Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was released in a prisoner swap in August, said millions of Russians oppose Vladimir Putin and his war in Ukraine, and that the establishment of democracy in Russia is the only way to secure peace and stability for Europe and the world.
Citing letters he received in jail from ordinary Russians who queued to sign nomination papers for anti-war presidential candidate Boris Nadezhdin, Kara-Murza said the groundswell of opposition to Putin’s re-election showed the fragility of the regime.
“Suddenly, everyone saw through the lie peddled by Putin’s propaganda, the lie that all Russians backed his regime, that all Russians supported his war,” he told a September 27 awards dinner in Washington hosted by the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA.) “I will never forget the letter that one young woman wrote to me from the southern Black Sea town of Novorossiysk, after describing how she waited in that long line of like-minded people, mostly young people, to sign the nomination petitions for the anti-war candidate. She ended that letter by saying, ‘I never realized how many of us there are.’”
Thousands have been arrested for opposing the war, and many are still being held in the gulags of Putin’s regime, Kara-Murza said in Washington after receiving a Freedom Fighter award.
He argued opposition to the regime is the true face of a country where protest is criminalized so people are afraid to speak out. It is the Russia Putin doesn’t want the world to see, he said.
“This is my Russia, the Russia I love, the Russia I call home. Not the Russia of Vladimir Putin, but the Russia of Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny,” he said. “Not the Russia of murderers and war criminals who are sitting in the Kremlin but the Russia of decent and good-hearted people who oppose them.”
Kara-Murza, who has been poisoned twice (probably by the Putin regime) and was convinced he would die in prison, said his release showed the powerful effect of campaigners across the world working tirelessly in the name of freedom. It also demonstrated the importance of working for the release of Russians as well as Westerners held in the Kremlin’s jails, he said.
“Last month’s prisoner exchange that saved 16 lives from the hell that is Vladimir Putin’s modern-day gulag has shown once again that public opinion matters and that sustained efforts by good people in democratic nations are, in the end, stronger than any dictatorship can ever hope to be,” he said. “And the most powerful message sent by the world’s democracies in this exchange was to insist that it included not only Western hostages held by Putin, but also Russian political prisoners.”
Kara-Murza, a dual British-Russian citizen who studied history at Cambridge University, has said evidence from the past suggests Putin’s regime will not last, and will collapse quickly like the Romanov empire and the Soviet Union before it.
“Russia is not limited by the walls of the Kremlin,” he said. “The best promise of long-term security, stability and democracy on our continent, the best promise for a Europe that would finally be whole, free and at peace, will be a democratic Russia. I believe in this promise with all my heart.”
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
