Putin critic who survived gulag reveals one memory that keeps playing in his head

Sitting in the lobby of a central London hotel, Vladimir Kara-Murza is in a valiant mood.

It’s been six months since he was released from the IK-6 colony in Omsk, Siberia, a maximum security prison roughly 2,800 miles away.

The 43-year-old was locked up for two-and-a-half years, where he was, according to Amnesty International, ‘repeatedly subjected to arbitrary disciplinary punishments and other ill-treatment, including multiple placements in SHIZO (penalty isolation cell).’

His sentence came after he spoke out against the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Kara-Murzawas freed last August in the biggest exchange of prisoners since the Cold War. He is one of the surviving faces of Russia’s beleaguered opposition.

The father-of-three, who is also a British citizen, sat down with Metro for an exclusive interview about how his life has changed in the months since his release from the gulag where he thought he would die.

He said he is now working with Donald Trump’s administration to secure the release of Ukrainian prisoners of war, civilian captives and Russian political prisoners as part of a rumoured ceasefire to end Vladimir Putin’s three-year bloodshed.

From the day he was freed, Kara-Murza has continued to campaign for much harsher sanctions against the Kremlin. So, his days are now spent ‘on the go’ rather than in almost 24-hour confinement.

As time passes, the dissident remembers ‘less and less’ from all the savagery he experienced in the Russian gulag, but there is one memory that keeps playing over and over in his head.

‘The way the human mind works, it tries to get rid of the trauma because it cannot live with it,’ he told Metro.

‘As the days and weeks and months go on, I remember less and less, but there is one thing I will never be able to forget.

‘One of the things that authorities do to punish political opponents – this is something that has been done since Soviet times – is seek to inflict harm on their loved ones, they seek to punish the families too, as much as they can.

‘Among all the other measures I faced in prison, I was not allowed to call my wife and my children. In the whole two-and-a-half years that I spent in prison, I was once able speak on phone with my wife once and twice with my children.

‘The last time was just before Christmas in 2023 when I was given a single 15-minute call. I have three children. So, my wife had to literally stand on the other side with a stopwatch to see that each child is not getting more than five minutes.

‘She would have to physically take away the phone and pass it to the next child. This is torture to the families as well as to the prisoners.’

Before being convicted of treason and imprisoned in April 2022, Kara-Murza’s wife and children had already suffered the wrath of Putin during two near-fatal attempts to poison him in May 2015 and February 2017.

His family watched him slip into prolonged comas after the incidents that left him with a serious nerve disorder called polyneuropathy, which can be fatal.

Many of his compatriots in the fight against Putin’s authoritarian regime did not survive. Opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, Kara-Murza’s mentor and godfather to his youngest daughter, was the first to be killed. He was shot dead as he walked across Bolshoi Moskvorestky Bridge, just metres from the Kremlin, back in 2015.

Anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, who was for a long time the most prominent face of Russian opposition, was also assassinated almost a year to the day.

Evgenia, Vladimir’s wife, told Metro a year before her husband was exchanged, that she feared about his life in jail where his physical and mental health were declining.

Conditions vary greatly between colonies and even between cells within the same prison.

‘What you do all day is walk around in this tiny cubicle-size 2×3 metres cell in a small circle,’ he recalled of his days in confinement.

‘You have nowhere to go, nothing to do and no one to speak to. That is the most difficult part. It was Aristotle who wrote that we, human beings, are social. We need interaction as much as water and oxygen.

‘And when a human being is totally deprived of communication, when they cannot as much as say “hello” to anybody for days and weeks on end, they go crazy. I do not mean that in a metaphorical sense, but in a literal sense.

‘You start forgetting words and names, you start shouting at walls. Political prisoners by definition are considered by the regime to be particularly dangerous. We are not allowed to speak with the rest of the prisoners, so we are all held in isolation.’

To occupy his brain – while watching his life being ‘washed away’ – Vladimir started to learn Spanish. He had a list of languages he wished to master if he had to serve the rest of his 25-year sentence.

What really ‘saved him’ was his Christian faith, knowing that he was on the right side of history, and letters.

The dissident received thousands of letters every month from people all over Russia, proving that not all his fellow citizens support Putin’s war in Ukraine.

They were from people he had never met and from cities and towns he had never been to.

‘They took time to write to me in prison and say that they feel the same way as I do about this war,’ Kara-Murza said.

‘The letters were a very big help. Every time I have spoken to a Western audience in these last six months and people ask “What can I do to help? I am not a member of parliament, not a journalist, I am just a regular citizen. What can I do to help?”

‘I always say one thing, please write to political prisoners. It makes the life of a difference between someone keeping their sanity and surviving.

‘Only somebody who has been in a situation like I have can appreciate how much light and how much hope and how much warmth can be in a small sheet of paper that the prison guard hands you through the feeding slot in the door at 4pm every day.’

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