TThe last time I met Evgenia Kara-Murza, it was a dreary day in early March. The timing couldn’t have been worse: As we spoke, Alexei Navalny’s coffin was being lowered onto the frozen ground of a Moscow cemetery, while Evgenia’s husband, Vladimir Kara-Murza, was still incarcerated in a Siberian cell nearly identical to the Arctic prison where Navalny’s body was found, presumably murdered.
The similarities were eerie: Vladimir, a journalist turned political activist, was hated and feared by the Kremlin, not only imprisoned on baseless charges but also targeted and poisoned twice by the same FSB units that poisoned Navalny.
The outlook was bleak and the news from Russia and Ukraine relentlessly depressing, so seeing Evgenia walk into a London hotel lobby six months later, this time with Vladimir at her side, feels almost miraculous. Six weeks ago he was in a Siberian labor camp. Today he is a free man, on a trip to London with his wife and their youngest son, Daniel, 9 years old, the result of the largest prisoner exchange between Russia and the West since the Cold War.
Seeing them together, I’m suddenly overwhelmed, and I can’t imagine how Evgenia must feel. “I cry all the time,” she says, “and I make other people cry. I can just talk and people in the audience start crying. I seem to have that effect on people.” The last time I saw her, she was extremely frustrated. She had just returned from a meeting with the foreign minister, where she had been waiting for two years, with the ruthlessness of a woman who just can’t give up.
“The psychological trauma was so great, not to mention the fact that Vladimir had been held in solitary confinement in horrible conditions in Western Siberia, but also having to deal with people who really couldn’t comprehend this. It’s very hard for people living in a normal democracy to understand what political repression in the 21st century is like. They just couldn’t understand.”
But it’s hard to make sense of — what’s disconcerting about Vladimir’s description of the Siberian gulags is how similar it is to the works of Solzhenitsyn and other Stalin-era writers — but for Kara Murza, who studied history at Cambridge University, it was a source of both incredulity and comfort.
“I’m a historian, and one of my biggest areas of research has always been Soviet dissidents. I’ve made films about them. I’ve written a lot about them. I know a lot of their people. And it’s sometimes said that every historian subconsciously dreams of personally experiencing their field of study. If that’s true, then my wish has been completely fulfilled.
“I felt like I was living in this book. It’s surprising, shocking and, frankly, very sad, to see how nothing has changed after so many decades. Everything is exactly the same, from the little things like what the prison cells look like, how the walks are organised, how the guards talk to you, to how the prison transport works.”
But what helped him get through the system was his knowledge of it, gleaned from Soviet memoirs: “I knew the rules. These Siberian prisons are notorious, even by the standards of the Russian system, for having rules for everything, every minute of every day, but I also knew that I had a right to these books, the prison library, so they had to give them to me.”
Evgenia also had a role model in the past: her husband praised “this wonderful woman” who helped him keep his fate in the minds of Western politicians, likening her to the “Decembrist wives” of the early 19th century who followed their husbands to Siberia. But the shock of the sudden change in circumstances and the fact that Navalny, who was supposed to take part in the exchange, has run out of luck, has yet to sink in.
For his close friend Bill Browder, a businessman and anti-corruption campaigner who had lobbied tirelessly for Kara Murza’s release, it was “a really wonderful gift. I thought he was going to die in custody.” So did Kara Murza.
“I was sure I would die in prison. Sitting here with you, a few hundred yards from the Palace of Westminster, it feels completely surreal. It’s so shocking. It’s happening too fast for the human mind to process. It feels like I’ve been watching this movie since the end of July. It’s a great film, but it still doesn’t feel real.” He recounts how, as they taxied along the runway at Vnukovo airport, the FSB agent sitting next to him told him to look out the window as it would be his last chance to see his homeland. “I laughed in his face and said, ‘Look, I’m a historian. I don’t just think, I don’t just believe. I know I will come home. And it will be a lot sooner than you think.'”
Most of the people he met in Russian prisons, “police officers, prison officials, judges, prosecutors – they don’t believe in anything,” he said. Most of them, he said, aren’t pathological sadists, but just doing their jobs. “But I saw an ideological hatred in the FSB special unit, the Alpha Group, who were guarding us. It’s even more frightening because they believe in this stuff.”
Kara Murza’s understanding of history supports his conviction that Putin’s regime will collapse – quickly and without warning. “That’s what happens in Russia. The Romanov Empire at the beginning of the 20th century and the Soviet regime at the end of the 20th century both collapsed in three days – and I’m not metaphorical here, it was literally three days in both cases.” He passionately believes that the best chance for a free and democratic Russia and peace in Europe lies in Russia’s defeat in Ukraine.
He says that “losing the war of aggression” was the biggest driver of political change in Russia, but in his view it’s not just the Russian people who need to bear collective responsibility – so do Western leaders who “have been buying gas from Putin for years, inviting him to international summits, rolling out the red carpet.”
He told me the truth would come out: “They are keeping meticulous records. When the end comes – and it will come – the archives will be opened and the truth will come out about Trump and Marine Le Pen and you Brits.”
Sitting in London, the money- and reputation-laundering centre of Putin’s empire, he laughed when I mentioned one of Britain’s most notorious political benefactors, Yevgeny Lebedev, owner of the Independent and the Evening Standard newspapers and son of KGB lieutenant colonel Alexander Lebedev.
“Is that the Siberian Baron?” he says. “I should meet him. Is he my agent?”
Siberia, Soviet-style concentration camps and the estates of British aristocrats, and a joyous ex-political prisoner walking in the London sunshine with his wife and son – a tiny flickering light from the heart of Putin’s darkness.
