As he awaits the next court date in his trial for treason, Russian opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza has been picking the brain of a man with intimate knowledge of his situation: Natan Sharansky.
Kara-Murza, a 41-year-old father of three facing the prospect of a 25-year sentence, is unable to meet or speak with Sharansky, a former politician living in Israel who is among the world’s best-known political prisoners from the former Soviet Union.
But Kara-Murza, his lawyer recently said, has the next best thing: Prison authorities have allowed him to keep a copy of Sharansky’s 1988 memoir of his own ordeal.
Sharansky also recognizes the similarities between their stories. The former prisoner of Zion, who spent nine years in a Russian prison on trumped-up treason and espionage charges, called the prosecution of Kara-Murza for criticizing Russia’s war in Ukraine “evidence that Russia has returned to Stalinist times.”
In the 1970s and ’80s, when Sharansky was jailed for attempting to immigrate to Israel, and later, for advocating human rights in general, punishments were already lighter than the decades-long sentences of Stalinist times, “where they could throw you away forever for voicing an unpopular opinion,” Sharansky told The Times of Israel on Monday.
Prosecutors accuse Kara-Murza, whose mother is Jewish, of discrediting the Russian military, and of treason, after he criticized Russia’s war in Ukraine, Moscow’s crackdown on dissent, and President Vladimir Putin. Police arrested Kara-Murza, who also has British nationality, last month, shortly after his return from Europe, where he had attended several discussion forums critical of Russia’s year-long war in Ukraine.
The 25-year sentence that the prosecution is seeking is unusual even for Putin’s Russia, where the regime is accused of using the judicial system to silence dissent.
The two men met in Israel several years ago, when Kara-Murza interviewed Sharansky, who was born in what today is Ukraine, for an article exploring the history of human rights in Russia. “I saw that he is an intelligent, motivated, and capable person,” Sharansky said of the meeting. “Now I know he is also very courageous.”
Then-Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky attends a meeting in the Knesset of the lobby for strengthening ties with the Jewish world, June 27, 2017. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90/File)
Kara-Murza and his supporters say he has twice survived past poisoning attempts. Russian authorities deny any involvement in the alleged attacks. Several petitions have been launched for his release, including by dozens of Russian-language journalists, some of them living in Russia.
The journalists wrote in their petition: “We consider the charges against Vladimir Kara-Murza to be politically motivated. The treason charge against him is particularly cynical. It is thanks to Kara-Murza that the political leaders in the West have realized that the Russian state’s aggressive policies are the responsibility of specific individuals, as opposed to the whole country and all of its people.”
Even before the war, which prompted Putin’s authorities to impose new limitations on the already-restricted freedom of expression in Russia, Kara-Murza understood the risks he was undertaking by speaking out against the regime.
Kara-Murza’s first steps in politics were as a protégé of Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister turned opposition leader, who, in 2015, was gunned down in Moscow, just hours after he urged fellow citizens to attend a rally against Russia’s involvement in an earlier invasion into Ukraine. The shooting of Nemtsov, who also was Jewish, was widely thought to have been an addition to the growing list of Putin critics who in recent years had died of unnatural causes or were sentenced to lengthy prison terms, usually for graft, in what outside observers decried as unfair trials.
As the name of his memoir from prison, “Fear No Evil,” suggests, Sharansky focused on extinguishing angst to steady himself against attempts by the KGB to break him as a human rights activist, and later as a prisoner of Zion, as people in his situation were called.
But he fears the worst for Kara-Murza, whose health has deteriorated since the alleged poisonings. “They want to give him 25, but, in his condition, even one year is effectively a death sentence, I’m afraid,” Sharansky said.
