The Woman Fighting Russia’s Carceral State

Updated at 11:50 a.m. ET on January 22, 2024

Evgenia Kara-Murza walked past the United States Capitol, her heels clicking quickly on the pavement as she hurried to get to her next meeting on time. It was a late-October afternoon in Washington, a day marked by the slow legislative lurch from one crisis to the next. Evgenia had just testified before the U.S. Helsinki Commission, a bipartisan congressional committee, about an unending crisis of her own: Her husband, Vladimir Kara-Murza, a personal enemy of the Kremlin, is among the most prominent inmates in Russia’s penal system. A liberal Russian opposition politician and journalist, Vladimir has been incarcerated for the past year and nine months, held for allegedly disobeying police orders, spreading disinformation, and committing treason against the Russian state.

“My husband is a politician. He is brilliant, you know, at all this,” she told me, gesturing to the congressional buildings behind her. “I never wanted any of this.”

Evgenia lives in the suburbs of Virginia with her parents and her three children, who are 12, 14, and 17 years old. (She and the children are U.S. citizens; Vladimir is a U.S. permanent resident who holds dual citizenship from Russia and the United Kingdom.) The couple first moved to the Washington, D.C., area in 2004, when Vladimir was offered a job as the head of the Washington bureau of RTVI, a privately owned Russian news broadcaster. The year prior, he had staged a run for the Russian State Duma, but lost to a politician from the ruling United Russia party. “It was the last free election in Russia—free but not fair,” Evgenia said.

“The situation in Russia was getting worse by the day, and for Vladimir to continue his work as he saw fit, we thought it would be better if the family was in a safe place.” So Evgenia, a professional translator and interpreter, shipped boxes of dictionaries across the Atlantic and continued her work in the U.S., where she and Vladimir’s three children were born. The family settled into a quiet domestic life. “I stayed with the kids, working from home, doing my translating,” Evgenia said.

Her husband remained a public figure, and traveled back to Russia frequently as part of his work for the political opposition. He was an architect of the U.S. Magnitsky Act, which in 2012 authorized the imposition of sanctions against Russian human-rights offenders, and a protégé of the liberal Russian politician Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated in 2015. In 2018 he served as a pallbearer at Senator John McCain’s funeral. Vladimir devoted his life to working for a free, liberalized Russian society even as he watched Putin institute more and more repressive measures and flout democratic norms at every turn. He survived two FSB poisoning attempts; after each he resumed his travel between Washington and Moscow. Then, in April 2022, he was arrested in Moscow not long after he’d said on CNN that Russia was being ruled by “a regime of murderers”; a year later, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison. (In March, the U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned a Russian judge, an expert witness, and an investigator all involved in the case against Vladimir for human-rights abuses under 2016’s Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, which Vladimir had also helped create.)

When people speak of a Russia after Putin, they often suggest that the opposition leader Alexei Navalny could be the president, and Vladimir Kara-Murza the foreign minister. For now, both men are incarcerated. In July, Navalny called Kara-Murza as a defense witness at his trial inside the penal colony where Navalny was being held. “Only in a Russian court can an extremist call a traitor as his defense witness,” Navalny told him when he appeared via video link.

“There’ve been stranger things,” Kara-Murza replied.

In early September, Kara-Murza was abruptly transferred from a pretrial detention center in Moscow. When I spoke with Evgenia that month, she did not know where he had been taken, what his condition was, or whether he was still alive.

By the time Evgenia testified before the Helsinki Commission, Vladimir’s lawyers had been able to locate him in the Omsk IK-6 prison, a maximum-security penal colony in Siberia. The prison emptied out the entire cellblock of other inmates when officials moved Vladimir in, but even so he is confined to a “punishment cell,” a solitary chamber measuring approximately 10 feet by five feet, where his bed is affixed to the wall between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. During the day, he is provided with a backless metal chair and one book. If he closes his eyes during waking hours, a voice yells at him over a loudspeaker. “It’s torture,” Evgenia told me. “They watch him 24/7.”

Vladimir’s communication with the outside world is also extremely limited. He is allowed to read and write letters for 90 minutes every day; after that time is up, his pen, papers, and photographs of his family are taken away. “Under Russian law, people cannot be kept in punishment cells for more than 15 days,” Evgenia said. “He has been there since September 21, since the day he arrived in the prison colony.”

The longer Vladimir remains in jail, the more urgent Evgenia’s advocacy becomes. Over the past year, she has traveled to Germany, Belgium, Austria, France, the Czech Republic, Canada, and England to speak with diplomats about her husband’s case and to call attention to the conditions of political prisoners in Russia and around the world. She recounts her own sorrow, and the sorrow of her nation, to anyone who will listen. It is exhausting and draining work, but to stop would be to abandon the cause, so she keeps going, giving speeches, shaking hands, and accepting awards on Vladimir’s behalf—these have started to pile up, still in their boxes, in her home office. “I wish I could trade them all in,” she said, “and get him back.”

The Russian government has jailed virtually every individual who has dared to speak out against its repressive political system in recent years. It has effectively become a carceral state, in which hundreds of Russians and an untold number of Ukrainians, including thousands of children, have been taken hostage by the Kremlin, their whereabouts, in many cases, unknown. Vadim Prokhorov, Vladimir’s longtime lawyer, told me that one of his colleagues in Russia found 50 Ukrainians in jail while visiting another client. “After her visit, 40 of the 50 hostages were released, because there were no legal grounds for them to be detained,” he said. “This is a matter of life and death for Ukrainian prisoners.” (He did not share the name of the Russian lawyer to protect her safety.)

Read: The children Russia kidnapped

Last month, Navalny himself went missing for 20 days while he was being transferred from one high-security prison to another. His lawyers were able to find and meet with him on December 26 at the Arctic penal colony where he is now jailed. Two days after he was located, a court proceeding in one of his ongoing cases nevertheless convened without him. The judge in the suit, Irina Kim, claimed, nonsensically, that Navalny was not participating in the hearing because his whereabouts were unknown. “The whole world knows where Alexei Navalny is, but Judge Kim—no,” Evgenia wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “Poor Judge Kim.”

Evgenia makes a point of mentioning a few of the unjustly detained by name in each of her public talks. She began her Helsinki Commission testimony by speaking in her calm and quiet voice about 16-year-old Nikita Uvarov, who was sentenced to five years in prison for blowing up a virtual FSB building while playing the video game Minecraft. Evgenia reminded the committee that, since February 2022, some 20,000 individuals have been unlawfully arrested in Russia, at least 565 of whom are minors. Among those detained are 18-year-old Ilya Podkamenoy, who faces a life sentence for allegedly vandalizing a railway, and 22-year-old Ibrahim Orujov, who could receive a 15-year sentence for taking a photograph of a Moscow military-enlistment office’s operating hours. A 64-year-old activist named Igor Baryshnikov has been sentenced to seven years and six months for Facebook posts about Russian crimes in Ukraine, and Ksenia Fadeeva, a former elected official and Navalny staffer, was sentenced to nine years in prison for her activism (several Navalny associates have been jailed, while others have fled the country). The opposition politician Ilya Yashin, 40, was sentenced to eight and a half years for speaking out about the massacre in Bucha, Ukraine; 33-year-old Sasha Skochilenko was sentenced to seven years in a penal colony for posting anti-war messages on food labels in a supermarket.

Evgenia knows that the simple act of speaking about the detainees can be enough, in the Russian penal system, to get them some small comfort in their cells.

“Sometimes they get medical treatment, sometimes a phone call with their families; sometimes the torture stops,” she told me. “I cannot just talk about [Vladimir] when I know that our friends and colleagues are behind bars.”

When she was done briefing Congress, Evgenia gamely lingered for photographs, posing alongside relatives of Israelis taken hostage by Hamas on October 7, who had sat behind her as she spoke. Wherever she goes, she is welcomed as a member of the unhappy coalition of next of kin to those who have been unjustly seized from their family and put at the mercy of a hostile power, forcing their relatives to petition their governments for assistance.

As Vladimir’s imprisonment has dragged on, and his physical conditions have worsened, Evgenia has directed her efforts toward trying to persuade Western officials to more forcefully counteract what she views as a new and dangerous period of hostage-taking around the world. Autocrats like Putin have seen that hostages can be effective tools not only to get what they want from other nations, she argues, but also to shut down internal dissent. So far, the U.S. and its allies have taken a reactive posture in response to Russia’s embrace of this tactic, she says. “They should not just be controlling the damage,” she told me. “It has to be proactive. I would like to see democracies come together to come up with tools to deter this from happening in the first place.” Western governments could apply stronger sanctions to Russia, she says, and more nations might officially recognize it as a terrorist regime.

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At the same time, Evgenia wants people to understand that “Russia” cannot be reduced to the evil that the Kremlin has come to embody; she always reminds her audience that the nation is made up of more than 140 million people scattered across 11 time zones, many of whom have dared to protest against the regime and have been locked up and tortured for their small acts of resistance. Russia, Evgenia likes to say, is also home to people like Sasha Skochilenko, “an artist, a pacifist, everything that Putin hates … This young, beautiful girl who is not afraid of all these absolute monsters, smiling in her prison cage—she is also Russia.”

Born in the Russian far east, on the Kuril Islands, northeast of Japan, Evgenia aspired to be a translator, and imagined herself living in Moscow and traveling to French-speaking countries. She and Vladimir had known each other as children, but fell in love when they reconnected in Moscow in their 20s. She has always supported his advocacy, despite the risks it carries. “I am committed to him, and he is committed to his thing. I married the package,” she told me. When Vladimir was poisoned in 2015, and again in 2017, Evgenia flew to Moscow to collect her husband and escort him back to the U.S. to recover. Both poisonings led to multiple organ failures and temporary comas.

“After the second poisoning, he couldn’t walk; he was talking gibberish,” Evgenia recalled. She kept a trash bin next to him, in case he had to throw up. “I had to hold it all together, to make sure the family survives this somehow.”

Her close friend and colleague Natalia Arno, president of the Free Russia Foundation and a fellow Russian exile, met the Kara-Murzas at the airport when they returned to the U.S. after the second poisoning. As a result of the poisonings, Vladimir developed polyneuropathy, a chronic nerve disorder. “She was working very hard to help him regain his senses,” Arno told me. “She was his therapist; she was his everything.”

After he had recovered from the most acute effects of the poisoning, he got back to work. In early April 2022, Vladimir returned to Moscow. When I asked Evgenia how the two of them had discussed his decision to go back to Russia, she said that there had been no negotiation. Telling her husband not to do so would have been akin to telling him that he had to give up who he was. She was not interested in that. “I would have walked away, if he became someone different,” she said. “That would not have worked.”

The last time they saw each other was just before his arrest, in Paris, where they had arranged to spend a few days together. They parted in their usual way, hoping that this trip would be like all the others, but also knowing that for Vladimir to simply step foot inside Russian territory meant playing roulette with his life once more. They flew out on the same day, Evgenia heading to the children in Washington, and Vladimir to his work in Moscow.

“We didn’t expect him to be arrested, but we thought he might be killed,” she told me. “He had already survived two assassination attempts.”

Although Vladimir’s official sentence is 25 years in prison, Prokhorov, his lawyer, told me that “in fact, it’s a life sentence—and in his case, it’s also a death sentence, because of his health. He has a condition that’s very difficult to treat even if he was free.” (Russian law technically prohibits the incarceration of people with polyneuropathy.)

This summer, Vladimir was told he would be given six phone calls with his family; Evgenia and her children waited by the phone on the selected days. “In the beginning, he was banned from talking to me; he could just talk to the kids,” Evgenia said. “Because I think I am just as much of a traitor to them as he is.” The children were given five minutes each to speak with him, and practiced what they wanted to say to their father in advance. On the second call, when the kids were done speaking with Vladimir, her daughter Sonya brought her mother the phone. “I said, ‘No, I can’t talk to him, we’ll get disconnected,’ but she said, ‘Mom, we’re done. Just tell him that you love him.’ So I took the phone, and they didn’t disconnect me. We got to talk. That was the first time I had heard his voice since April 2022. But when they realized he was talking to me, he was punished for that.” He was not allowed any more phone calls for at least a month.

Even while jailed in Moscow, Vladimir still managed to write op-eds for The Washington Post. “We had a tricky way of getting them out,” Evgenia told me. She would type up the handwritten drafts and share them with Vladimir’s longtime editor, Christian Caryl, who prepared them for publication. (“I know that it’s really hard on her,” Caryl told me. “And she can’t admit that it’s hard on her, because what he is going through is immeasurably harder.”)

Now that Vladimir is under a high-security regime in Omsk, the public writing has almost completely stopped. Evgenia is not willing to create additional risks for his lawyers, whose access to him is already precarious—and dangerous for them. In April, Prokhorov was forced to flee Russia after being threatened with his own arrest, and several of Navalny’s lawyers have been imprisoned. On New Year’s Eve, however, Vladimir was able to send a short letter addressing his supporters, wishing them well for 2024, and reminding them that, “in Russia, change begins when you least expect it.” (He had prewritten the message, which came through the prison’s automated delivery system, in advance of the censors’ holiday break.)

These days, Evgenia marks holidays by Vladimir’s absences: He has missed two Thanksgivings, and almost two years of birthdays. Letters sent through a prison messaging system are the only way that she and her children can communicate with him, knowing that whatever they say will have to clear the censors before it is passed on. Just before Thanksgiving, Evgenia showed me an image of the most recent letter from Vladimir, dated November 19. He wrote that he had been allowed to keep a second book in his cell and was making his way through Dostoyevsky’s Dead House to pass the time. He sent his love.

“Before, it always felt like I was carrying our entire family across a river, just trying to get us to the other side,” Evgenia told me. “Now, I do not even know where I am swimming to.”

Since Vladimir’s arrest, Evgenia has gotten to know the growing number of wives, partners, and mothers of other Russian political prisoners, “amazing women who refuse to accept what is thrown at them,” she said. One of her idols is the late Soviet dissident Nataliya Gorbanevskaya, who as a young mother dared to protest on Red Square against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and was later arrested, tried, and sent to a psychiatric hospital for several years before she was released and allowed to emigrate. Her story, and those of countless others, keeps Evgenia going: “I feel like I’ve been banging my head against the wall for a year and a half now, but then I think of all the people who have spent years in prison even though their loved ones were campaigning like crazy.”

Every time the Kremlin seizes one more person for its penal regime, it also absorbs their loved ones, unleashing a cascade of losses. “One of my biggest heartbreaks,” Evgenia told me, is that “now, neither am I in Russia with him, nor am I with the kids. I am just somewhere in limbo; I’m gone. It often feels like I am betraying the kids, while not achieving anything to bring Vladimir back.”

Her daughter Sonya testified to Congress last year, asking elected officials to help free her father. She’d outfitted her mother’s phone case with a photograph of their family all together, smiling in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square.

“The kids, sometimes they’re doing well, and sometimes they struggle,” Evgenia said. “I brought their father back twice. They expect me to do it again.”

This article originally misidentified the Moscow detention center from which Vladimir Kara-Murza was abruptly transferred in September, and the number of years to which Sasha Skochilenko was sentenced to prison. The article also originally stated that Evgenia Kara-Murza met her husband when they were in their 20s; in fact, they first met as children.