Evgenia Kara-Murza is the project manager of the Free Russia Foundation and wife of detained Russian opposition leader Vladimir Kara-Murza. This article is based on remarks made at an event at the National Endowment for Democracy on April 28.
My husband is in a Russian jail for speaking the truth
Within days, the authorities leveled new and more serious charges against my husband. His alleged crime? Criticizing Putin’s bloody invasion of Ukraine. The regime, which is trying to conceal the reality of its actions from the Russian people, has issued a law targeting anyone who dares to refer to this war as a war. Yet Vladimir has shown again and again during his years of fighting the Putin regime that he has never been afraid to speak the truth — no matter the consequences.
In May 2015, Vladimir fell ill after a lunch meeting in Moscow. He began vomiting violently and was soon diagnosed with a multiple-organ failure. It didn’t take us long to figure out that he had been poisoned — though doctors were never able to determine the precise nature of the toxin. After three weeks in an intensive care unit and another three in the neurology department of Moscow’s First City Hospital, Vladimir was transported to the United States for rehabilitation.
Yet a few months later, leaning on his cane, having relearned how to walk and hold a spoon, he returned to Russia. When I think of courage, this is what comes to mind. I saw it again when he decided to return to Russia after his second poisoning in 2017 — and again in February, when he returned after the outbreak of the war.
The reason in each case was simple: He believes that, as a Russian politician, he needs to be where people are fighting this regime. He believes that he must assume the same risks, and face the same challenges, confronted by Russians at home. He believes in his country and his people. He is a patriot — one who believes that the Russian people deserve to be free, and that patriotism should not be ceded to the Neanderthal nationalists and their thugs.
He went back after the invasion began because he wanted to show that the Russian people do not support this war. In one of his recent articles, he cited the example of Natalia Gorbanevskaya, one of the Soviet-era dissidents who demonstrated in Red Square against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968: “A nation minus me is not an entire nation. A nation minus ten, a hundred, a thousand people is not an entire nation. So [the authorities] could no longer say that there was nationwide approval for the invasion …”
Now, since the beginning of the war, there have been more than 15,000 arrests of people opposing the war in Ukraine all across Russia — despite the opinion polls showing that more than 80 percent of Russians supposedly approve of the invasion. One young man was arrested for making a silent protest with a copy of Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” A young woman was detained for holding up a blank sheet of paper. A St. Petersburg artist is facing up to 15 years in prison for switching price tags at a local supermarket with antiwar messages. These people make their protests knowing full well that they will get arrested, they will get beaten up, thrown in jail, tortured, humiliated.
Vladimir knows the risks, but he knew that he needed to be there with these people. He wants to remind us of a simple fact: You cannot trust opinion polls conducted in a totalitarian state where there is no free speech, where there is no free independent media, no access to independent, objective information. The many Russians who rely on television as their main source of information have not had access to objective information for years. They have become thoroughly brainwashed.
They hear the exact same message on every channel: The West wants Russia’s demise, wants to see Russia on its knees. Russians hear this message on state-controlled channels over and over, and there are no alternate messages available. Putin knew what he was doing. His propaganda machine has been working tirelessly over two decades to create this warped image of reality for the Russians. We are now seeing the effects of this decades-long propaganda.
Vladimir wanted to be where people are fighting this evil regime. He wanted to show that you should not be afraid. Never be afraid, because fear is what makes us back down. Fear is what makes us keep silent in the face of something monstrous. When you keep quiet in the face of something monstrous, you become complicit. Vladimir could never do that.
Source: WP
