Married with three children, 41-year-old Kara-Murza has for many years been a thorn in President Vladimir Putin’s side.
On Monday, Russian opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years in jail just for criticising President Putin’s unprovoked war on Ukraine. He was declared guilty of treason, spreading “false” information about the Russian army and being affiliated with an “undesirable organisation”. The bulk of his sentence was for “treason”, the first time anyone has been convicted on that count for making public statements containing publicly available information. Announcing the sentence, the judge said that it would be served in a “strict regime correctional colony”, and that Kara-Murza would be fined $5,000.
Married with three children, 41-year-old Kara-Murza has for many years been a thorn in President Vladimir Putin’s side. A protégé of Boris Nemtsov, who was murdered eight years ago in the most secure area of Moscow near the Kremlin, Kara-Murza was one of the last remaining prominent critics of Putin still alive and walking free. He served as vice-chairman of Open Russia, an NGO founded by Russian businessman and former oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, which promotes civil society and democracy in the country.
In Putin’s Russia, it has become impossible for non-state institutions, a visible sign of civil society, to exist. Members of any group expressing an alternative view to Putin’s, or even the slightest criticism of the tyrant, are either in jail, have fled abroad, or in many cases simply murdered. Organisations that refuse to promulgate the view of the Kremlin are shut down, usually under the veneer of a court order. The Kremlin appoints all judges, so courts always concur with the Kremlin’s wishes.
Only three months ago, a Moscow court ruled to close the Moscow Helsinki Group, Russia’s oldest human rights organisation and the inspiration for citizens’ groups monitoring human rights in the Europe-Eurasia region. This was just the most recent target of Russian authorities’ expanding crackdown on human rights, including freedom of expression. The Andrey Sakharov Foundation and independent news outlet Meduza were also designated as “undesirable” by the Kremlin, effectively outlawing their activities in Russia. Only last week, the EU-Russian Civil Society Forum, a prominent nongovernmental organisation promoting cooperation between Russian and European civil society groups, was designated “undesirable”, as was Transparency International, a leading global anti-corruption network. Just four of 84 groups to be designated “undesirable” under Putin’s intensifying campaign to cut off independent sources of information and silence voices of conscience.
It was back in 2012 that legislation was passed in the Kremlin-controlled Duma that required nongovernmental organisations to be registered, to identify themselves as “foreign agents”, and to submit audits. This followed the huge demonstrations against the rigged elections that brought Vladimir Putin back to the presidency. Citizens had seen video evidence of massive ballot-box stuffing and vans full of “carousel voters”, people bussed from polling site to polling site in order to cast multiple votes for Vladimir Putin. Putin quickly claimed victory after just 20 percent of votes were counted, but his opponents just as quickly cried foul, armed with reels of evidence of fraud. They uploaded videos by the thousands to their Twitter accounts; outrage went viral. This was the moment when a terrified Putin, realising that he would never be elected in a truly democratised state, began to clamp down on civil society and the last vestiges of democracy began to wither in Russia.
By the time Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a decade later, his stamping out of dissent had all but annihilated any civil rights and opposition in Russia. By far the most prominent opposition figure, Alexei Navalny, the lawyer and anti-corruption activist, is languishing in jail, having been convicted of embezzlement and contempt of court, in a trial described by Amnesty International as a “sham”. In August 2020, he was poisoned with Novichok, a military-grade nerve agent used also in the Kremlin-inspired attempted murder of Sergei and Julia Skripal in Salisbury, UK, two years earlier. The attack nearly killed him, and he had to be flown to Germany for treatment. Undaunted, his return to Russia in 2021 briefly galvanised opposition protesters, but Putin had him immediately arrested on trumped-up charges. His team said this week that he is again seriously ill, fearing the authorities are slowly poisoning him again. Navalny’s colleague, Vladimir Kara-Murza, was also twice the victim of a mysterious poisoning (almost certainly carried out by Russia’s FSB, the security service) that left him in a coma in 2015 and again in 2017. Following these poisonings, Kara-Murza, who holds both Russian and British passports, spent much of his time with his wife and children in the US state of Virginia, but frequently returned to Russia against the advice of his friends, arguing that it was important to campaign for a free Russia. It was on his trip to Moscow in April 2020, that he was detained simply for disobeying police orders. From that moment, charges piled up, the last for “treason” on account of three public speeches he gave in the US, Finland, and Portugal. He had ruffled feathers over many years as the main advocate of the “Magnitsky Act”, which called upon countries to target Russian officials involved in human rights violations and corruption. Tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky had been murdered in a Moscow prison after eleven months in custody, following his claim of massive tax fraud by Russian officials.
It was a matter of supreme irony that the judge who presided at Kara-Murza’s trial, Sergey Podoprigorov, was already sanctioned by the US government under the Magnitsky Act. In any normal country, such a person would not be deemed proper to preside at the trial because of conflict of interest. But this is Russia, and Podoprigorov, whose judgement is clearly highly questionable, refused a demand by Kara-Murza’s lawyers to recuse himself over the issue. It came as no surprise when he sentenced Kara-Murza to the maximum possible jail term of 25 years, as requested by the prosecutors.
“My self-esteem even went up on the sentence”, said Kara-Murza according to his lawyer Maria Eismont, “I realised I was doing everything right”. “Twenty-five years is the highest score I could get for what I did, what I believed in as a citizen, as a patriot, and as a politician”, he continued with a smile.
Vladimir Kara-Murza, a descendant of a distinguished Moscow family, is maintaining a proud family tradition of raising his voice against oppression and warmongering. His late father was a well-known journalist and host of the first professional and independent TV channel in Russia. He fought to the bitter end the Kremlin’s campaign to erase media freedom. His grandfather, also a journalist, spent many years in Stalin’s labour camps, and narrowly escaped execution for his anti-Stalin views. History appears to be repeating itself. Russia has witnessed a widespread wartime crackdown on dissent, but the severity of Kara-Murza’s sentence marks a new record as the Kremlin seeks to muzzle any criticism of its ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Before the trial, Russian journalists and rights activists, most of whom have fled abroad, called on the authorities to free Kara-Murza, saying the charges against him were baseless and politically motivated Prosecute murderers and criminals, rather than honest and responsible citizens who dare to think and speak the truth”, the letter said. “Stop Russia’s new slide toward Stalinism and a totalitarian state”. Sadly for Russians, they’re too late, as it’s already happened. In Putin’s neo-Stalinist Russia, civil society is dead.
John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the University of Plymouth.