Vladimir Vladimirovich Kara-Murza

In 2005, Kara-Murza produced a four-part TV documentary, They Chose Freedom, dedicated to the history of the Soviet dissident movement. The documentary was based on interviews with Russian dissidents, including Vladimir Bukovsky, Elena Bonner and Sergei Kovalev. It was first aired in October 2005.[9]

It has since been screened at various locations in Europe and North America, with subtitles added in English.[10][11] On 24 March 2014, Kara-Murza, Anne Applebaum, and Vladimir Bukovsky took part in a discussion following a London screening of the film.[12]

In 2011, Kara-Murza published his first book, Reform or Revolution: The Quest for Responsible Government in the First Russian State Duma (in Russian only), which recounts the unsuccessful attempt by the Cadets or Constitutional Democratic Party to form a government during the brief existence of the first Russian Parliament or Duma from April to July 1906. Based on the original 1906 parliamentary record and contemporary newspaper reports, as well as memoirs by participants of the events, the book was launched in both Moscow and Saint Petersburg.[8]

Since 2010 Kara-Murza has written a weekly blog, "Spotlight on Russia", for World Affairs Journal.[13]

In late 2014 and early 2015, he wrote about a number of anti democratic trends in Russia. President Vladimir Putin, for example, had resumed the Soviet practice of stripping dissidents of their Russian citizenship.[14] As a result of this and other acts, Kara-Murza urged the Council of Europe not to restore Russia's voting rights, suspended since the annexation of Crimea.[15] Kremlin SWAT teams, he wrote in December 2014, were breaking up opposition meetings.[16] Putin's word was therefore "void of value", wrote Kara-Murza, citing as evidence the false statements made by the Russian President and his broken promises.[17]

Putin had soft-pedaled his response to the opposition during the Sochi Olympics, warned Kara-Murza in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal (26 February 2014). Now that the prestigious international event was ended the Russian president was rapidly returning to his former oppressive behaviour. Only hours after the closing ceremony in Sochi a Moscow court handed prison sentences to seven of the May 2012 Bolotnaya Square protestors.

Pressure was brought to bear not only within Russia. Russia's nationwide TV had been broadcasting "hate-filled appeals to crush the protesters in Kiev" for several weeks early in 2014, noted Kara-Murza. For Putin, he explained, "maintaining the status quo in Ukraine was not primarily about preserving a post-Soviet sphere of influence or recreating a Moscow-led empire". The Russian president feared that "a democratic, pro-European Ukraine" would set "a 'dangerous' precedent for Russia" and that it would be "only a matter of time" before Russian citizens began to demand similar levels of political and economic freedom.[18]

Kara-Murza was a candidate for election to the Russian parliament, or State Duma, in the 2003 parliamentary election, running in Moscow's Chertanovsky district. His candidacy was endorsed jointly by the Union of Right Forces and Yabloko.[19] During the campaign, various underhanded methods were used against Kara-Murza. The candidate from the United Russia ruling party Vladimir Gruzdev attempted to have him removed from the ballot; the lighting on Kara-Murza's campaign billboards and the sound during his televised debates were turned off; and unlawful carousel voting was discovered on election day.[20] British journalist Andrew Jack named the Chertanovsky district in south Moscow as a case of electoral manipulation in Russia's 2003 vote in his book Inside Putin's Russia.[21] According to the official results, Gruzdev received 149,069 votes (53.8%); Kara-Murza, 23,800 votes (8.6%); and Communist Party candidate Sergei Seregin, 18,992 votes (6.9%).[22]

In January 2004, he co-founded the Committee 2008, an umbrella opposition group led by Boris Nemtsov and Garry Kasparov. In May 2007, Kara-Murza nominated the veteran human rights activist and writer Vladimir Bukovsky as a democratic opposition candidate for the Russian presidency in the 2008 election. "The opposition needs a candidate for president – strong, uncompromising, decisive, with irreproachable political and, more importantly, moral authority," read the statement written by Kara-Murza on behalf of Bukovsky's campaign committee. "Russia needs its own Vaclav Havel, not a new successor from [the KGB].".[23]

From May to December 2007, Kara-Murza chaired Bukovsky's campaign committee, which included, among others, Academician Yuri Ryzhov, writer and satirist Victor Shenderovich, columnist Andrei Piontkovsky, lawyer Yuri Schmidt,[24] human rights activist Alexander Podrabinek, and political analyst Vladimir Pribylovsky.[23][25] In October 2007, Kara-Murza was one of organisers of the "Rally of Free People" held on Moscow's Triumfalnaya Square in support of Bukovsky's presidential nomination.[26][27]

On 16 December 2007 Bukovsky was duly nominated as a presidential candidate by 823 members of a voters' assembly in Moscow (the law required at least 500 people to support such a nomination). At the same meeting, Kara-Murza was elected as Bukovsky's plenipotentiary representative to Russia's Central Electoral Commission.[28][29] On 22 December 2007 the Commission refusing to register Bukovsky as a candidate for the presidency, thereby denying Bukovsky access to the ballot.[30]

At the founding convention of Solidarnost, Russia's united democratic movement, in December 2008, Kara-Murza was elected to the movement's federal council, placing second out of 77 candidates, behind Nemtsov.[31] He was re-elected to the Solidarnost council in 2010 and 2013.

In 2012, he took part in the street protests in Moscow against Putin's rule, the largest pro-democracy demonstrations in Russia since 1991.[32]

In June 2012, Kara-Murza was elected to the federal council of the Republican Party of Russia – People's Freedom Party, co-chaired by Boris Nemtsov, Mikhail Kasyanov, and Vladimir Ryzhkov.[33] In October 2012, he was elected to the Coordinating Council of the Russian Opposition, placing 21st out of 169 candidates and receiving 20,845 votes.[34]

Soon after, on 1 November 2012, Kara-Murza was hired by the Institute of Modern Russia as the organisation's senior policy advisor. "It is an honor for me to join this distinguished institute and contribute to its mission of keeping the spotlight on the situation in Russia and advocating for democracy, human rights, and the rule of law", said Kara-Murza, "These values should remain at the forefront of international relations."[35] In this capacity he took part in panel discussions about Russia's future at the Heritage Foundation in February 2013[36] and in October 2013, with Pavel Khodorkovsky (son of the former entrepreneur and philanthropist Mikhail Khodorkovsky) and others, in a similar discussion hosted by the National Endowment for Democracy.[37]

Kara-Murza is a coordinator of the Open Russia Foundation, founded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The organisation was created with the goal of promoting civil society and democracy in Russia, while revoking Putin's grip on power. Launched in 2014, Open Russia has been instrumental in educating Russian citizens on western democracy, whilst bringing opposition groups and activists in contact with support from the west. Kara-Murza is deputy chairman and heads Open elections project designed to promote free and fair elections in Russia; a task he has noted is exceedingly difficult given the government's ability to silence opposition and manipulate elections. He also frequently addresses international stages to promote further cooperation and discussion among nations.[1][2][3][38][39][40]

In April 2018, United States Senator John McCain sent Kara-Murza a message revealing that McCain had been diagnosed with brain cancer and requesting that Kara-Murza, who had worked with McCain on issues relating to Russia since 2010, serve as a pallbearer at the senator's eventual funeral. Kara-Murza later said that he was "speechless", "heartbroken", and "close to tears", and that doing so would be "the most heartbreaking honor that anyone could think of". McCain died on 25 August; Kara-Murza joined fourteen others chosen by McCain himself, including former Vice-President Joe Biden and actor Warren Beatty, as a pallbearer at McCain's funeral at the Washington National Cathedral on 1 September. McCain's choice of Kara-Murza was described by Politico as a "final dig" at Putin, of whom McCain was a vocal critic, and at U.S. President Donald Trump, for his apparent closeness to the Russian president.[41][42]

Kara-Murza and Nemtsov called on Canada to pass a similar piece of legislation, then under consideration by the International Human Rights Subcommittee of the Canadian parliament's House of Commons.[44] Writing for Macleans in December 2012, Michael Petrou reported Kara-Murza's visit to Ottawa to urge the passage of the proposed Canadian version of the Magnitsky law, a private member's bill introduced by Liberal MP Irwin Cotler: while it was the task of Russian opposition leaders, not foreigners, "to bring democratic change to Russia," Kara-Murza said, Western democracies could still help the cause of Russian democracy through legislation. Those in Russia who had abused and tormented Magnitsky "rule in the style of Zimbabwe or Belarus," wrote Petrou, paraphrasing Kara-Murza, "but prefer the West as a safe place to store their money, buy second homes, and send their children to school. And it is in the West where they are most vulnerable."[49]

In June 2013, in an interview with France 24 television, Kara-Murza discussed the proposed version of the Magnitsky law then being debated in the European Parliament. He spoke in favour of such laws, and noted that the list of persons covered by the U.S. law was being expanded. He distinguished between those in the European Parliament who were "friends of Russia" and those who were "friends of Putin".[50]

In March 2014, noting that the average Russian opposes intervention in Ukraine by the government of Vladimir Putin, Kara-Murza stated that the world "should respond to Putin's aggression" by imposing sanctions against its perpetrators. He called for the list of Russian human-rights abusers who were already banned, under the Sergei Magnitsky Act, from travelling to the United States and keeping assets there to "be dramatically expanded to include senior Kremlin officials responsible for the attack on Ukraine and the crackdown against Russian citizens." He also expressed the hope that "the European Union would soon follow with its own version of the Magnitsky sanctions." "Those who commit acts of aggression and abuse the rights of their own citizens should not be entitled to the privileges and comfort of the democratic West," he said.[51]

On 26 May 2015, Kara-Murza was suddenly taken ill in Moscow during a meeting.[59] He had eaten lunch at a restaurant and then had a two-hour meeting, during which he consumed nothing and felt normal, before becoming ill over a ten to fifteen minute period, leading to vomiting.[60] At first he was thought to be having heart difficulties, but treatment at a specialised cardiac clinic did nothing to arrest the symptoms. He was then diagnosed with poisoning and taken to the First City Hospital.[1][2][3][39][61]

Coming after the murder of his colleague Boris Nemtsov on 27 February 2015, and mindful of other cases of poisoning, both in Russia (journalist and Duma deputy Yuri Shchekochikhin in 2003, the attempted murder of Anna Politkovskaya in 2004) and abroad (Alexander Litvinenko in October 2006) there was great concern on the part of friends and family.[62] His wife Yevgenia urged that he be evacuated from Russia for examination and treatment abroad.[7] On 2 June, it was announced by a spokesman for the Republican Party of Russia – People's Freedom Party that Kara-Murza had emerged from his coma and recognised his wife, who was now by his bedside.[63] The cause of his sudden illness remained a mystery, but in an interview with the BBC his father commented, "if someone did want to frighten us, then they succeeded."[64]

After his release from the hospital, Kara-Murza stated that it was difficult to "believe this was an accident", suspecting it was an intentional poisoning, but noted there was no way to be certain.[65] On 15 August 2015 Mikhail Khodorkovsky commented with delight that Kara-Murza had returned to work co-ordinating the Open Elections project.[66] Kara-Murza is working to provide free and fair elections for the Duma.[65]

On 2 February 2017, Kara-Murza was again hospitalised after the onset of the same symptoms as his prior illness. He was put in a medically-induced coma and was on life support.[67] He was treated at the same hospital by the same medical team who had already saved his life in 2015.[68] According to his lawyer Vadim Prokhorov, Kara-Murza was diagnosed by the hospital with 'toxic influence of an unknown substance'.[69] He was released on 19 February and has gone abroad for rehabilitation. His lawyer sent the Russian Investigative Committee a request to open a criminal case into the alleged poisoning. A similar request after the 2015 incident had been turned down without an explanation.[70][71] His blood samples were provided to a number of laboratories including one affiliated to the FBI. But for unclear reasons, the FBI subsequently have not revealed details of their investigations into the substance that triggered Kara-Murza's illness, with one US Senator suggesting that it might be "classified".[72]