. Well, needless to say, such a position is completely immoral, especially for the leaders of countries that pride themselves on their adherence to such principles as democracy, rule of law, respect for human rights. 

But what's equally important: this policy was very shortsighted and very impractical because, as anybody who has read about Russian history knows very well, in Russia, internal repression is always followed by external aggression. There are always two sides of the same coin. Because a government that does not respect the rights and freedoms of its own people is not going to respect international borders. It's not going to respect the principles of international law. And so those Western leaders who for years and years and years chose to turn a blind eye on Putin's authoritarian abuses, chose to appease Putin, chose to enable Putin. They bear a significant responsibility for what is happening now in Ukraine for the largest military conflict on European soil since the Second World War that the Putin regime has unleashed. 

And for years and years and years, there was this absolutely hypocritical situation that characterized the regime of Vladimir Putin, which was that the same people in and around the Kremlin who were destroying the most basic tenets of democratic society in our country in Russia were enjoying, personally enjoying the benefits and the privileges of democratic societies offer in the West, because this is where they had all their money, their bank accounts, their yachts, the villas, their families and so on. And so we decided to put a stop to that. 

And in 2010, Boris Nemtsov, the leader of the Russian opposition, invited me to get involved in this work to advocate for the passage of this legislation called the Magnitsky Act, and the premise of this law was very simple. That the people who are obviously based on substantive evidence, responsible for human rights abuses and for corruption initially in Russia, but then this was extended to all countries, would no longer be able to receive U.S. visas, own U.S. assets or use the U.S. financial and banking system. And the first person that Boris Nemtsov and I went to to discuss this legislation was Senator John McCain. And so he was one of the original co-sponsors of the Magnitsky Act in the U.S. Congress. The two Republican co-sponsors were Senator John McCain and Senator Roger Wicker, and the two Democratic co-sponsors were Senator Ben Cardin and Senator Joe Lieberman. And when the Magnitsky Act passed with enormous majorities in both houses of Congress, it became law in December of 2012. 

And, you know, I think it's important to say that this legislation is is a shadow of real responsibility. Right? Because, you know, if if you kill someone or if you steal from someone, the punishment for that should not be, you know, closing a bank account or canceling a visa. It should be something much more serious. But at least while it is impossible to get any accountability for these people inside of Russia while this regime continues to be in power, and it was very important to get this measure of accountability on the international level to make sure that the world's democracies send a very clear signal that the crooks and then human rights abusers will no longer be welcomed on their territories and in their financial systems. And I'm proud of the fact that in the year 2025, 35 countries and jurisdictions around the world have this legislation, the Magnitsky legislation, on the books, and it applies globally it applies not just to the Putin regime in Russia, but to all authoritarian, dictatorial, corrupt regimes around the world. 

Anne Applebaum: You were poisoned a couple of times. Could you talk about what happened and why you think it happened? Why were you targeted? 

Vladimir Kara-Murza: Right, so the, the two poisonings were in May 2015 and then February 2017. Both times I was in a coma with a multiple organ failure on artificial life support. And both times doctors were telling Evgenia, my wife, that I had about a 5% chance to survive. I had no doubt from the first moment, and neither did my friends and colleagues, that these were deliberate poisonings. And I had no doubt from the very beginning that this was because of my work on the Magnitsky Act. 

Anne Applebaum: But both times you recovered and then you made the decision to go back to Russia. 

Vladimir Kara-Murza: Well it could not have been any other way. I'm a Russian politician. A politician has to be in their own country. This cannot be any other way. What moral right would I have to call on my fellow Russian citizens to stand up to the Putin dictatorship. If I didn't do it myself, I think that being a public person, being a political leader presupposes a level of responsibility, that transcends, frankly, the considerations of personal safety and comfort. And I know that what I'm doing is right. I know that what I'm doing is in the interest of my country, and I'm going to continue doing it regardless. And so I did not even have a thought about leaving Russia either after my poisonings or after Putin launched the full scale aggression on Ukraine in February of 2022. 

After the invasion, they passed these laws, these new articles, to the criminal code that made it a crime not only to oppose the war in Ukraine, but actually even to talk about it. You cannot call it a war because, of course, in the Kremlin's imagined propaganda world, there is no war. There are no mass bombings of residential areas. There are no, you know, mass deaths of civilians. There are no bombings of schools and hospitals and so on. This is a target, quote unquote, special military operation. And anybody who says anything different is a criminal in this system. And so they passed these laws at the beginning of March of 2022, and then they waited for about a month to let everybody who wanted to leave leave because, of course, that's much easier for the Kremlin, for Putin, when political opponents just leave because they don't have to deal, you know, with the trials in the international public opinion and the outcry and so on. And I was invited by the speaker of the Arizona House at the invitation of the McCain Institute and I spoke about what was happening in Russia. I spoke about what was happening in Ukraine. The horrendous, the murderous, the criminal nature of this war was evident to to everyone outside of Russia, because in Russia itself, in the first days of the invasion, the government imposed near-total censorship, near-total blackout on the media and on the Internet. Everything was blocked. 

Anne Applebaum: And as a result of going back after that invasion of 2022, you were arrested. Tell me what that was like. 

Vladimir Kara-Murza: I was arrested on the 11th of April 2022. I was coming home, driving back home from a meeting, and as I came up to my home to my apartment block in Moscow, I saw some kind of a silver van with darkened windows parked outside the entrance. Didn't pay much attention because there was all sorts of cars around. In Moscow, as you know, and I stopped to push the button, my remote to open the gate to drive into the courtyard to park. And as I began to drive in the courtyard, I saw in my rearview mirror, I saw that the doors of that silver van opened and about 5 or 6 black uniformed and black masked police officers came out and started running, running after my car. And then, of course, I just understood everything at that moment. So I had just enough time to to park the car and texted my lawyer that I've been arrested. 

And then when I was arrested, this speech before the Arizona House was my first article of indictment. So when I got my 25 year sentence by the Moscow city court in April of 2023, my five counts of criminal indictment were five public speeches that I had made, both in Russia and abroad, two speeches against the war in Ukraine, including that speech in in Arizona, two speeches against political repression and political murders in Russia. And one speech against the illegal and illegitimate nature of Putin going around the constitutional tournaments to stay in power essentially forever. And while I was being escorted down into the cellars of the Moscow city court, where the where the cells are, the commanding officer of the police convoy turned to me and asked ‘So did you really just get 25 years for five speeches?’ I said, ‘Yeah, yeah. I did.’ Well he thought a little bit, looked at me again and said, “Well, at least I hope they were good.” I said, "Well that’s probably not for me to decide but I’m guessing by the sentence they probably were." 

Anne Applebaum: Talk to me a little bit about how in prison you were able to write and get your columns out. You wrote from prison and you wrote some very moving descriptions of prison that were part of the package that won the Pulitzer Prize last year. How did that work? 

Vladimir Kara-Murza: So first, let me say that, you know, when I was rereading many of the Soviet dissident memoirs while I was in prison, it was absolutely astonishing how everything was just exactly the same down to the last detail. The way prison guards speak to you, the way you know, the prison courtyards are organized, the way the cell looks, everything like that, the schedule of the day, everything is just exactly the same. 

Anne Applebaum: I described all these things in my Gulag book. And I've been told by many people since then that it's unchanged. 

Vladimir Kara-Murza: It's exactly the same everything. But there's one thing that actually is different genuinely, and that is the correspondence. Because when, Bukowski and Sharansky’s generation were in Soviet prisons, they had very limited opportunities to write letters. Now, there is this electronic correspondence system. As as one lady wrote to me in prison, she referred to it as a new digital gulag. It's an electronic correspondence system that anybody can use. There's a website where people outside can go to select the region, the prison, the person they're writing to, and they can write letters. And then there's also a response sheet attached to those letters. And then the prison administration obviously censors all these letters. They read through them. They cross out the parts they don’t like and then they bring those letters to to prisoners with a response sheet attached. And so this is the way I corresponded and this was also the way I passed out my articles to The Washington Post. 

And by the way, while we're speaking about this, you know, I often get questions now in these last few months since since I've been released from prison, from people who say, well, look, you know, we're not journalists, we're not politicians. There are limited things that we can do. But we want to do something. We want to help. What can we do? And I always say, please write to political prisoners. Anybody can do this. The information is public. It's out on the websites of Memorial and OVD-Info and all these other human rights groups that have these lists of names and addresses the way people can write to them. Because, you know, only someone who has been in this situation can appreciate how much light and how much warmth and how much hope there can be in that sheet of paper that the prison guard hands you through the feeding slot in a cell door at 4 p.m. because those letters that people receive literally can make a difference between surviving or not. Between keeping one's sanity or not. It may seem like a small thing just a few minutes out of the busy day to write a letter. But it's really, really important. Please write to political prisoners. 

Anne Applebaum: How is it possible to compose a column, you know, not just to write a letter, but to to think from the beginning, the middle of an end, to write paragraphs. And did you write in English, I should ask? 

Vladimir Kara-Murza: For The Washington Post, yes. And then I had publications in Russian language media which I obviously wrote in Russian. When I was transferred from from Moscow to to Siberia in September 2023 to Omsk, I was kept in solitary confinement all the time. The main problem was a time limit, 90 minutes a day only. This is all you have with pen and paper. Then they take it away. You know I had to basically choose either write a letter to my to my wife or my kids or, or you know to friends or I write those columns. Usually it's not enough. Obviously, an hour and a half to to write a serious column. So that would take several days in a row and I’d spend time thinking about it. But I’m the kind of person that I have to write to think properly, if you know what I mean. I have to I have to put words on paper. But, you know, eventually I did learn the habit of just composing stuff in my head and then just putting it on on paper as soon as I had it. Evgenia and my wife would have to retype it all because I obviously wrote it all by hand on the on these provided response sheets. And then she would pass the columns to the editors at The Washington Post who would then put them in final publication. 

Anne Applebaum: So was there censorship of the columns? 

Vladimir Kara-Murza: So the way the censorship works in the Russian prisons correspondent system is is absolutely unpredictable. And it's really different depending on the precise institution. In the time I've been in prisons — two years and three months — I've been in 13 different penitentiary institutions. My wife says that I've been given an extended tour of the of the modern day gulag to say from different angles. And the censorship works differently everywhere. 

So when I was in Moscow at the Voynich prison, number five, that this is a pretrial detention center, the censorship there was really, really bizarre. I mean, it was almost caricature. For example, there was a rule that, you know, all the letters that go through this prison correspondence system have to be written in the Russian language. Well that’s pretty obvious, so the censors can read it and censor it. But, the censor at the Voynich prison would take that to the extreme. So, for example, when somebody would write PS ou know, in their letter to me, she would scribble it out with a big black fountain pen because, of course, you know, letters P and S, they come from Latin alphabet, not Russian. So she would scribble it out because I would not be allowed. When I was in Omsk and I was in Siberia — and and so this goes to your question about the The Washington Post columns — there for some reason, I mean, everything else was horrendously harsh, but the censorship actually was very different from what it had been in Moscow. And so I'm really grateful for this correspondence system. I mean, this without any irony, both for being able to to communicate with family and friends, but also for being able to put out the publications, including my columns for The Washington Post. 

Anne Applebaum: Do you think that the conditions you were kept in were designed to affect your sanity? 

Vladimir Kara-Murza: Oh absolutely. There's nothing new in this. This is an old Soviet tradition. Political prisoners whom the regime, for one reason or another, considers to be particularly dangerous, are kept in total isolation, in constant solitary confinement. So you sit in this small cubicle, you know, two by three meters, one small window with metal bars under the ceiling. You attach your bunk bed to the wall at 5 a.m. with the wake up call, and then you can only take it down again at 9 p.m. with the lights out. So all day you can just walk in a small circle around the cell or try to sit at this really uncomfortable stool that sticks out of the wall, but you can't really sit in it for long. And so essentially all day you just spent walking around in that cell, there is nothing to do. There is nowhere to go. There is no one to speak to. 

I had never understood why, according to international law, according to the United Nations rules on this on the treatment of prisoners, solitary confinement for more than 15 days is officially considered the form of torture. I knew that rule, but I never understood it. Only once you go through it, you understand why that is. Because, as Aristotle said, we human beings are social animals, right? We need human interaction just as much as we need water to drink or oxygen to breathe. And when you are just totally deprived of it, when you cannot as much as say hello to another human being, well your mind really starts playing tricks on you. Very quickly after about two weeks, you start forgetting names, you start forgetting words, you start shouting at walls, you stop understanding what's real and what's imagined. And it is really, really difficult in in such conditions to to keep one’s sanity. It really takes a lot of effort to do that. 

But, you know, this was one of the ways actually to keep sane, to write, to do something, to do something useful, to do something important. One advice that Soviet dissidents always gave those who were in the same conditions, in solitary confinement back in in the 70s and the 80s, they said that learning a new language is a very good way to pass time in prison. I mean, Vladimir Bukovsky learned English in the Vladimir Central prison. Natan Sharansky worked on his Hebrew while he was in prison. Prisoners who were Roman Catholics in the Soviet go like they often do in Latin. I learned Spanish. I I made the prison administration order me a Spanish textbook from a local bookstore. And I was learning Spanish because this is a way to occupy your mind. So it doesn't just keep, you know, searching out these strange thoughts every single day. It's a very good way to occupy your time because one of the worst things in prison is just watching the time of your life just meaninglessly go by day after day, week after week, month after month with nothing. And, you know, it's really important every evening when you go to to sleep to have a feeling that you've done something useful with this day, that you haven't just thrown it away. And obviously, I never thought I would ever be able to use it. This was just not to go crazy. But we just took a family vacation, you know, with my wife and kids to to Mexico, our first family vacation in three and a half years. And guess what? I can actually speak Spanish now apparently. 

Anne Applebaum: Oh, congratulations 

Vladimir Kara-Murza: There's good in everything. [chuckles] 

Anne Applebaum: There is a lot of optimism in your writing. So there you were in really horrific conditions, conditions that would have been familiar to prisoners in Russia in the 1930s, and you continue to maintain that Russia can change and that Russia can be different. Where does that optimism come from and that conviction? I mean, there aren't so many people like you in Russia right now. Certainly there's a limited number of people willing to go to prison, but there's also a limited number of people who are willing to push back against the regime right now at all. So where does your optimism, where does your conviction in the possibility of change come from? 

Vladimir Kara-Murza: Well, on that last point Anne, the truth is we don't know how many people are in Russia who really want change and who really are fed up with this. And you know when I sometimes see in Western media references to opinion polls in Russia, you know, claims that most Russian citizens support the war in Ukraine, this is complete nonsense. How can we speak about opinion polls? How can you speak about sociology in a repressive dictatorship where people go to prison for expressing views that are different from the view of the government? The only way this regime, this system is able to continue to exist is by lying every single day to the people of Russia by hiding truthful information from the people of Russia. You know, just like Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote in his famous work Live Not by Lies, published on the day of his arrest in February of 1974. He said that lies are always kept up by violence, and violence has nothing to cover itself but with lies. And this is exactly the way the current regime operates. 

I know it's sort of strange to to grasp for people who live in free countries in the 21st century, but a large part of the Russian population is not even aware of the horrendous war crimes that are being committed daily by Putin's forces in Ukraine. And I think one of the most important tasks for the free world, for the Western world now is to help give the people of Russia truthful, objective information in the Russian language about what is going on. If this was possible to do with the technologies of the 1970s with a shortwave radio broadcasting into the Soviet Union. This is certainly possible today. And I care about my country. I love my country. I think Russia is a wonderful country that has, you know, a lot of very good people. And we just have a horrible criminal regime in power. And I want to make my country better. And, you know, if we want to do that we have to do something. 

Anne Applebaum: What you're saying also reminds me of another Russian friend who you've probably met over the years, Linda Nemirovsky, who many years ago said to me, I am not a dissident. I'm not against my country. I'm in favor of making my country better. And I think of myself as a as a straight line establishment patriot who's working towards that end. And it's just the regime that wants me wants to see me as difficult or different. So maybe, that would describe you? 

Vladimir Kara-Murza: Absolutely. I’m anything but anti-Russian. I'm pro Russian. I love my country and I want Russia to become a normal, modern, democratic, European country. And the only people who are destroying the future and interests of our country is the gang around Putin, led by himself, who was sitting in the Kremlin for the last 25 years. It's not just the fact that I believe that Russia can change. I know that Russia will change. I know that Russia will become a normal, modern, democratic country. I have absolutely no doubt about this. And what gives me this confidence is my background as a as a historian. 

If we look at the last several decades of history, it's absolutely unmistakable where the direction goes. A lot of people are pessimistic and and worried and even alarmist about processes that have been happening in recent years and rightly so. We should always be vigilant and on the watch when it comes to protecting democratic institutions. But if you look at the big picture, as historian, historians invariably do, we see that the trends and the directions are unmistakable. I mean, look just a few decades ago, democracy seemed as distant in Brazil, South Africa or South Korea as it does today in, you know, Russia or Belarus or Venezuela. If we look at this map of Europe four decades ago, that’s nothing by historical standards, that's like yesterday morning, we would see that half of the European continent was living under some forms of authoritarian, totalitarian regimes. If you look at the map of Europe today, there are only two dictatorships left. That will be Putin's Russia and Lukashenko's Belarus. I have absolutely no doubt that Russia will become a democracy because that is the way that history goes. Nobody has ever been able to stop the course of history, and Vladimir Putin is not going to be an exception. 

And I think what we have to do now and when I say we, I mean both the Russian pro-democracy opposition, but also the Western world, we have to plan and prepare for that day after Putin, because I believe that so many mistakes were made in the 1990s in Russia, that mistakes that, you know, ended up in this botched democratic transition and return to authoritarianism because people were not prepared, because the collapse of the Soviet regime seemed absolutely impossible until it happened, and then people were not ready. We have to have that strategy, that roadmap for the day after Putin and the time to prepare that roadmap is now, because when things start changing in, Russia is going to be just as sudden, just as quick and just as seemingly unexpected as it was both in 1917 and 1991. 

Anne Applebaum: Yes, we just saw something similar happen in Syria, for which I'm afraid absolutely nobody was prepared, despite some maybe even more signs that it was coming there. 

You were, of course, eventually released. You were part of this famous prisoner exchange. Can you describe what that felt like? 

Vladimir Kara-Murza: When we were exchanged on the 1st of August 2024, this was the first East-West prisoner exchange in nearly four decades that actually freed Russian political prisoners. We cannot wait another four decades.There is a record number of political prisoners in Russia today. In fact, according to publicly available figures from human rights groups, there are more political prisoners in Russia today than there were in the whole of the Soviet Union. So that's 15 countries put together in the mid-1980s towards this later period. And I think it is the, not just illegal, but above all, a moral responsibility by the free world, by the democratic world, to help save these people, to help free these people. In fact, this has been done by four American presidents, two Republicans, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan and two Democrats, Jimmy Carter and now Joe Biden. And whichever party is in power in Washington, whoever is sitting in the Oval Office, it is absolutely essential that these exchanges continue. 

Anne Applebaum: You were in a place from which there was no hope of escape. And then suddenly what happened? 

Vladimir Kara-Murza: One day in late July, I was sitting in my cell in my prison cell in Omsk when the security officer came in with a prison guard, and they took me to some sort of a prison office, a small room, a desk, a couple of chairs and a big portrait of Vladimir Putin on the wall. And on the desk there was a some sort of a preprinted template and then a blank sheet of paper with a pen and a security officer – this was a prison security officer – he told me to sit down and write with my own hand what was written on the template. And I looked at it and it was a petition for pardon addressed to Vladimir Putin, in which I was supposed to admit my guilt, express remorse for all my crimes, and and ask him to pardon me. 

First, I thought this was a prank. So I just I just laughed at it when I saw it. But then I looked at the security officer's face and it didn't look like he was in the mood for joking. So I said, What is this? And he said, Please write and sign this. I said, I'm not going to write and sign anything like this. He said, Why not? And I said, Well, because first of all, because I do not consider Putin to be a legitimate president of my country. I consider him to be a usurper, a dictator and a murderer. And I'm not going to ask him for anything. And secondly, I'm certainly not going to admit any guilt because I'm not the one guilty of anything. And the real criminals are those people who are sitting in the Kremlin who have started this war in Ukraine, not those of us who are in prison because we had opposed it. He obviously was not very happy with the answer. So he asked if I would put that in writing, that I was very happy to do so. I put that in writing, adding also that I very much hope to live to see the day when Vladimir Putin is put on trial for all the crimes he had committed. Signed it, dated it, and gave it to him. 

Suddenly one night in the middle of the night, I was woken up by a loud noise. The doors of the prison cell were opened. Screeching metal lights came on. I woke up and asked him what time it was and the officer said, it's 3:00 in the morning, which is really weird because Omsk, even by the standards of the Russian prison system, Omsk is particularly fanatical about procedure. But here the officers barged into my cell and said, You have ten minutes to get up and get ready. And at that moment, I was absolutely certain that I was going to be let out, let out and be executed. But instead of the nearby forest, they drove me to the airport, put me on a passenger plane, handcuffed with police escort, and flew me to to Moscow. And then in Moscow, I was taken to Lefortovo the legendary the notorious NKVD KGB prison that once housed some of the most prominent opponents of the Kremlin. But it was really bizarre the way the reception was organized, because usually when a prisoner is taken to an institution, they take him to the office. They, you know, officially tell him what institution he is in they inform him of his rights and so on and so forth. But nothing like this was happening here. 

Then they locked me up in a solitary confinement cell in Lefortovo. And then on the morning of the 1st of August, the deputy director of Lefortovo prison came into came into my cell with guards carrying the bags from from from the storage that I had bought from Omsk. And he said he told me to take off my prison uniform and put on the civilian clothes And so they escorted me down and there was a row of men in plain clothes and black balaclava masks covering the face of standing. That's pretty intimidating sight, I have to say. Even after everything else I've seen in prison, these turned out to be the Alpha Group, the FSB, Spetsnaz, the elite unit. And there was some sort of a bus standing in the prison courtyard, and I was told to get up on it, and I did. And there were more men in black balaclavas sitting inside the bus. But next to each of them, I saw a friend, a colleague, a fellow political prisoner, people who have been serving time in different prisons all over Russia. And it was only at that moment that I understood what was happening, because there could only be one reason why all of us would be in the same bus together. 

And then we were driven to Vnukovo, the government airport, put on the Russian government plane, and flown to Ankara, to Turkey, where the exchange took place. When our plane was taking off from Vnukovo Airport in Moscow on the day of the exchange, the FSB escort officer who was sitting next to me turned to me and said, 'Look out the window. This is the last time you're seeing your motherland.' And I just turned to him and I laughed in his face and I said, ‘Look, I'm a historian. I not only hope, I not only believe. I know that I'll be back in Russia, back in my home country. And this is going to happen much quicker than you can imagine.’ And it was totally, totally surreal. 

Once the exchange actually happened, we were driven to some sort of a government terminal, a big reception room. There was a long table with sandwiches and cookies and pots with coffee and tea. And a lady came up to me in a business suit. She was holding a mobile phone, and she came up and she asked, Are you Mr. Kara-Murza? I said, Yes, yes, I am. And she handed me the phone. And she said, The president of the United States is on the line waiting to speak to you. And at that moment, I just thought that I'm going to just give up trying to understand what what is happening here. And then I took the phone and and I heard President Biden and, you know, try to put together something to say to him. Of course, I hadn't used the word of spoken English in in more than two years, hadn't used much Russian either, being in solitary confinement. But I you know, I just, well, I thanked him. Of course, this was the first thing that came to mind. Thanked him for saving 16 souls, 16 human lives from from Putin's gulag. 

And then he passed the phone to to Evgenia my wife and our kids who were with him in the Oval Office. And when I heard my wife's and my kids voices on the phone standing in an airport terminal in Ankara, I don't think I'll be able to find, words in any of the languages that I know to describe what that felt like. Every minute of every day that I was in prison, I felt I felt guilty towards my children because, you know, as a Russian politician, I could not have chosen any other path. I had to be in Russia, even if that meant being in prison. But I'm not just a politician. I'm also a father and a husband. And this is, you know, this these are the two worlds that every person who's both a family man or woman and a public figure is always torn between. I am so deeply grateful to my to my family, to my wife, Evgenia, above all, who just took everything upon her shoulders for all the time that I was in prison and did it brilliantly. But I'm also very grateful to to our three children for their support and their solidarity throughout all this time. And I just hope and I want to think that when when our kids grow up, they're all teenagers still. I want to think that when they will grow up, they will understand why I could not have done it any other way. 

Anne Applebaum: I wonder if we could finish by talking both a little bit about the Pulitzer, what it's like to win a Pulitzer Prize in prison, you know, and then what it's like to attend the Pulitzer ceremony, which I imagine is not a place you ever thought you would be a few months later. And also a little bit about the one of the things that the Pulitzer is meant to do is it's meant to reward writing, partly also as a way of reminding Americans of the value of free speech and the value of of journalism and its importance. I just wonder if you could reflect on that for listeners? 

Vladimir Kara-Murza: Well, that was also a very, very surreal day back in May of 2024, when when my lawyer came to see me on his weekly visit. I was sitting there in that small room separated by a glass. And he told me that I'd won a Pulitzer Prize. And, you know, I could never have imagined having my name in the word Pulitzer in the same sentence. I mean, this I've been in journalism many years. This is an unspeakable honor, an unspeakable privilege, you know, to to be able to share a prize with people like you Anne [Anne laughs] and, you know, with people who are top of the top in the world of journalism. Of course, I never, never could have thought about this. And, of course, I was certain that I would never be able to see it or to accept it in person. It is an unspeakable privilege to have received it. 

And I was also very grateful for the for the monetary prize that went with it, because every single penny from the Pulitzer Prize I received went to the 30th of October Foundation that we have set up with my wife, Evgenia, while I was in prison to help to provide financial support to families of of Russian political prisoners, to people who have been not only separated with their loved ones, but also very often deprived of the means of survival, because very often it's the main breadwinner who is arrested on these political charges. And at least in this small way, we want to try to make the lives of the families of political prisoners a little bit easier. And we're focusing, the Foundation is focusing on helping families with young children. This is an old tradition. This is something that Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Yelena Bonner, Andrei Sakharov's wife, did back in the 70s. And so this is where the where the inspiration came from. And when I when I started to receive all these prizes and awards like the Václav Havel Prize from the Council of Europe and then the Pulitzer, I made a commitment of every every single penny from from the monetary part of these prizes will be going to the 30th of October Foundation to help the families of those people who are only in prison because they dare to stand up and speak up to this murderous dictatorship. 

And I think it was President Reagan who said that freedom was never more than one generation away from extinction. I think it's very, very important to be vigilant. And it's very, very important to to value, first of all, to value and appreciate democratic freedoms and not take them for granted. And let's never forget that whatever flaws and and whatever downsides democracy can have, it's still the very best system that has been tried by humanity. And we have to do everything we can to make sure to to keep it and to expand it to those nations and those countries that are for now, still deprived of it, countries like my homeland of Russia. 

Anne Applebaum: Thank you so much, Vladimir, for joining this podcast. And I hope that being together with your family now is helping you revive and recover from that long, traumatic ordeal. And I also really hope it, it also helps you be productive and continue to work and to write in the future and that we can continue to read you and we can continue to hear from you and about you for many years to come. 

Vladimir Kara-Murza: Thank you so much Anne. Thank you for this invitation. It's always great to speak with you. 

Nicole Carroll: That’s it for this episode of Pulitzer on the Road. Thank you to Vladimir Kara-Murza, the 2024 Pulitzer winner for Commentary. And to Pulitzer-board member and author Anne Applebaum. 

For more details about this work and the work of all Pulitzer winners please visit our website at www.pulitzer.org. 

Please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. 

Pulitzer on the Road is a production of the Pulitzer Prize Board and is produced by Audacy’s Pineapple Street Studios. This show is hosted by me, Nicole Carroll. Our Senior Producer is Justine Daum. Natalie Peart is our associate producer. Production support from Melissa Akiko Slaughter. Our executive editor is Joel Lovell. The Head of Sound & Engineering at Pineapple Street is Raj Makhija. This episode was mixed by Marina Paiz, with additional audio engineering by Pedro Alvira. A special thank you to Columbia Event Management - Audio Visual. Music licensing by APM. Editing, promotion and other support by Pamela Casey, Edward Kliment and Sean Murphy. Bari Finkel and Marjorie Miller are our executive producers.