Life in Putin’s gulag: ‘A long ‘Groundhog Day’,’ says Vladimir Kara-Murza

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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.

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.

Shipley: Can you describe a day in prison?

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.

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.

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 they feared more than losing their coveted access to Western countries, to Western institutions, to Western financial systems.

And so just to drive home the point, the judge that gave me my 25-year sentence was the same judge who imprisoned Sergei Magnitsky back in 2008. He was one of the first people sanctioned by the United States government under the Magnitsky Act. So there couldn’t have been a clearer message that the Kremlin could send than this.

Shipley: Do you think the release of Russian political prisoners will help the anti-Putin opposition both inside and outside of Russia?

Kara-Murza: I think what happened with us gives a lot of hope to so many others who are still languishing in Putin’s gulag.

I’m thinking in particular of people like Alexei Gorinov, a Moscow municipal councilor, who was the first person to be arrested and criminally charged for public opposition to the war in Ukraine. I’m thinking of Maria Ponomarenko, a journalist from Siberia, a mother of two daughters, who is also in prison for her public opposition to the war. I’m thinking of Igor Baryshnikov, an engineer from Kaliningrad, who has been in prison for his antiwar stance, and so many others.

This release gives hope to a lot of people back in Putin’s gulag that [their sentences are] not actually connected to reality. And that if enough people of goodwill in the free world decide that they’re not okay with so many innocent people being confined to prisons, being away from their loved ones only because they’re opposed to Putin’s aggressive war, only because they’re opposed to Putin’s dictatorship, that this public opinion can actually work and that there is a way that these people will be free much, much sooner than their official prison papers say.

I’m going to dedicate my time and all the strength that I have left to advocating and campaigning for all of those Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians who are still stuck back in those gulags, in those prisons. I’m not going to rest until the day they are free.

Shipley: How do you begin? How do you make that case, especially since you aren’t in Russia? I mean, you’ve talked often about going back as a Russian politician. You know, that’s something that you did at enormous cost. That’s something that Alexei Navalny did at tremendous cost. How do you carry on that conversation with the Russian people?

Kara-Murza: There are a lot of people in Russia who are either indifferent or who back what the Putin regime is doing in Ukraine. It’s something that makes me very angry and very sad at the same time.

But it is also something that, frankly, should not be surprising after a quarter century of one-man dictatorship. Vladimir Putin has been in power for 25 years. One of the first things he did after coming to power was shut down or take over independent television networks to make sure that Russian society only receives officially approved propaganda.

And so after 25 years of brainwashing, after 25 years of repression, when those people who are publicly coming out against the regime and its policies are murdered, are imprisoned, are, in the best case, are exiled, I think it’s hard to expect that a large part of society would not be affected by this.

But let’s not forget also that a lot of this responsibility is also borne by leaders of Western countries, who for so many years, despite our cries, shouts, warnings — I don’t know how else to express it — continue to engage with Vladimir Putin, to legitimize Vladimir Putin in the eyes of the international community, to trade with him, to make deals with him, to invite him to international summits, to look into his eyes and see his soul, to engage in resets and so on and so forth.

If we still believe in that goal of a Europe whole, free, and at peace, a goal that was expressed famously 35 years ago by an American president speaking in West Germany — that goal will only be possible when Russia, which is the largest country in Europe, also becomes peaceful and democratic. A Europe whole, free and at peace will only be possible with a peaceful and democratic Russia as a part of it. And this is a road map that we need to start preparing today.

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