When a Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza was sent to prison for speaking out against the Kremlin, it is worth noting that he continued to criticize Vladimir Putin behind bars, even to the point of winning a Pulitzer Prize for his essays. What’s even more remarkable is that the Russians let him correspond with the outside world.
“I was already in there. I mean, that was the goal,” Kara-Murza told correspondent Scott Pelley in an interview for 60 Minutes. “I was in solitary confinement in a strict regime prison in Siberia and serving a 25-year prison sentence. What else could they have done to me?”
Kara-Murza was released from prison in August as part of the prisoner exchange with Russia this was negotiated by the Biden administration and its allies. He had been arrested in April 2022 for publicly criticizing Russia’s war in Ukraine and held in solitary confinement in Siberia since his conviction a year later.
Long a critic of Putin, Kara-Murza twice survived poisoning by suspected Kremlin agents.
Before his arrest, Kara-Murza had written articles for the Washington Post, and he continued to write them throughout his time in the Russian prison system. His prison essays included headlines such as “Russians live in a frightening, distorted reality” and “Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine is a travesty of the law.”
Although his public criticism of Putin and the war in Ukraine earned him a treason conviction, Kara-Murza said writing behind bars has long been a tradition for Russian political prisoners.
“Many of them wrote some of their most significant works while they were in prison,” he said.
He explained to Pelley how he managed to get his writing done. It all started, he says, with an email system, through which friends and family would write to him. The guards would then print out these correspondences, along with a few sheets of blank paper for a written response.
Kara-Murza said that his wife, Evgenia, wrote to him frequently and enclosed the maximum allowed number of blank sheets, which he used to write his chronicles by hand. He would return his writings to prison officials, who then sent them through the censorship system before they were returned electronically to Evgenia.
Kara-Murza said very little was censored. He noted that, at times, he would preemptively edit his own words in order to get past the censorship system, knowing that his wife would understand what he really meant.
“She knew exactly what I was saying,” Kara-Murza said. “And so she would just replace a word to make it one that I actually intended to write but couldn’t write because of prison censorship. And every time, she was exactly right. “
Kara-Murza received a Pulitzer Prize in May for the “passionate chronicles” he wrote “at great personal risk” and which included landmarks such as “PREAD DETENTION CENTER No. 5” and “PRISON COLONY No. 6.” “
Whether awaiting his fate in a Moscow cell or being held in solitary confinement in Siberia, Kara-Murza told us that no one in the Russian prison system ever stopped him from writing.
“I think that for the regime and the Kremlin, the most important thing is to punish their opponents, to punish them physically, to isolate them from their families, not to allow them to talk to their children, to send them back to Siberia, to keep them locked up, that’s what they did to us,” Kara-Murza said. “What we wrote in our letters, I don’t think they care much.”
The video above was produced by Brit McCandless Farmer and edited by Scott Rosann.
