Who is Vladimir Kara-Murza, the Russian Jewish dissident released with Evan Gershkovich?
Russian opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza sits on a bench inside a defendants’ cage during a hearing at the Basmanny court in Moscow on Oct. 10, 2022. Photo by Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP via Getty Images
By Benyamin Cohen August 1, 2024
As part of a multicountry prisoner swap, Russia has released Evan Gershkovich, the jailed Jewish Wall Street Journal journalist, along with others being held, including Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian Jewish dissident. While much has been written about Gershkovich since he was arrested in March 2023, Kara-Murza is less well-known.
Who is Vladimir Kara-Murza?
Kara-Murza, 42, is a Russian-British activist, filmmaker, journalist, politician and a harsh critic of the Kremlin. He is the vice-chairman of Open Russia, a nonprofit that promotes civil society and democracy in Russia. On his father’s side, he is a descendant of an aristocratic family who converted to Christianity after settling in Moscow in the 15th century. He is Jewish on his mother’s side.
Why did Russia arrest him?
Kara-Murza has spent his career railing against Russian President Vladimir Putin. It has cost him: He was poisoned and hospitalized in 2015 and again in 2017. In 2022, he accused Russia of committing war crimes in Ukraine and urged the U.S. to impose sanctions against Russia during a speech he gave to the Arizona state legislature. He was arrested in April 2022 and was later charged with treason.
How long was he sentenced to prison?
In April 2023, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison. One of the items Kara-Murza has been allowed to keep in prison is a copy of Fear No Evil, the 1988 memoir by Natan Sharansky about his time in the gulag as a Soviet Jewish dissident. Sharansky went on to become a politician in Israel.
Kara-Murza became a cause célèbre
In October 2022, Kara-Murza was awarded the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize. And in 2024, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, for the columns he wrote from his prison cell.
Little-known fact: He was a pallbearer at Sen. John McCain’s funeral
Kara-Murza, who has a home in the U.S., worked with former Sen. John McCain on Russia-related issues for years, and they remained friends. Before his death in 2018, McCain requested that Kara-Murza be a pallbearer. It was “the most heartbreaking honor that anyone could think of,” Kara-Murza said. Politico described the choice as McCain’s “final dig at Putin.” Other pallbearers included then-former Vice President Joe Biden and actor Warren Beatty.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
