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Russia is 'very, very afraid of…’:Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told this week's Ukraine Recovery Conference that “democracy paves the way for the rule of law”. He said resources and land were not the only reasons Russia invaded. The architects of the Western policy of embracing Putin ignored two fundamental warnings from history: that internal repression in Russia always translates into external aggression and that appeasing an aggressor always leads to war, Vladimir Kara-Murza writes for The Post.
Vladimir Kara-Murza’s imprisonment in Russia
(Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP)
Who is Vladimir Kara-Murza?
Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Global Opinions contributor to The Post, is a Russian politician, author and historian. He holds Russian and British passports and settled his family in the United States. He has been an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
PRETRIAL DETENTION CENTER NO. 5, MOSCOW — Dictatorial regimes can come to power in different ways. Sometimes, it is through years of civil war, as with the Bolsheviks in Russia after 1917. Sometimes, it is through democratic procedures, as in 1930s Germany. Or, as in Chile in 1973, it can happen as the result of a military coup.
Vladimir Putin achieved power in 1999 by a backroom deal in the top ranks of President Boris Yeltsin’s administration. But the new Kremlin leader needed time to transform Russia’s imperfect democracy into the seamless authoritarian system it is today. No one can pinpoint the precise moment Russia ceased to be democratic. But the year can be named with certainty.
It was 2003 — and this week marks exactly 20 years since the first turning point in that transformation. On June 22 of that year, Putin’s press ministry turned off the broadcasting signal of TVS, Russia’s last independent television network. In a characteristic display of Soviet-style hypocrisy, the official reason it cited was “viewers’ interests.” This was the final step in Putin’s campaign against independent television, which he had launched days after his inauguration with a security raid on the offices of Russia’s largest private media holding. Within three years, all major independent broadcasters — NTV, TV-6 and finally TVS — fell silent, giving the Kremlin a complete monopoly on the airwaves. Controlling public sources of information is a prerequisite to any dictatorship.
Two other milestones came later that year. In October 2003, Putin’s security services arrested Russia’s richest man, oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The official charge was tax evasion. But the real reason was Khodorkovsky’s funding of civil society groups and opposition parties and his public confrontation with Putin over government corruption. This was a clear signal from the Kremlin to all of Russia’s business community: Stay loyal or stay out. Finally, in December came Russia’s parliamentary election that — for the first time since the end of Soviet rule — was assessed by international observers as unfair.It resulted in the ejection of pro-democracy parties from the Duma. With the Russian parliament becoming — in the unforgettable words of its speaker — “not a place for discussion,” Putin’s authoritarian transformation was complete.
For those of us who had been involved in the democratic opposition to Putin from the very start of his rule, it was painful to watch how calmly most of Russian society seemed to accept the dismantling of the nascent freedoms of the 1990s. There were street protests against the state takeover of NTV — but nowhere near the scale merited by the situation. There were principled voices in the Russian parliament against Putin’s authoritarian moves — such as Boris Nemtsov — but they were not matched by a mass popular movement. As a candidate for the Duma in the critical 2003 election, I remember well how indifferent most voters even in my Moscow district were to the country’s authoritarian turn. After the economic hardships that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet system in the 1990s, many people were willing to accept Putin’s unspoken social contract: higher living standards (bankrolled by rising oil prices) in return for giving up political freedoms.
So when politicians and opinion-makers in the West today speak of Russian society’s responsibility for allowing Putin’s rise to unchecked power (and ultimately leading us to the current war), they have a point — but only partly. Why? Because a very large part of that responsibility lies with the West itself.
When Putin came to power, Russia was fully integrated into the international rules-based system. It belonged to the Group of Eight industrialized democracies; it was a member of the Council of Europe, which serves to safeguard human rights on the continent; it was (and still is) a participating state in the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, whose statutes explicitly assert that matters relating to democracy, human rights and the rule of law are of legitimate concern to all member states. So when Putin launched ever more active efforts to dismantle Russia’s democratic institutions, we in the Russian opposition naively thought the free world would express criticism.
Instead, American presidents of both parties applauded Putin’s rise. George W. Bush called him “a new style of leader, a reformer … who is going to make a huge difference in making the world more peaceful.” Barack Obama lauded his “extraordinary work … on behalf of the Russian people.” One German chancellor even went to work for one of Russia’s biggest state-controlled companies.
But perhaps the most grotesque gesture came from the British government, which welcomed Putin for a lavish state visit — complete with a horse-drawn carriage ride with the queen and billions of dollars in lucrative contracts — literally two days after he pulled the plug on TVS in June 2003. I covered that visit as a journalist, and I will never forget the surreal spectacle of Britain’s political and financial elite hosting the emerging dictator at an ornate banquet at the London Guildhall.
The immorality and cynicism of this realpolitik aside, the architects of the Western policy of embracing Putin ignored two fundamental warnings from history: that internal repression in Russia always translates into external aggression and that appeasing an aggressor always leads to war. Again, the free world has learned this the hard way. After he got away with so much else over the years, both at home and abroad, it is not surprising that Putin thought he could get away with occupying Ukraine, too.
Incredibly, there are still voices in the West who are suggesting that he should. Day after day, Russian state television (which I am forced to watch in my prison cell) relays statements by Kremlin-friendly politicians and talking heads in Western Europe and the United States calling for some kind of an “understanding” with Putin over Ukraine. I can think of no better recipe for disaster — and for a new, even larger war a couple of years down the road — than handing the aggressor yet another cave-in.
There is only one outcome of this conflict that would be in the interests of the free world, of Ukraine and, ultimately, of the Russian people: resounding defeat for Putin, to be followed by political change in Russia and a Marshall Plan-type international assistance program both to rebuild Ukraine and to help post-Putin Russia build a functioning democracy so that it never again becomes a threat to its own people or its neighbors. That is the only way to make sure Europe can finally become whole, free and at peace — and stay that way.
Both Russian society and the West are responsible for letting Putin come as far as he did. Both also share the responsibility to get it right this time.
Vladimir Kara-Murza is a Russian opposition politician and Post contributor who has been imprisoned in Moscow since April for speaking out against the war on Ukraine. He has been designated by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience.Twitter
A história de um líder oposicionista à ditadura de Vladimir Putin, o czar de todas as Rússia, e criminoso de guerra e tirano feroz contra o seu próprio povo.
On a cold spring evening in April, Russian opposition leader Vladimir Kara-Murza was parking outside his Moscow apartment building when five uniformed police officers surrounded his car. The officers yanked him from the vehicle and hustled him into a waiting van. Next thing he knew, he was occupying a 6-by-9-foot cell in Moscow’s notorious Khamovniki police station.
Initially, he was detained on a spurious charge: disobeying the police. But on April 22, 11 days after his arrest, Kara-Murza was indicted on a charge of “spreading deliberately false information” under a law passed in the wake of Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine. It’s a charge that could bring 10 years in prison.
The charging document cited a speech that Kara-Murza, a Post contributing columnist, had given weeks earlier to the Arizona House of Representatives. His remarks accused Russian forces of dropping cluster bombs on residential areas in Ukraine and staging airstrikes on maternity wards, hospitals and schools. He did not mince words: “These are war crimes that are being committed by the dictatorial regime in the Kremlin against a nation in the middle of Europe.”
The atrocities Kara-Murza described have been verified by news organizations around the world and have led to international war crimes investigations. But Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin couldn’t bear the spectacle of a Russian citizen airing these uncomfortable facts — so it locked him up for telling the truth.
If telling the truth qualifies as a “crime,” it is one that the 40-year-old Kara-Murza has committed proudly and consistently. For two decades, he has been an outspoken opponent of the Putin regime. His efforts have come at a huge price: He was poisoned in 2015 and again in 2017, narrowly surviving both attempts on his life. Over the years, associates and friends have been attacked, jailed or killed — experiences that have hardened his ideological rejection of Putin’s Kremlin.
Yet he’s not afraid to say so. The day before his latest arrest, he told CNN in an April 10 interview that Russia’s current government “is a regime of murderers.”
Even when it has been clear that pursuing his ideals might put his life at risk, Kara-Murza — a historian and documentary filmmaker as well as a journalist and activist — has continued to campaign for human rights and liberal democracy. Meanwhile, many politicians in the West have abandoned these values, whether by appeasing dictators such as Putin or by eroding democratic principles in their own societies.
Kara-Murza didn’t have to take this path. Years ago, he settled his family — his wife, Evgenia, and three children, now ages 16, 13 and 10— in a Northern Virginia suburb. He holds a British passport as well as a Russian one; he easily could have embraced a full-time life in the West. His friends often express dismay over his insistence on returning to Russia — but Kara-Murza maintained that he could not advocate for the rights and freedoms of the Russian people without enduring the same travails they face.
Even when it has been clear that pursuing his ideals might put his life at risk, Kara-Murza — a historian and documentary filmmaker as well as a journalist and activist — has continued to campaign for human rights and liberal democracy. Meanwhile, many politicians in the West have abandoned these values, whether by appeasing dictators such as Putin or by eroding democratic principles in their own societies.
Kara-Murza didn’t have to take this path. Years ago, he settled his family — his wife, Evgenia, and three children, now ages 16, 13 and 10— in a Northern Virginia suburb. He holds a British passport as well as a Russian one; he easily could have embraced a full-time life in the West. His friends often express dismay over his insistence on returning to Russia — but Kara-Murza maintained that he could not advocate for the rights and freedoms of the Russian people without enduring the same travails they face.
Kara-Murza recently described his imprisonment as a kind of badge of honor worn by an illustrious line of Russian oppositionists before him. In a letter sent from prison, he cited the example of dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who proudly recalled being charged with “anti-Soviet activity”: “I wear these convictions like medals!”
Vladimir Kara-Murza, right, with Vladimir Bukovsky in the early 2000s. (Family photo)
“He’s one of the very few people of the new generation who could be called an heir of the [Soviet-era] dissident movement, of its ideals and its critiques,” says 68-year-old Aleksandr Podrabinek, who was a political prisoner for 5½ years in Soviet times. “He knows its history; he understands its meaning. He’s one of our dissident family.”
As Putin’s Russia backslides into a state resembling its Soviet past, Kara-Murza finds himself in a role that he knows well from his study of history. In the 20th century, dissidents such as Podrabinek used the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakiaand Afghanistan to illuminate the communist regime’s brutality. Now, Kara-Murza has become a prisoner of consciencein his own right for daring to oppose yet another cynical war.
The Russian opposition has produced many talented leaders over the years. The most prominent today is Alexei Navalny, a rousing populist who made a name for himself with highly effective online campaigns against the corruption of officialdom. Navalny, who was successfully building a national grass-roots organization until he was poisoned in 2020, is serving a nine-year sentence in a maximum-security penal colony.
Yet few can make the case with the same depth and rigor as Kara-Murza. And that makes him dangerous. Since Putin invaded Ukraine in February, Kara-Murza has argued that the war enjoys far less support among ordinary Russians than the Kremlin claims. Saying that out loud strikes at one of the regime’s most vulnerable points. “The regime is so afraid of the people,” his wife, Evgenia, told me. “It wants to create this image for the international community that everyone supports Putin’s actions in Ukraine, that Russia is a strong country, and that Putin’s leadership is approved by his population who stand behind him in everything that he does. None of that is true.” That’s why the Kremlin is cracking down, she says, on anyone who challenges the official narrative.
If Kara-Murza were free to speak, he’d scold me for making him the center of attention. I have edited his columns for The Post for five years — exactly 101 columns so far — and over those years, I’ve been honored to call him a friend. He shies away from attempts to single him out, instead redirecting attention to the plight of other democratic activists. Fluent in English and French as well as Russian, Kara-Murza often comes across as soft-spoken and cerebral — an image somewhat belied by his fondness for 1970s British TV comedy and a natural ease with people.
But there can be no mistaking the intensity of his quarrel with Russia’s regime. For 20 years, Kara-Murza has battled against Putin and everything he stands for — a conflict fueled by the two men’s radically divergent biographies. Putin chose a career in the KGB as a devoted servant of the Soviet system. The Kara-Murza family has long defined itself by its opposition to that system. Two of Kara-Murza’s ancestors — a great-grandfather and a great-great uncle — were shot by Stalin’s secret police.
Kara-Murza was born in September 1981 at the nadir of the Cold War. His first political mentor was his father, also named Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Soviet-era dissident who became a nationally known journalist during the 1990s. His parents divorced early in his childhood. Later, his mother, Elena Gordon, married a British citizen and took her teenage son with her to live in Britain.
Vladimir Kara-Murza, right, with his father, Vladimir Kara-Murza Sr., in St. Petersburg, Russia in the early 2000s. (Family photo)
At 16, while studying at British schools, Kara-Murza started working as a correspondent for a Moscow newspaper and other Russian media outlets, too. His work brought him into contact with a man who would become his political mentor: Boris Nemtsov, a liberal member of the Russian parliament who had served as a deputy prime minister under President Boris Yeltsin. Soon, Kara-Murza was helping Nemtsov organize visits to Britain; in 2000, he became one of Nemtsov’s parliamentary aides.
In 2003, Kara-Murza completed his undergraduate degree in history at Cambridge. Then he returned to Moscow, where he threw himself into the work of the liberal opposition. Officially a member of Nemtsov’s party, he campaigned for a seat in the national parliament. Just a few years into Putin’s rule, it was already clear that democrats faced an uphill battle, even if the tactics used against them were relatively benign. His opponents unplugged lights illuminating one of his campaign billboards, blocked distribution of his election pamphlets and turned off his microphone during a televised debate. Little surprise, Kara-Murza lost to a Putin-backed candidate.
In many respects, Russia’s fledgling democracy in the 1990s — complete with private property, elected government, freedom of assembly and of the press — was a remarkable achievement. It lasted more than a decade, longer than any such experiment in the previous thousand years.
But it also brought chaos. Many Russians came to identify post-Soviet democracy with runaway inflation, unpaid wages and social turmoil; organized criminals ran amok, and a tiny coterie of oligarchs seized control of much of the economy.
In the 2000s, the disillusioned initially welcomed Putin’s reassertion of state power even as he maintained some popular achievements of the Yeltsin era, such as the right to open a business or travel abroad. For Putin’s supporters, his dismantling of press freedom and representative government seemed an acceptable price to pay for stability. As Putin settled into office, however, the pro-democracy parties, riven by factionalism and private feuds, could do little to counter the Kremlin’s gradual restoration of the police state.
Vladimir Kara-Murza, left, with Boris Nemtsov at a conference of the Union of Right Forces party in Moscow in May of 2001. (Family photo)
Over time, Russians — especially younger ones — began to see signs of deepening stagnation. That sentiment exploded into mass protests in 2011, when Putin announced — without even a nod at consulting the voters — that he would return to the presidency after four years as prime minister (and showed what a sham it had been when he stepped down to comply with term limits). Russians in major cities took to the streets by the tens of thousands, at a moment when the Arab Spring was elsewhere reminding the world that sclerotic dictatorships are never as stable as they appear. The Kremlin, palpably unnerved, crushed the protests, with some demonstrators sentenced to long prison terms.
One source of the discontent stood out: the rampant corruption of the ruling elite. Those Yeltsin-era oligarchs who had accepted Putin’s rise to power had been joined at the top by a new class of ex-KGB billionaires, who used their proximity to the president to seize control of lucrative assets. Despite their nationalist rhetoric, they tended to park their ill-gotten gains overseas; economists recently estimated that some 50 percent of Russian wealth is stashed abroad. In 2009, the machinations of a coterie of corrupt police officials had led to the death in prison of an idealistic young Russian lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky. The ensuing quest for justice by one of his clients, the investor Bill Browder, would have far-reaching consequences — for Russian human rights abusers and for Kara-Murza, who soon joined the cause.
Until this time, sanctions on authoritarian regimes usually targeted entire industries or economic sectors — and ordinary people often ended up bearing the brunt. But when Browder sought justice for Magnitsky, he lobbied for legislation in the United States and elsewhere that would impose personal sanctions on individual Russian human rights abusers, banning them from travel to the West and allowing the seizure of their assets. In other words, the measure would hit them in their pocketbooks.
The law, named the Magnitsky Act, was passed by the U.S. Congress in 2012. Browder and his allies then lobbied for similar legislation in Canada, Britain and the European Union. Kara-Murza, helped by his status as one of the very few leading members of the Russian opposition who spoke fluent English, played a key role. “Vladimir was indispensable,” says David J. Kramer, a George W. Bush administration State Department official who assisted in the Magnitsky Act campaign. “No one can question his bona fides to speak personally directly about the abuses, if not the outright atrocities committed by the Putin regime.”
Putin saw the Magnitsky law as a threat to himself and his cronies. Browder, a U.S.-born British citizen, soon found himself fending off death threats, lawsuits and eight Interpol arrest warrants filed by the Russian government. But for Putin’s Russian critics, the risks were worse. In February 2015, Nemtsov was gunned down crossing a Moscow bridge just a few hundred feet from the Kremlin. Hours before the late-night attack, Nemtsov had given an interview in which he denounced Putin’s “mad, aggressive and deadly policy of war against Ukraine,” referring to Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and deployment of Russian troops.
The Russian government tried and convicted five Chechen men for Nemtsov’s murder — while suppressing evidence that suggested the killers had ties to the Kremlin. “This is personal for me,” Kara-Murza said in 2017. “Boris Nemtsov was my closest friend. He’s godfather to my younger daughter; that’s family in Russia. I know that for so many people, this is personal.”
Vladimir Kara-Murza lays flowers Feb. 27, 2021, near the place where Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was gunned down six years earlier in Moscow. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP)
Despite entreaties from many friends and allies, Kara-Murza insisted on staying in Russia. A few months later, on May 26, 2015, soon after visiting a Moscow restaurant with a colleague, he began to feel violently ill. Suddenly, he was sweating and vomiting, his heart racing: “Within the space of 10 to 15 minutes, I went from feeling completely normal to being a really sick man,” he later told an interviewer.
Kara-Murza passed out before arriving at a Moscow hospital, where doctors discerned that his kidneys were shutting down. Other major organs followed. When his wife, Evgenia, arrived from the United States a day and a half later, doctors estimated his chances of survival at 5 percent.
Yet survive he did. Recovery was a long, slow process — rebuilding his strength involved relearning such basics as how to hold a spoon. A few months after the poisoning, Kara-Murza was invited to a reception at the British ambassador’s residence in Moscow, where one British lawmaker declared that he opposed passage of a Magnitsky Act-style law, saying he thought it would be bad for British business. As Browder tells the story, Kara-Murza, still relying on the aid of a cane, responded: “They tried to kill me over this thing, and you’re worried about doing a bit of business with Russia?”
As he recovered, Kara-Murza continued his opposition work. He traveled, organizing grass-roots activists for Open Russia, a pro-democracy group funded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch who was imprisoned for 10 years for defying Putin. Kara-Murza made a film about Nemtsov that celebrated his mentor’s achievements as a defender of democracy, screening it to audiences inside Russia and abroad. And he continued lobbying foreign governments to pass Magnitsky Act-style personal sanctions.
Then, on Feb. 1, 2017, he was attacked again. After eating in a Moscow cafe with a fellow activist, Kara-Murzasuddenly began experiencing familiar symptoms: difficulty breathing, plummeting blood pressure, a racing heart rate. Before he lost consciousness, he managed to call Evgenia, who swiftly boarded a flight for Moscow. Before she arrived, doctors placed Kara-Murza in an artificial coma to aid their treatment of his failing lungs and kidney. Their diagnosis: “acute intoxication with an unknown substance.”
Kara-Murza fought his way back to health after the 2017 poisoning and again rejoined opposition efforts. In public appearances in Russia and elsewhere, he persisted in calling out the Putin regime for falsifying election results and other distortions of the truth — despite the obvious risk. He also began to write regularly for The Post. His opinion columns vividly portrayed Russia’s real political life, with all its complexity and turmoil, and its contradictions with the official image of a people seamlessly united behind a strong leader.
In a 2018 column about Putin’s suppression of political opponents, for example, Kara-Murza wrote: “A leader with real popular support would not be afraid of real competition at the ballot box.”
Vladimir Kara-Murza, recovering in 2017 after he was poisoned for the second time, is visited in the hospital by, from left, his wife, Evgenia; his lawyer and friend Vadim Prokhorov; and Aleksandr Podrabinek, an activist and Soviet-era dissident. (Family photo)
An impressive array of U.S. legislators has called for Kara-Murza’s release, as have politicians and human rights organizations around the world. “As I said at the time of Vladimir Kara-Murza’s arrest, the Kremlin’s charges against him are a cynical attempt to silence him,”U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said this month. “Vladimir should be released, as should all of those who have been detained for doing nothing more than speaking the truth.”Fred Ryan, publisher of The Post, said: “The Biden administration and Congress must use all the levers at their disposal — including tougher sanctions on those closest to Putin — to secure Kara-Murza’s freedom immediately.”
Putin, however, shows little sign of relenting. On June 8, a Moscow court extended Kara-Murza’s pretrial detention by two months. His lawyer, Vadim Prokhorov, recently announced that investigators in Moscow opened another criminal case against Kara-Murza this month based on his alleged membership “in an undesirable organization."
All this has tragically vindicated Kara-Murza’s two decades of warnings about Putin. Meanwhile, the Magnitsky Act-style sanctions he has long advocated are serving as the model for a host of international measures punishing Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. An unprecedented wave of internal repression has put more than 16,000 Russians behind bars. And it has put Kara-Murza on a collision course with a ruthless dictator who acts as though he has little left to lose.
Yet Kara-Murza remains upbeat. In a recent letter from prison, he characteristically noted others who have dared to speak out against tyranny. “Each of the thousands of Russian antiwar protesters is standing up not only for the people of Ukraine and for the international rule of law but also for the future of our own country,” he wrote. “Each one is giving another reason to hope that a renewed, reformed post-Putin Russia can one day take its place in the community of democratic nations — and in a Europe that would finally become whole, free and at peace.”
Such optimism might sound misplaced at a moment when Russia is once again reverting to despotism. Knowing Vladimir Kara-Murza, though, I know how he would respond to my skepticism: The night, he would say, is always darkest before the dawn.
The Washington Post, May 21, 2021 at 1:08 p.m. GMT-3
This week, capitals around the world are marking the centennial of the birth of Andrei Sakharov, the renowned Russian scientist, humanist and human rights advocate, with commemorative events and exhibitions. The one exception is Sakharov’s native city, where the authorities have prohibited the planned photo exhibit on the Boulevard Ring. “The content was not authorized,” a Moscow City Hall official explained to the organizers.
Paradoxically, the decision was quite appropriate. It would have been the height of hypocrisy to hold an official Sakharov exhibit at a time when state-driven repression in Russia is fast approaching what it was in his own time — and when the number of recognized political prisoners is more than double the number he noted in his 1975 Nobel Prize lecture. Not to mention that Vladimir Putin, a former officer from the Soviet KGB — the very organization that persecuted Sakharov and his family — is occupying the Kremlin.
Not many people would voluntarily trade a life of privilege and comfort for the perilous fate of a dissident in a totalitarian society. Sakharov did. A brilliant physicist, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, the youngest-ever full member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, he received the highest state awards, enjoyed material privileges and had personal access to Kremlin leaders. But as his eyes opened to the true nature of the regime he helped protect — including by what he witnessed during nuclear tests in populated areas — he could not stay silent.
“Freedom of thought requires the defense of all thinking and honest people,” Sakharov wrote in his first major political essay in 1968. “[It] is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship.” It was at the end of the 1960s when Sakharov the scientist finally gave way to Sakharov the dissident as he began to focus almost exclusively on defending prisoners of conscience, displaced peoples (notably Crimean Tatars), those seeking to emigrate and others who came under attack from the repressive state.
Sakharov used his prominence and academic credentials to attend the political trials that were normally closed to the public. “He came with all his medals and decorations and told police officers that he was Academician Sakharov,” recalled Vladimir Bukovsky, a famed Soviet dissident and prisoner of conscience. “They didn’t dare not let him in. Why, he had more decorations than [Soviet leader Leonid] Brezhnev!” It was at one of these dissident trials that Sakharov met Yelena Bonner, a fearless champion in her own right who would become his wife, companion and comrade in arms. If there ever was a marriage between soulmates, it was theirs.
Soviet leaders were at a loss how to deal with Sakharov. He was too prominent, at home and internationally, to send to prison or a psychiatric hospital. They couldn’t exile him abroad because of “state secrets” he knew by virtue of prior work. So they tried everything else, from pretending he no longer existed (Soviet encyclopedia articles simply stated that Sakharov “has left scientific work”) to orchestrating open letters in Soviet newspapers from workers, milkmaids, writers and Sakharov’s fellow academicians, condemning his “anti-Soviet activities.”
The harassment grew especially vicious when, in 1975, Sakharov became the first Russian to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. (The next one, ironically, would be a general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev.) In his Nobel lecture — read out by Bonner, as he was not allowed to leave the U.S.S.R. — Sakharov named 126 Soviet prisoners of conscience, who, as he emphasized, “share with me the honor of the Nobel Prize.”
The Kremlin’s patience ran out in January 1980. While on his way to an academic seminar, Sakharov was intercepted by the KGB, driven to the prosecutor’s office and told that he was being stripped of his state awards and consigned — without as much as a formal court order — to internal exile in Gorky, a city closed to foreign visitors. There, kept under constant KGB surveillance and subjected to regular force-feedings during hunger strikes, he would spend nearly seven years. His return to Moscow in December 1986 — after a surprise phone call from Gorbachev — was the first sign that something might be changing in the Soviet Union.
Sakharov lived just long enough to taste a small sampling of the freedom he helped bring to his country. In 1989, he was elected to the Soviet Union’s first (and last) semi-democratic legislature, the Congress of People’s Deputies, where he led, along with Boris Yeltsin and other rebellious lawmakers, the small but vocal pro-democracy opposition. For the first time, his words were heard not from foreign radio broadcasts or samizdat publications, but by millions of Soviet citizens on live television — and that in itself had a profound moral effect on society. History, as they say, knows no “ifs” — but had Sakharov lived longer, the outcome of Russia’s failed democratic experiment in the 1990s might have been different.
Although it has been more than three decades since his passing, Sakharov’s time has not yet come in Russia. But today’s young people, who may know little about him, unwittingly continue his work as they risk arrests and beatings to demonstrate their solidarity with prisoners of conscience. “Today as always I believe in the power of reason and the human spirit,” Sakharov wrote in the darkest days of his Gorky exile. His own spirit of optimism and hope is very much needed in today’s Russia.
Vladimir Kara-Murza is a Russian democracy activist, author, and filmmaker. He is the chairman of the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom and vice president of the Free Russia Foundation. He is a contributing writer at The Post, writing regularly for Global Opinions with a focus on Russia. Twitter
