The last time I met Evgenia Kara-Murza, it was a grim day in early March. The timing couldn’t have been worse. As we spoke, Alexei Navalny’s coffin was being lowered into the frozen ground in a Moscow cemetery. Meanwhile Evgenia’s husband, Vladimir Kara-Murza, was still incarcerated in a Siberian prison cell almost identical to the one in the Arctic Circle in which Navalny had been found dead, presumed murdered.
The parallels were eerie. Because Vladimir, a journalist turned political activist, was not just also loathed and feared by the Kremlin and imprisoned on spurious charges, he’d also been poisoned – twice – targeted by the same FSB (Federal Security Service) unit that had poisoned Navalny.
The prospects were so grim and the news from Russia and Ukraine so unrelentingly depressing, it feels almost unimaginably miraculous six months later to see Evgenia walk into the lobby of a London hotel, this time with Vladimir right next to her. Six weeks ago, he was in a Siberian gulag. Today, he’s a free man on a trip to London with his wife and their youngest son, nine-year-old Daniel, the result of the largest prisoner exchange between Russian and the west since the cold war.
I find myself suddenly overwhelmed by the sight of them together so I can’t begin to imagine how Evgenia is feeling. “I cry all the time,” she says. “And I make other people cry. Just when I speak, people start crying in the audience. I just seem to have that effect on people.” She’d been so exasperated when we’d last met, fresh from a meeting she’d waited two years to get with the foreign secretary with the steely demeanour of a woman who can’t afford to give up.
“There has been so much emotional trauma. I mean, let alone the fact that Vladimir was in prison in those horrible conditions and solitary confinement in Western Siberia, but I also had to deal with people who couldn’t really understand this. It’s so difficult for a person living in a normal democratic country to grasp what political repression is in the 21st century. They just couldn’t get it.”
But then, it is difficult to grasp. What’s disorienting about Vladimir’s descriptions of the Siberian gulag is how familiar it is from the works of Solzhenitsyn and other writers of the Stalinist era – though for Kara-Murza, who studied history at Cambridge, this was a source of both incredulity and solace.
“I’m a historian, and one of the biggest areas of study has always been the Soviet dissidents. I made films about it. I’ve written about it extensively. I’ve known many of these people. And it’s sometimes said that every historian subconsciously dreams of personally experiencing the area of his or her study. If that’s true, you know, I’ve got my wish fully.
“I felt like I was living inside these books because it’s astonishing and shocking, and, frankly, very sad how, all these decades later, nothing has changed. Even the minutest details of what a prison cell is like, how the walk is organised, how prison guards speak to you, how the prison transportation works, everything is exactly the same.”
Though it was his knowledge of the system, gained from these Soviet memoirs, that enabled him to navigate the system. “I knew the rules. These Siberian prisons are notorious even by the standards of the Russian system for having rules for everything, every minute of every day, but I also knew that I had the right to these books, to the prison library, so they had to give them to me.”
For Evgenia too, there were models from the past. When her husband heaps praise on “this amazing woman” who helped keep his fate in the mind of western politicians, he compares her to the “Decembrist wives” of the early 19th century who followed their husbands to Siberia. But the shock of his sudden change in circumstances, and of the luck that ran out for Navalny who was intended to be part of the exchange, still hasn’t sunk in.
For his close friend, Bill Browder, the businessman and anti-corruption campaigner who lobbied tirelessly for Kara-Murza’s release, it’s “been such a gift. I was sure he was going to die in custody”. As did Kara-Murza.
“I was convinced I was going to die in prison. Sitting here, with you, a few hundred yards from the Palace of Westminster, it feels completely and utterly surreal. It’s too much. It’s too fast for the human mind to process. I’m sort of watching this film since the end of July. It’s a wonderful film, but it still doesn’t feel real.” He talks about how, as he was taxiing down the runway of Vnukovo airport, the FSB agent sitting next to him told him to look out of the window because it would be the last time he’d see his country. “I just laughed in his face and said, ‘Look man, I’m a historian. I don’t only think, I don’t only believe, I know I will be back home and it’s going to be much quicker than you imagine.’”
Most people he met in the Russian prison system, “the police officers, prison officials, judges, prosecutors, they don’t believe in anything”. Most are not pathological sadists, he says, they were just doing a job. “But the Alpha Group, the FSB special unit that was escorting us, I saw ideological hatred. They believe in this stuff and that’s even scarier.”
Kara-Murza’s grasp of history underpins his certainty that Putin’s regime will collapse – quickly and without warning. “That’s how things happen in Russia. Both the Romanov empire in the early 20th century, and the Soviet regime at the end of the 20th century collapsed in three days. That’s not a metaphor, it was literally three days in both cases.” He believes passionately that the best chance of a free and democratic Russia and peace in Europe rests on Russia’s defeat in Ukraine.
Related: Russian prisoner swap deal was to have included Alexei Navalny
“A lost war of aggression” has been the country’s greatest driver of political change, he says. Though it’s not just the Russian people, in his view, who need to take collective responsibility but western leaders too, who “for all these years were buying gas from Putin, inviting him to international summits, rolling out red carpets”.
He tells me he thinks the truth will out. “These guys keep meticulous records. When the end comes – and it will – the archives will open, we will find out about Trump and Marine Le Pen and your British guys too.”
Sitting in London, the money and reputation-laundering centre of Putin’s empire, he laughs when I mention one of the more notorious figures of British political patronage, Evgeny Lebedev, the proprietor of the Independent and Evening Standard, son of KGB lieutenant colonel Alexander Lebedev.
“Is that the guy who’s Baron of Siberia?” he says. “I should meet him. I guess he represents me?”
Siberia, the land of Soviet-style gulags and British lords and one delighted former political prisoner walking out into the London sunshine with his wife and son, a small flickering light from the heart of Putin’s darkness.
