Pulitzer Prize goes to Putin’s fearless critic. For comments from a prison cell

A year ago, the court sent him to prison for 25 years, now Russian oppositionist Vladimir Kara-Murza has won one of the prestigious Pulitzer Prizes.

The award came for “urgent commentary” from behind bars that he writes for The Washington Post despite enormous personal risks.

His wife, Yevgenia, living with the children in American exile, said she was devastated that Vladimir could not accept the award alone.

Forty-two-year-old Kara-Murza is currently in a penal colony in Omsk, Siberia, where he ended up for criticizing Russian aggression against Ukraine.

A graduate of history at Cambridge University, he is a longtime opponent of the Kremlin. “I plead guilty: I failed to convince enough people of how great a danger the current Kremlin regime is to the world,” he said in his closing arguments in court last April.

Vladimir Kara-Murza comes from a family with a long tradition. The Kara-Murz were Tatar aristocrats who settled in Moscow in the 15th century and converted to Christianity. In translation, the family name means “Black Lord”.

For example, he has a family of Latvian revolutionaries and politicians, the Bisenieks, among his ancestors. Two of them were executed by order of the Soviet Ministry of the Interior.

His father was a dissident in the era of Leonid Brezhnev. He supported Boris Yeltsin’s reforms, worked with Grigory Yavlinsky and became a critic of Vladimir Putin.

Kara-Murza started out as a journalist. He cooperated with Russian and foreign media. But at the same time, already in 2000, i.e. at the age of 19, he became an assistant to deputy Boris Němcov.

He participated in the launch of Boris Yeltsin’s reforms in the 1990s. Later, however, he rose to the position of one of the main critics and opponents of Putin, and in 2015 he was murdered.

Kara-Murza helped the liberal economist and politician Grigory Yavlinsky in the presidential campaign – against Putin. He also helped the communist-era dissident Vladimir Bukovsky in the presidential campaign. Bukowski spent many years in lunatic asylums and prisons under communism. In 1976 he was deported from Russia and exchanged for the Chilean political prisoner Luis Corvalán. He lived in Britain, but returned to Russia after 1991.

The recent Pulitzer Prize winner also worked with Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oligarch who was still considered the richest person in Russia in 2003. But then he fell out of favor with the dictator. He was arrested in 2003 and spent ten years in prison. After his release, he lives in Switzerland.

Kara-Murza was simply “at it”. He met an oligarch – Khodorkovsky, a product of the wild privatization of the 1990s, who later became a prisoner and an internationally recognized critic of the regime.

And he got to know a politician – Nemtsov, who went to the extreme in his criticism of Putin, did not hesitate to organize demonstrations and participate in them himself, asserting his own freedom. And life.

The regime did not leave him unnoticed. In 2015, Kara-Murza fell into a coma due to sudden kidney failure. His father told the BBC at the time: “He was perfectly healthy. And it is clear that he was poisoned. Who and what poisoned him, but we don’t know.’

Doctors did not agree on the cause of the acute illness. They could not rule out poisoning. As well as the manifestation of a hidden kidney disorder in combination with the antidepressants that Kara-Murza was taking. Kara-Murza woke up after a week of coma and recovered.

After two years, the situation repeated itself – sudden organ failure from an unknown cause. His wife Yevgenija told the BBC: “It’s the same as last time. He has been perfectly healthy so far.’

It was not possible to prove that Kara-Murza was poisoned. But the context speaks for this hypothesis: Poisoning is becoming a common part of the fight against the opposition in Russia. Similar to falls from a window.

The year before last, Kara-Murza won the Václav Havel Prize for Human Rights. Director of the Václav Havel Library, Michael Žantovský, said on that occasion: “I know and admire Vladimir Kara-Murza as a fearless fighter for human rights, freedom and democracy in the face of despotism and violence.”