Vladimir Vladimirovich Kara-Murza (; born 7 September 1981) is a Russian-British political activist, journalist, author, filmmaker, and former political prisoner. A protégé of murdered Russian dissident Boris Nemtsov, Kara-Murza is vice-chairman of Open Russia, an NGO founded by the exiled Russian businessman and former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, which promotes civil society and democracy in Russia. He was elected to the Coordinating Council of the Russian Opposition in 2012, and served as deputy leader of the People's Freedom Party from 2015 to 2016. He has directed two documentaries, They Chose Freedom and Nemtsov. As of 2021, he serves as Senior Fellow to the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights. He was awarded the Civil Courage Prize in 2018.
In April 2022, after speaking out against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Kara-Murza was arrested on charges of disobeying police orders. His arrest was extended after prosecutors introduced new charges of "discrediting" the military, and in October 2022 he was charged with treason. Amnesty International and others called the charges politically motivated due to his anti-war views. In October 2022, he was awarded the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize.
In April 2023, Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years in prison, and was sent to a prison colony in Siberia. In 2024, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary for the columns which he continued to write from his prison cell for The Washington Post. On 1 August 2024, Kara-Murza was released from prison as part of a prisoner exchange deal involving two dozen individuals from seven different countries.
Early life and education Vladimir Vladimirovich Kara-Murza was born in Moscow, the son of Russian journalist and television host Vladimir Alexeyevich Kara-Murza (1959–2019), an outspoken critic of Leonid Brezhnev and supporter of reforms under Boris Yeltsin. His mother is Jewish. His father was a great grandson of Latvian revolutionary Voldemārs Bisenieks (1884–1938), and great-grand-nephew of Latvia's first Ambassador to Great Britain, Georgs Bisenieks (1885–1941), both of whom were shot by the NKVD. The Latvian agronomist and publisher Jānis Bisenieks (1864–1923) was their older brother.Information from the Russian Wikipedia entry on Georgs Bisenieks.
He is related to Sergey Kara-Murza (born 1939), a Soviet/Russian historian, chemist, and philosopher. He is a member of the Kara-Murza family, who are descendants of a Tatar aristocrat who settled in Moscow and converted to Christianity in the 15th century AD.
Kara-Murza earned a BA and an MA degree in history at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and he speaks fluent English and French. With his wife Yevgenia, he has three children.
Career Author and journalist
Kara-Murza became a journalist at the age of 16. He worked as London correspondent for a succession of Russian media outlets, including Novye Izvestia from 1997 to 2000, from September 2000 to June 2003, and the radio station Ekho Moskvy from September 2001 to June 2003. Kara-Murza then briefly became foreign affairs correspondent of Kommersant (July 2003 to April 2004) and Washington correspondent for the BBC (December 2004 to December 2005). In 2002, he was editor-in-chief of the London-based financial publication Russian Investment Review. In April 2004 he took over as the Washington bureau chief of the RTVi television network, a post he held for the next nine years. On 1 September 2012 he was dismissed from this job.
Documentarian In 2005, Kara-Murza produced a four-part TV documentary, They Chose Freedom, dedicated to the history of the Soviet dissident movement. The documentary was based on interviews with Russian dissidents, including Vladimir Bukovsky, Elena Bonner and Sergei Kovalev. It was first aired in October 2005.
The documentary has since been screened at various locations in Europe and North America, with subtitles added in English. On 24 March 2014, Kara-Murza, Anne Applebaum, and Vladimir Bukovsky took part in a discussion following a London screening of the film.
Author In 2011, Kara-Murza published his first book, Reform or Revolution: The Quest for Responsible Government in the First Russian State Duma (in Russian only), which recounts the unsuccessful attempt by the Cadets or Constitutional Democratic Party to form a government during the brief existence of the first Russian Parliament or Duma from April to July 1906. Based on the original 1906 parliamentary record and contemporary newspaper reports, as well as memoirs by participants of the events, the book was launched in both Moscow and Saint Petersburg.
In late 2014 and early 2015, he wrote about a number of anti-democratic trends in Russia. President Vladimir Putin, for example, had resumed the Soviet practice of stripping dissidents of their Russian citizenship. As a result of this and other acts, Kara-Murza urged the Council of Europe not to restore Russia's voting rights, suspended since the annexation of Crimea. Kremlin SWAT teams, he wrote in December 2014, were breaking up opposition meetings. Putin's word was therefore "void of value", wrote Kara-Murza, citing as evidence the false statements made by the Russian President and his broken promises.
Putin soft-pedaled his response to the opposition during the Sochi Olympics, Kara-Murza wrote in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, published on 26 February 2014. Now that the international event was over, the Russian president was rapidly returning to his former oppressive behaviour. Only hours after the closing ceremony in Sochi, a Moscow court handed prison sentences to seven of the May 2012 Bolotnaya Square protestors.
Pressure was brought to bear not only within Russia. Russia's nationwide TV had been broadcasting "hate-filled appeals to crush the protesters in Kiev" for several weeks early in 2014, noted Kara-Murza. For Putin, he explained, "maintaining the status quo in Ukraine was not primarily about preserving a post-Soviet sphere of influence or recreating a Moscow-led empire". The Russian president feared that "a democratic, pro-European Ukraine" would set "a 'dangerous' precedent for Russia" and that it would be "only a matter of time" before Russian citizens began to demand similar levels of political and economic freedom.
Russian politics From 1999 to 2001, Kara-Murza was a member of the Democratic Choice of Russia party; from 2001 to 2008 he was a member of the Union of Right Forces. Between 2000 and 2003 he served as an advisor to State Duma opposition leader Boris Nemtsov. He has been in opposition to Vladimir Putin since 2000, backing liberal candidate Grigory Yavlinsky in the 2000 presidential election.
Kara-Murza was a candidate for election to the Russian parliament, or State Duma, in the 2003 parliamentary election, running in Moscow's Chertanovsky district. His candidacy was endorsed jointly by the Union of Right Forces and Yabloko. During the campaign, various underhanded methods were used against Kara-Murza. The candidate from the United Russia ruling party Vladimir Gruzdev attempted to have him removed from the ballot; the lighting on Kara-Murza's campaign billboards and the sound during his televised debates were turned off; and unlawful carousel voting was discovered on election day. British journalist Andrew Jack named the Chertanovsky district in south Moscow as a case of electoral manipulation in Russia's 2003 vote in his book Inside Putin's Russia. According to the official results, Gruzdev received 149,069 votes (53.8%); Kara-Murza, 23,800 votes (8.6%); and Communist Party candidate Sergei Seregin, 18,992 votes (6.9%).
In January 2004, he co-founded the Committee 2008, an umbrella opposition group led by Boris Nemtsov and Garry Kasparov. In May 2007, Kara-Murza nominated the veteran human rights activist and writer Vladimir Bukovsky as a democratic opposition candidate for the Russian presidency in the 2008 election. "The opposition needs a candidate for president – strong, uncompromising, decisive, with irreproachable political and, more importantly, moral authority," read the statement written by Kara-Murza on behalf of Bukovsky's campaign committee. "Russia needs its own Vaclav Havel, not a new successor from [the KGB]."
From May to December 2007, Kara-Murza chaired Bukovsky's campaign committee, which included, among others, Academician Yuri Ryzhov, writer and satirist Victor Shenderovich, columnist Andrei Piontkovsky, lawyer Yuri Schmidt,Schmidt [Shmidt], 1937–2013, in Soviet times was close to dissident circles in Leningrad; served as senior attorney on Mikhail Khodorkovsky's legal team at his two trials, in 2005 and 2011. human rights activist Alexander Podrabinek, and political analyst Vladimir Pribylovsky. In October 2007, Kara-Murza was one of organisers of the "Rally of Free People" held on Moscow's Triumfalnaya Square in support of Bukovsky's presidential nomination.На Триумфальной площади в Москве прошел митинг в поддержку кандидатуры В. К. Буковского на президентских выборах 2008 г. tr. "A rally in support of V.K.Bukovsky's candidacy in the 2008 presidential elections was held on Triumfalnaya Square in Moscow." Memorial, 22 October 2007.
On 16 December 2007, Bukovsky was duly nominated as a presidential candidate by 823 members of a voters' assembly in Moscow (the law required at least 500 people to support such a nomination). At the same meeting, Kara-Murza was elected as Bukovsky's plenipotentiary representative to Russia's Central Electoral Commission. On 22 December 2007 the Commission refused to register Bukovsky as a candidate for the presidency, thereby denying Bukovsky access to the ballot."Central Electoral Commission refuses to register Bukovsky", Grani.ru news website (ЦИК отказал Буковскому в регистрации) Grani.ru, 22 December 2007.
At the founding convention of Solidarnost, Russia's united democratic movement, in December 2008, Kara-Murza was elected to the movement's federal council, placing second out of 77 candidates, behind Nemtsov.Российская «Солидарность» учредилась "Russian Solidarity' has been set up", Panorama, No 64, April 2009 (in Russian). He was re-elected to the Solidarnost council in 2010 and 2013.
In 2012, he took part in the street protests in Moscow against Putin's rule, the largest pro-democracy demonstrations in Russia since 1991.
In June 2012, Kara-Murza was elected to the federal council of the Republican Party of Russia – People's Freedom Party, co-chaired by Boris Nemtsov, Mikhail Kasyanov, and Vladimir Ryzhkov.Сопредседателями партии РПР-ПАРНАС стали Немцов, Касьянов и Рыжков "Nemtsov, Kasyanov and Ryzhkov become co-chairmen of RPR-RFP", RIA Novosti, 16 June 2012 (in Russian). In October 2012, he was elected to the Coordinating Council of the Russian Opposition, placing 21st out of 169 candidates and receiving 20,845 votes.Результаты голосования по выборам в КС оппозиции "Results of voting for the Coordinating Council of the opposition", TsVK, 22 October 2012 (in Russian). Alexei Navalny placed first.
Institute of Modern Russia Soon after, on 1 November 2012, Kara-Murza was hired by the Institute of Modern Russia as the organisation's senior policy advisor. "It is an honor for me to join this distinguished institute and contribute to its mission of keeping the spotlight on the situation in Russia and advocating for democracy, human rights, and the rule of law", said Kara-Murza, "These values should remain at the forefront of international relations." In February 2013, he took part in panel discussions about Russia's future at The Heritage Foundation. In October 2013, with Pavel Khodorkovsky, son of the former entrepreneur and philanthropist Mikhail Khodorkovsky and others, he participated in a similar discussion hosted by the National Endowment for Democracy.
Open Russia