He thought he would die in Putin’s gulag. Now he has a message for the world.

On April 11, 2022, just weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the writer and activist Vladimir Kara-Murza was arrested outside his home in Moscow. He was charged with “spreading deliberately false information,” Kremlin-speak for criticizing the war in Ukraine. A year later, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison before later being transferred to a remote Siberian penal colony where he was held in an isolation cell.

Kara-Murza, who had already survived two earlier poisonings that had been linked to Russia’s security services, continued writing in prison, including regular columns for the Washington Post, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He expected to die in prison, as his fellow dissident Alexei Navalny did earlier this year.

Then, in August of 2024, Kara-Murza — a dual Russian-British citizen — found himself suddenly released and expelled from Russia as part of the massive international prisoner exchange that also freed the American journalist Evan Gershkovich.

Last week, Kara-Murza sat down with Vox for an extended interview on the sidelines of the Halifax International Security Forum, where he had just received the event’s John McCain Prize for Leadership. (The award was particularly meaningful for Kara-Murza, who was a friend of the late Arizona senator and a pallbearer at his funeral.)

In an interview with Vox, which has been edited for length and clarity, Kara-Murza talked about the “surreal” experience of sudden freedom, the lessons of history for the war in Ukraine, and why Putin’s regime might not be as stable as it seems.

When this conference was happening a year ago, you were still in prison. Is the experience of being out still strange for you?

It is completely surreal. For the last three months, I’ve felt as if I’m watching some kind of a film. Frankly, it’s a very good film, but it does not feel real. I was absolutely convinced that I was going to die in that Siberian prison. And what happened on August 1, I can only describe it as a miracle, because the last time that there was an international prisoner exchange that actually freed Russian political prisoners — not just Western citizens held in Russian jails, but Russian political prisoners — was in October 1986.

It was a miracle, but in many ways, a human-made miracle, because this exchange was made possible by the relentless efforts of so many good people in democratic nations who never stopped advocating and speaking and shouting about this growing crisis with political prisoners in Russia. We have more political prisoners in Russia today than there were in the whole of the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s. This is the situation in Russia under Putin.

And so yes, it still feels totally surreal. I haven’t really had any transition. That’s another problem. I went from solitary confinement in a maximum security prison in Siberia to being in four or five different countries every week. And that’s not really the way it should be done after the prison experience, but I just feel I have no choice. Because, you know, while people are prepared to listen, I have to speak, because I do feel that responsibility now that I’ve been rescued from that hell.

Given what’s happened to a number of prominent critics of the Russian government abroad, do you still feel like there’s some threat to your safety, even outside of Russia?

When our plane was landing in Ankara on the day of the exchange, one of the FSB [Russia’s state security service] officers who was accompanying us turned to Ilya Yashin [another Russian opposition activist freed as part of the exchange] and to me, and said, “Don’t think that you guys will be safe over there. Krasikov can come for you too.” [Vadim Krasikov is the Russian security service hitman, released as part of the prisoner exchange, who had been serving a life sentence in Germany for the assassination of a former Chechen rebel in Berlin.] He didn’t mean literally Krasikov, of course. They have a whole desk of Krasikovs.

I’ve been in Russian opposition politics for 25 years. We all know what can happen to people who publicly oppose the Putin regime. My closest friend, my mentor, the godfather to my younger daughter, Boris Nemtsov [the former Russian Deputy Prime Minister turned opposition leader, killed in 2015], was gunned down, literally in front of the Kremlin, on Putin’s direct orders. Other people have been poisoned, including myself, and we know that these attacks have happened not just on Russian soil, but abroad.

And so look, we all know the risks. We all know what it involves, but frankly, I just don’t think about it, because, well, I don’t want to become paranoid, and it’s not possible just to live every day with that thought in your mind. I know that what I’m doing is the right thing to do, and I’m going to carry on anyway.

But what’s even more important is that I’m not just a politician. I’m a historian by education. And we know that the arc of history may not bend as fast as we’d like, but it does bend towards liberty, and we know that the future belongs to democracies and not to one-man, personalistic, archaic dictatorships, like the dictatorship led by Putin. And so the bottom line is, even if Vladimir Putin gets rid of all of us who are the current leaders, the current faces of the Russian opposition, all it means is that others will come in our place.

Looking at the number of Russian casualties that are coming back from Ukraine, why doesn’t this seem to have more of an impact on Russian society? And how long can this situation be sustainable for the Russian government?

We do not know whether or not it is having an impact, because it’s not possible to objectively assess the state of public opinion in a country that imprisons you for expressing it. And that’s the problem with authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. They seem stable and strong and secure, and then suddenly they collapse.

Both the czarist regime and the communist regime in Russia went down in a matter of days, literally, and nobody saw it coming. There’s a book by the Berkeley anthropologist Alexei Yurchak about the later years of the Soviet Union — I have not read it because it came out while I was in prison, but I love the title: Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More.

And this is exactly how it happened in Russia, and this is exactly how it’s going to happen next time. In these repressive, tyrannical regimes, you don’t know what’s happening beneath the surface. [Czech dissident and later President] Václav Havel writes about this in The Power of the Powerless, that there may be problems developing for the regime, but nobody’s aware of them until they come out of the open and suddenly everything collapses.

So the honest answer is, we don’t know what the real impact of the war is on Russian society. What we do know for certain is that there are a lot of people in Russia who are against this war. We don’t know it from opinion polls. Those are useless. But you have to look at what I call little glimpses of reality. One of the most vivid ones came in February in the middle of our so-called presidential election campaign, which you’ll remember was just Putin and a couple of handpicked clowns.

But there was one guy, a lawyer and former member of parliament named Boris Nadezhdin, who announced that he was running as a presidential candidate on an anti-war platform. And the public response in Russia was just unbelievable. All across the country, in large cities and small towns, you had these long, massive, hours-long lines of people who were waiting at his campaign headquarters to sign petitions to get him on the ballot.

And of course, he was not allowed to. He was barred from running as an opposition candidate in Putin’s Russia. But that was almost beside the point, because suddenly everyone saw through this lie pushed by Putin’s propaganda that everybody in Russia backs this regime, that everybody in Russia supports this war. You can fake election results. You can rig the opinion poll numbers, but you cannot hide the sight of hundreds of thousands of people all over the country literally voting with their feet for the anti-war candidate. And I got a lot of letters in prison, and in February, almost all my letters were about these lines all over the country.

I’ll never forget, there was one woman, one young woman, who wrote to me from Novorossiysk, which is a town on the Black Sea coast in the south of Russia. And she was describing how she waited in that long, long line of like-minded, mostly young people, to sign [Nadezhdin’s] ballot access petition. And then she wrote, “I never realized how many of us there are.” It’s these glimpses of reality that really matter for sort of trying to assess what the actual situation is.

But do you think the government is really feeling insecure? It’s certainly not reflected in the economic numbers, which show Russia is still rapidly growing. Last month, we saw Putin host half a dozen world leaders at the BRICS summit in Kazan. This doesn’t seem like an isolated leader who’s feeling the pressure.

There’s a lot of pressure. The economists tell us that this sort of formal growth that the Russian statistics are producing is all, in a major sense, artificial. This is all just fueled by the war machine. And as soon as this is over, economists are forecasting some very hard times ahead, because this is not a real economy. This is not a consumer economy or a free-market economy in the full sense of this term. Everything is geared towards the military-industrial machinery.

And in terms of how the regime is feeling, I would say that the best way to gauge that is to actually look at their own behavior. Because you know, on the one hand, that propaganda says that, you know, Putin is very popular, his regime is stable and secure. But to me, actions are always more important than words. If that were really the case, why would they need to arrest somebody for a social media post and send them for seven years to prison? Why would they be so afraid of allowing, for example, that anti-war candidate on the ballot, if that position is as unpopular as they claim? Why not just let him on the ballot and let him get his 1 percent?

When this war ends, what do you think it will take to repair the anger and distrust between Russian and Ukrainian societies?

First of all, I can tell you that I’ve had very good contacts, very good dialogue with my Ukrainian friends and colleagues over these last few months that I’ve been out of prison. I also got letters from Ukrainians while I was in prison. So you know, let’s not also pretend that it’s total. Reasonable people can distinguish between a dictatorial regime and its society, and they don’t blame all 140 million Russians.

But of course, there is a lot of pain, there is a lot of grief, there’s a lot of emotion on the Ukrainian side, and it could not have been otherwise when every day people are hearing bombs falling on their towns, and every day children are dying and civilians are dying.

Not only do I totally understand this — this is why I could not stay silent in the first place. Russians will have a very long and very difficult road ahead of us once this is all over and once, of course, there’s a different political situation in Russia. It will be a long and difficult path to reconciliation, to finding a way to speak to each other again, to look into each other’s eyes again. It’s going to be long, it’s going to be difficult, but I fully believe that it’s going to be possible.

And what gives me this hope is, again, my background is as a historian, because we know that this has happened in history before. Just a couple of months ago in September, I was in Strasbourg in France for the autumn session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. They invited me to give a speech at the plenary session. The easiest way to get to Strasbourg is to fly to Frankfurt and just get a rental car and drive for a couple of hours.

I’m a historian. I know what Alsace-Lorraine [a much fought-over border region, now part of France] is. I know how much blood was spilled over that piece of land between the Germans and the French. I know how many thousands of people are buried in that land because they fought over it in the Franco-Prussian War, in the First World War, in the Second World War.

It must have seemed like this hatred would be eternal, that it would never be possible to overcome it. But when I was driving from Frankfurt to Strasbourg, I wasn’t even sure if I was still in Germany or already in France, because there’s an open border. There’s a single currency. People are living in peace and friendship with each other, even when there are still people alive today who fought in the Second World War. So this all happened within the life of a single generation. The French and the Germans were able to find that way to reconcile, and I have no doubt, Russians and Ukrainians will.

You’ve referred to your training as a historian. Are there moments from history that you think can help us better understand this current moment we’re in, both the war and the political situation in Russia?

So first, I’ll answer the negative side of your question, and this links to your question about the next US administration and this talk we hear about possibly cutting a deal with Putin over Ukraine. I think one lesson from history that we must never forget is that the appeasement of dictators never brings peace. It always leads to more aggression, more suffering, more wars, because dictators do not see compromise as an invitation to compromise back. They see it as a sign of weakness, and they become more aggressive.

We know this from the history of the 1930s. We know this also from the history of the past 25 years of Western dealings with Putin because for a lot of that time, Western leaders on both sides of the Atlantic basically engaged in the policy of appeasement, and this is where it led us. And so I think that it’s very important that whatever agreement, whatever settlement is made to to end this war, that settlement has to take into account the interests of Ukraine, and that settlement cannot be done in such a way as to allow Vladimir Putin to present himself as being the victor, who’s being triumphant, because if that happens, that would be a disaster for everybody.

On the more positive side, I mentioned how quickly political changes happen in Russia. I remember 1991. I was 10 at the time, I was a child, but you know, when the revolution is happening in front of your eyes, it’s not something you can forget. And I remember those days in Moscow — the very smell of the air, the freedom. And to me, this was, in many ways, a life-defining lesson of those three days in August of democratic revolution.

Because, as you know, of course, that began as an attempted hardline coup d’état led by the leadership of the Soviet Communist part of the KGB, the military. And it seemed that everything was on the side of those coup plotters, right? They had everything to themselves. They had the whole machinery, the whole apparatus of the Soviet state. They had the whole propaganda apparatus. They had the police, the military, and of course, they had the KGB, the world’s most powerful machine of repression.

And the people who opposed that coup, who wanted to stand up for Russian democracy, they were not armed with anything except their dignity and their determination to defend their own freedom, but they went into the streets in hundreds of thousands — my dad was among those people — and they literally stood there on the streets of Moscow in front of the tanks, and then the tanks stopped and turned away.

The lesson here is that however strong, however stable, however secure a dictatorial regime may seem, if enough people are willing to stand up to it, they succeed.

Russia can change unexpectedly, and we have to be ready for it.

How can we get ready for it?

What happened in the 1990s was that the Soviet system collapsed so suddenly that people were not prepared, and people made mistakes, both on the Russian domestic side and on the international side. And we have to learn from those mistakes.

On the domestic side, we know that any country that wants to overcome the trauma of totalitarianism and successfully transition to democracy has to undergo some sort of a process of public reckoning, a public reflection of the crimes that are being committed.

We saw this in South Africa after apartheid. We saw this in Argentina after its military dictatorship. We saw this in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of communism. Of course, we saw this in Germany after ’45, and then again, after ’89 in the eastern parts. This is a process where society is made aware of all the horrendous crimes that have been committed in its name by the previous regime. So the archives are opened and these crimes are made public. The people responsible for these crimes are made accountable. The institutions that have been committing these crimes, like the secret services, are dismantled, and so on.

None of this happened in Russia in the ’90s. And we know that when evil is not publicly reflected on and publicly condemned, it’s going to come back. And this is exactly what we saw with a former KGB officer coming to power in Russia. We must never make this mistake again. So this is our homework for the Russian opposition, for the Russian democratic forces.

But there’s also an important international aspect, and that is that, you know, for many of the countries of the former Eastern Bloc, the former Warsaw Pact in the 1990s, the promise of Euro-Atlantic integration, served as the most powerful incentive to successfully complete their reforms. When Václav Havel addressed the US Congress in February of 1990, he termed the entire process of post-communist transformation in Czechoslovakia as, I quote, “returning to Europe.”And that light at the end of the tunnel is very important for these countries to continue their reforms and successfully complete them.

Russia never really got the promise of the 1990s. It was sort of kept to the doorstep. When President Boris Yeltsin in December of 1991 wrote to Manfred Wörner, the then-Secretary General of NATO, for the first time officially and publicly raising the question of future Russian membership in NATO, he did not even receive a response.

We have to be ready the next time this happens, because what happens in Russia affects everyone.

To go back to the question of Ukrainians and Russians, it seems like what you’re proposing will require the West to take a leap of faith on Russia after the war. Here at this conference, we’ve heard a lot of slogans like “Make Russia Small Again,” and it’s not unusual to hear people talk about Russia needing to be demilitarized or carved up.

All this talk that you just referenced, that’s an amazing gift to Putin’s propaganda, because all he needs to do is just amplify those voices and tell people, ‘all these people in the West, they’re so Russophobic. They hate all Russians. Their quarrel is not with me, with Putin, they hate all of you. And frankly, it is really damaging, really shortsighted and really counterproductive to hear.

So there’s now been years of discussions, analysis, and legal proceedings regarding the relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. As this new American administration comes in, what do you think are kind of the best- and worst-case scenarios? What are your expectations for how this administration will handle Russia?

I think a character trait that we definitely know about Mr. Trump is that he’s famously unpredictable, so I think that it’s anybody’s guess what the actual policy will be. To be honest, I was really heartened by the selection of the secretary of state. I’ve known Senator Marco Rubio for many years. I know he cares about the issues of democracy and human rights, and standing up to dictatorial regimes. He’s spent a lot of his Senate career on these issues. He has advocated on behalf of political prisoners in Russia, in Belarus, of course, in Venezuela and Cuba.

Something that’s very close to my heart: After Boris Nemtsov was assassinated, we launched this international initiative to commemorate him with street designations around the world. And the first city that did this was Washington, DC. And today, if you go to the Russian embassy, you’ll see that it stands on Boris Nemtsov Plaza. The original sponsor of the Senate bill that did that was Marco Rubio.

A lot of Americans are worried now about the future of their own democracy. Polls show that was top of mind for a large number of voters. As someone who’s seen authoritarianism firsthand, do you think it’s reasonable for people in the US or other democracies to be worried about their countries remaining democracies?

Well, first of all, I do think it’s right to never be complacent about this, to never take things for granted. I think it was President Reagan who said that freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. That is unfortunately, absolutely true, and we all have to be vigilant about this. But you know, I’m an optimist about Russia, and I’m certainly an optimist about the United States.

You’ve had two-and-a-half centuries of democratic institutions and democratic traditions. That’s not going to suddenly be undone because of any single person in the space of four years. So I don’t share these alarmist sorts of views and predictions. But it’s right that people are concerned because we always have to stand guard and make sure that we protect these democratic institutions.