Russian Opposition Leader Kara-Mourza Recounts the ‘Miracle’ of His Liberation

(Paris) It has been a month and a half since Vladimir Kara-Mourza swapped his prisoner’s long underpants and rubber flip-flops for elegant suits, but the Russian opposition leader has not yet returned to “a normal life.”

The fierce Kremlin critic was released on July 1^er August, along with fifteen other people, as part of the largest prisoner exchange between Russia and the West since the Cold War.

He was serving a 25-year prison sentence in a Siberian penal colony for “treason” after condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“You know, something like this is not without consequences,” Kara-Mourza said in an interview with AFP this week, choosing his words carefully. “It will of course require a whole process to return to normal life.”

After surviving two poisonings in 2015 and 2017, the 43-year-old activist had lost 25 kilos during his detention and appeared emaciated and with dark circles under his eyes when he landed in Germany after the prisoner exchange.

The man who has since met with American President Joe Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron, as well as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, says he is experiencing something “completely surreal”.

“It’s a miracle,” he assured during his visit to Paris, his figure still frail but in better shape.

Extreme loneliness

In addition to two years spent in Russian prisons, including the high-security Omsk prison camp, he says he lived “in solitary confinement for 11 months straight, without stopping, without a break.”

Wake up at 5 a.m., before endless days of pacing in a 2-by-3-meter cell furnished with a stool and a bunk, and flanked by a tiny barred window at ceiling height.

The only distraction allowed: 90 minutes of daily reading and writing. With nothing else to do, no one to talk to, nowhere to go.

“This is how we live day after day, week after week, month after month,” summarizes Vladimir Kara-Mourza, who now “understands” why solitary confinement in detention for more than 15 days is considered a form of torture under international law.

“It is not very easy for a human being to […] “stay sane in these circumstances,” he adds.

One Friday night, he remembers hearing the name of opposition leader Alexei Navalny on the radio. The news of his sudden death in an Arctic penal colony was so horrific, and his own conditions so miserable, that he says he began to think he had “somehow imagined” it.

He says he spent the following weekend in extreme solitude, with no visits from lawyers or letters of support. “I don’t think I have the words to describe the feeling,” he says. “After months and months of isolation, your mind starts playing tricks on you.”

Faith in God

Deprived of regular contact with his family and other prisoners, it was above all his faith in God and his convictions that allowed him to survive, he explains: “I know that everything will be decided by Him in the end.”

“Nothing is new, and we have already seen all this in Russia,” continues this dual Russian-British national, a Cambridge-educated historian, referring to the famous Soviet dissidents who dared to challenge the Moscow power before him.

Like Vladimir Bukovsky, exchanged for the Chilean communist leader Luis Corvalan in 1976 and who died in 2019, about whom Kara-Mourza had made a documentary years earlier.

As a young journalist, he asked Bukovsky what had helped him survive in detention. “He answered very simply. He said: ‘I knew I was right.'”

A testimony that, twenty years later, helped the opponent to hold on. “I knew I was right every minute of every day I spent in prison,” he confided.

Strange days

The days leading up to the prisoner exchange were full of twists and turns… and oddities.

On July 23, two prison guards burst into his cell before escorting him to a prison office with a huge portrait of Vladimir Putin hanging on the wall, he recalls.

When asked to write a request for clemency, Vladimir Kara-Murza thought it was a joke.

To justify his refusal, the opponent told prison officials that he considered the Russian president to be “a usurper, a dictator and a murderer.” He was then offered to put these words on paper, which he said he eagerly accepted.

A few days later, on July 28, a loud noise woke him up in the middle of the night, around three in the morning. The doors of his cell were suddenly opened and a group of police officers burst in. They gave him 10 minutes to get ready.

“I was absolutely certain that I would be let out and executed,” recalls Kara-Murza, who was eventually taken to Omsk airport, handcuffed in a terminal amidst the crowd.

“After months and months of isolation where I couldn’t even say hello to anyone, suddenly finding myself in the middle of an airport full of people, families with children, cafes and shops open, it was mind-boggling.”

Without receiving any further explanation, he was put on a plane to Moscow, where a few hours later a prison van came to pick him up.

“Hollywood movie”

Arriving at his destination, he realizes that he is in Lefortovo, a prison infamous for having housed historical figures of Russian dissidence such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Natan Sharansky and Bukovsky.

“‘Vladimir Vladimirovich, you have not been transferred to Moscow,'” an FSB intelligence officer tells him when he asks that his family and lawyers be informed of his transfer. “‘You are still in Omsk.'”

Did the authorities have new grievances against him? Kara-Murza eventually gave up trying to understand what was happening. He was then held for several days in a new solitary confinement cell, which he said was “like a five-star hotel” compared to his colony in Omsk.

“There I had a bed on which I could lie down […] I had as many books as I wanted. I could write.”

Then comes the 1^er August. A group of officers led by the deputy director of Lefortovo Prison enter his cell with bags containing some personal belongings. He is ordered to get dressed before being escorted to the ground floor.

“There was a row of men standing there, their faces covered with black masks and balaclavas. It was quite an intimidating sight, like a scene from a Hollywood action movie,” he says.

Then, in the prison yard, he sees a bus. He is told to get on. “And there I see in each row even more men, more FSB agents with black balaclavas.”

Among these men, Kara-Murza recognizes some friends and comrades in arms who have been detained throughout Russia. There is notably the famous human rights defender Oleg Orlov, who has publicly compared Vladimir Putin’s power to a fascist regime. Ilya Yashin, another critic of the Kremlin, is also on board.

“That’s when I understood what was happening,” he says.

On to Vnukovo airport. Like the others, Kara-Murza has his face pressed to the windows. “I was just looking at Moscow. Moscow is my hometown. I love my city,” he recalls. “I realized that it would be a while before I could see it again.”

Another takeoff, this time on a government plane. A few hours later, the plane lands in Ankara, Turkey. The historic exchange takes place on the tarmac.

Sixteen dissidents and Westerners, including the American journalist from Wall Street Journal Evan Gershkovich, were exchanged for eight Russian nationals – including an intelligence agent convicted of murder – and two minors. Thirteen of them immediately flew to Germany.

That evening, Vladimir Kara-Murza met Chancellor Scholz, dressed in the only civilian clothes that the Russian authorities had left him: a T-shirt, long black underpants, and rubber flip-flops.