Released From a Russian Prison, This Activist Got Right to Work

Vladimir Kara-Murza, a vehement critic of President Vladimir V. Putin, didn’t want to be part of a prisoner exchange. But he says more exchanges are needed.

For much of the last two years, Vladimir Kara-Murza barely used his voice. A political activist and vehement critic of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, he was confined to a harsh isolation cell in a Siberian penal colony.

Now, he is using his voice as often as possible.

Since being traded to the West in August in the biggest prisoner exchange since the Cold War, Mr. Kara-Murza, 43, has been lobbying Western leaders to take stronger action against Mr. Putin. At the same time, he is trying to give opposition-minded Russians at home and abroad reasons for hope.

Mr. Kara-Murza said the need for more prisoner swaps had been among his main arguments to world leaders, including President Biden, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany and President Emmanuel Macron of France.

“While people are listening, I feel a responsibility to speak because I feel a responsibility toward all the others who are still left back there,” he said, referring to the hundreds of political prisoners in Russia. “We need to have more of these exchanges.”

He has promoted this cause even though he has maintained that he was released from Russia against his will.

“It has always been a question of principle that a Russian politician has to stay in Russia,” he said. “Because what moral right do I have to call on my fellow Russian citizens to stand up and resist the dictatorship if I wasn’t prepared to do it myself?”

Many of the others who were released have spent some time decompressing and getting used to their freedom. Mr. Kara-Murza immediately got to work.

“The hardest part was that there was no re-acclimating, because I went from solitary confinement in a strict regime prison in Siberia to traveling around to four or five different countries every week,” Mr. Kara-Murza said in a video interview from his study in the Washington area.

In his calmer moments, he still wonders if it has all been a dream.

“Frankly, it still feels completely surreal,” he added. “It feels like I’m watching some kind of a film. It’s a really good one, but it still does not feel real.”

“I still get this feeling sometimes that, you know, at 5 a.m. tomorrow, I’m going to wake up from the Soviet national anthem blasting on my radio,” he said. “I have to attach my bunk bed to the wall, and then we start again.”

He was referring to a practice in the punishment cells he was held in: From 5 a.m. until 9 p.m., the beds must be folded against the wall, forcing the prisoner either to sit on the floor or stand the entire time.

Finally, this holiday season, he will get to take his first vacation — at the beach — with his family in three years.

Like Aleksei A. Navalny, the prominent activist who died in prison last February, Mr. Kara-Murza is believed to have been poisoned twice, once in 2015 and again in 2017. The F.B.I., at the behest of Congressional lawmakers, investigated his resulting illness as a case of “intentional poisoning” but blood tests by an American weapons research laboratory and hundreds of pages of F.B.I. files were not released to him.

His supporters say it was punishment for his active lobbying in the West for sanctions against Kremlin-connected elites.

Mr. Kara-Murza suffers from polyneuropathy, a nerve condition that affects his ability to feel his extremities. It is believed to be a side effect of the poisoning.

While he was incarcerated, Mr. Kara-Murza lost 55 pounds. Eventually his feet and ankles were so swollen from his condition that he could not put on his boots. Before falling asleep each night, he said, he would lie on his bed with his legs lifted up, to let the blood flow back toward his core.

“Human beings get used to anything,” he said. “So in any conditions, you sort of find things that you can do to make things a little better.”

Although such frailty would be grounds to release many convicts, he refused to let his lawyers make the state of his health public.

“My point was that I should be released because I’m innocent, not because I have a health problem,” he said.

He spent at least 315 days in solitary confinement, in contravention of Russia’s own rules. According to the United Nations, more than 15 consecutive days in solitary confinement is considered torture. The only other opposition politician subjected to such an intense regime of solitary confinement was Mr. Navalny, an inspirational leader to the Russian opposition and a fierce critic of Mr. Putin.

Mr. Kara-Murza, who speaks fluent English, comes from a long line of Kremlin opponents. One of his great-grandfathers was a Latvian social democrat and revolutionary executed as an “enemy of the people” in 1938, at the height of Stalin’s “Great Terror.” His grandfather, a journalist and historian, was arrested in 1937, and forced to do hard labor in the Russian Far East.

Mr. Kara-Murza’s father, Vladimir, became an independent journalist as democracy was starting to emerge in Russia in the 1990s, and the son followed in his footsteps, starting his journalism career when he was 16. In 1999, while still a teenager, he interviewed the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, and he soon got involved in politics as Mr. Nemtsov’s aide.

It was the same year that another man sharing his name and patronymic, Vladimir Vladimirovich — Mr. Putin — rose to lead Russia.

As a young adult, Mr. Kara-Murza remained active in both journalism and politics in Russia, working alongside Mr. Nemtsov and producing a documentary series about the Soviet dissident movement. His extensive studies of those who defied the Kremlin during the Soviet era helped sustain him while he was in prison, he said.

“It was just absolutely mind boggling how everything is exactly the same,” he said. “I mean, down to the last details, down to the way the cell is organized, the way you’re taken to the courtyard for the prison walk, the way prison guards speak to you.”

Rereading Gulag memoirs in his cell was a source of solace, he said. “My education as a historian perhaps never came as useful to me as it did when I was in prison,” he said. “Because I know that we’ve had all this in Russia before, and we know that it ended, and we know how it ended."

“And this one’s not any different,” he added, referring to the Putin era.

Out of prison, Mr. Kara-Murza knows he cannot feel 100 percent secure.

On Aug. 1, as he was about to be freed, one of the Russian security service agents escorting the prisoners told him and Ilya Yashin, another activist who was released, that they should not allow themselves to feel safe in the West.

“He told us, ‘Remember, Krasikov can come for you any time,’” Mr. Kara-Murza said. It was a reference to Vadim Krasikov, the assassin who killed a Kremlin opponent in Berlin and was sent back to Russia as part of the same exchange.

“I just try not to think about it because — first of all, because I know that what I’m doing is right,” he said.

Mr. Kara-Murza became well known in Washington because of his lobbying for the so-called Magnitsky sanctions against human rights abusers in Russia. He grew so close to Senator John McCain, a champion of those sanctions, that he was a pallbearer at his funeral.

Since 2017, Mr. Kara-Murza has been a regular columnist for the Washington Post, and this year he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary for columns written while he was in prison.

Mr. Kara-Murza hopes opposition leaders can find common cause with the incoming Trump administration. He praised Senator Marcio Rubio of Florida, whom President-elect Donald J. Trump has nominated to be his secretary of state, for advocating for political prisoners in Russia, Belarus and other repressive countries.

He said his top priority is holding the Kremlin elite accountable for the atrocities they committed inside and outside of Russia, but he has steadfastly rejected the assertion, common in Ukraine and elsewhere, that all Russians bear responsibility for Mr. Putin and his aggression.

“We were protesting Putin from the beginning, from the year 2000, while Western leaders on both sides of the Atlantic were looking into his eyes and seeing his soul, pushing reset buttons with him, rolling out red carpets, inviting him for summits, buying oil and gas and so on,” he said.

“So if people want to talk about collective responsibility in Russia,” he said, “let’s not forget about the collective responsibility of Western leaders who were aiding and abetting and enabling and appeasing Putin throughout his first many years in power.”