[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 126 (Thursday, July 28, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3763-S3765]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                          Vladimir Kara-Murza

  Mr. WICKER. Mr. President, I rise this afternoon to make sure that 
the plight of Russian leader Vladimir Kara-Murza is not forgotten, that 
the outrageous imprisonment of Vladimir Kara-Murza by the Russian 
dictator Vladimir Putin is not forgotten.
  We remember three decades ago what hope we had for a new Russia. 
Russia had entered a new age of possibility some three decades ago. 
After more than 70 years of communist repression, the Soviet order had 
collapsed, and with it, the Iron Curtain that kept freedom away from 
millions was torn down.
  As the red flags came down in Moscow, the free world watched with 
anticipation, hoping that democracy and the rule of law might finally 
take root in a free Russia. Regrettably, that has not happened. Instead 
of democracy and freedom, the Russian people got Vladimir Putin, a man 
who has used his office to murder, imprison, and force into exile 
anyone who threatens his grip on power, all the while enriching himself 
beyond anyone's wildest imagination while ordinary Russians, especially 
out in the countryside of Russia, live in squalid conditions.
  One of his latest victims is Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian patriot 
and a friend I had the privilege of hosting in my office just 4 months 
ago. As a matter of fact, I have hosted him several times.
  Today, Vladimir Kara-Murza spends his days in a prison cell, where 
the only thing he can see through the window is a barbed wire fence. 
What was his crime? He simply spoke the truth about Putin's war on 
Ukraine. His trial--if it can even be called a trial--was held in 
secret. No journalists, no diplomats, or spectators of any kind were 
allowed to be there. And for his offense of talking about the Russian 
war against Ukraine, he now faces up to 15 years in prison.
  This is not the first time the Russian dictator has tried to silence 
him. Mr. Kara-Murza has been poisoned twice--in 2015 and 2017--and 
almost died in both cases. Since then, his wife and three children have 
had to live abroad, although he himself has chosen to spend most of his 
time in Russia.
  In a recent interview with National Review, his wife Evgenia 
explained why he insists on working in Russia:

       He believes that he would not have the moral right to call 
     on people to fight if he were not sharing the same risks.

  As Mr. Kara-Murza put it in a recent CNN interview the day of his 
arrest, he said:

       The biggest gift we could give the Kremlin . . . would be 
     to just give up and run, and that's all they want from us.

  What a contrast in character to the man currently running the 
Kremlin.
  The National Review story goes on to describe Mr. Kara-Murza's 
courageous work for democracy through the eyes of his wife Evgenia, as 
well as the costs that he and his family have endured, along with so 
many other Russian dissidents.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent at this point to have printed 
in the Record the National Review story that I referred to.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From the National Review, May 31, 2022]

                       In Dark Times, a Brave Man

                          (By Jay Nordlinger)

       On March 15, Vladimir Kara-Murza gave a speech to the 
     Arizona legislature. ``These are very dark times in Russia,'' 
     he said. ``These are times when we have hundreds of political 
     prisoners, and that number is only going to grow.'' Less than 
     a month later, Kara-Murza himself became a political 
     prisoner.
       Born in 1981, he is one of the most prominent opposition 
     figures in Russia. (Given the state of things, we should 
     probably return to the word ``dissidents.'') He is a 
     politician, journalist, and activist. A proponent of 
     democracy. For 15 years, he worked alongside Boris Nemtsov, 
     the opposition leader. They became the closest of friends. 
     Nemtsov was godfather to one of Kara-Murza's children. (``In 
     Russia,'' Kara-Murza once told me, ``that makes you 
     family.'')
       Together, they worked for passage of the Magnitsky Act in 
     the U.S. Congress. This is the act that allows the government 
     to sanction individual human-rights abusers rather than whole 
     peoples or societies. Nemtsov and Kara-Murza were sitting in 
     the gallery on November 16, 2012, when the House passed the 
     act. Nemtsov commented, ``This is the most pro-Russian law 
     ever enacted by a foreign government.'' At last, the 
     persecutors of Russians would face consequences.
       On February 27, 2015, Boris Nemtsov was murdered--gunned 
     down within sight of the Kremlin. This had a deep impact on 
     the Russian democracy movement, and it had a deep impact on 
     Vladimir Kara-Murza, personally. He told me, ``My life is 
     divided into before and after February 27, 2015.''
       His wife, Evgenia, confirms the importance of Nemtsov's 
     murder to her husband. ``He will never come to terms with it. 
     I just know him all too well. Boris Nemtsov was his teacher, 
     his mentor, and then he became his close friend.'' Plus, ``he 
     was family.''
       Three months after Nemtsov's murder, Vladimir Kara-Murza 
     himself was nearly murdered. He was subject to a poison 
     attack, of the kind for which Vladimir Putin's agents have 
     become infamous. After he recovered, Kara-Murza kept working, 
     not scared off. Approximately two years later--in February 
     2017--he was again almost murdered. Again in a poison attack.
       On the floor of the U.S. Senate, John McCain made a 
     statement about Kara-Murza, a friend: ``Vladimir has once 
     again paid the price for his gallantry and integrity, for 
     placing the interests of the Russian people above his own 
     interest.'' Congressman Ed Royce, then the chairman of the 
     House Foreign Affairs Committee, called Kara-Murza ``one of 
     the bravest people I know.''
       For the record, lots of people have called Kara-Murza ``one 
     of the bravest people I know.'' Also for the record: McCain 
     asked Kara-Murza to serve as a pallbearer at his funeral, 
     which he did, when the time came (September 2018).
       After the second poison attack, doctors told Kara-Murza, 
     ``If there's a third one, you won't survive it.''
       Last year, a team of independent investigators was able to 
     identify the exact unit of the Russian secret police that 
     poisoned Kara-Murza--and Alexei Navalny and others. (Navalny 
     is the current Russian opposition leader, and also a 
     political prisoner.) The investigators pinpointed the agents 
     who carried out the attacks.
       Wrote Kara-Murza, ``My emotions are difficult to express 
     with words. It's one thing to know intellectually that 
     someone has tried to kill you--and it's quite another to see 
     the names and photographs of the actual people who did 
     this.''
       For some years, Evgenia Kara-Murza and the couple's 
     children have lived abroad. ``Obviously, it's not an ideal 
     situation,'' Vladimir told me in 2017, ``but it has to be 
     this way. I go back and forth, but I spend most of my time in 
     Russia.'' He was willing to put his own neck on the line, but 
     he was not willing to do the same with his family's.
       Many people asked him, or pleaded with him, to work in the 
     West, rather than in Russia itself. That way, he would be 
     safer, if not entirely shielded from danger. Nemtsov was 
     dead. Kara-Murza almost died, twice. Wasn't this enough? 
     Hadn't he paid his dues, so to speak? Did he really need to 
     be on Russian soil, making it easier for Putin's men? Kara-
     Murza rejected all entreaties, saying that he belonged in 
     Russia.
       ``What does Evgenia think of all this?'' I asked him in 
     2017. He answered, ``If you ask her, she'll say, `I knew what 
     I was signing up for.' '' Then, with a hint of a blush, he 
     said, ``I'm grateful to have such a woman in my life.''
       Today, Evgenia tells me the following: ``When we were 
     dating, 20 years ago, I was looking at him and thinking, `You 
     know, I can imagine spending my life with this man. He's 
     smart, he's funny, he's honorable. He has so much integrity.' 
     Later, when the poisonings and persecutions began, I thought, 
     `I wish our lives could be a little more boring.' But I do 
     admire Vladimir. I've always admired and respected him for 
     his principled stand, and I would never have him any 
     different.''
       Explaining Vladimir's insistence on working in Russia, 
     Evgenia says, ``He believes that he would not have the moral 
     right to call on people to fight if he were not sharing the 
     same risks.''
       Back in 2017, I asked Vladimir whether his name would 
     protect him. He was a friend of U.S. politicians, he had been 
     featured on 60 Minutes, he had spoken at forums around the 
     world. He was a bit of a celebrity. Kara-Murza looked at me 
     and said, in effect, ``Are

[[Page S3764]]

     you kidding?'' Then he said (I will quote directly), ``If 
     they can kill the leader of the opposition on the bridge next 
     to the Kremlin''--he was speaking of the Nemtsov murder--
     ``they can do anything.''
       Vladimir Putin launched his all-out assault on Ukraine on 
     February 24 of this year. Kara-Murza, naturally, cried 
     against this assault. On March 15, he gave his speech to the 
     Arizona legislature. On April 11, he appeared on CNN, from 
     Moscow. He spoke of the Putin regime's history of murder. 
     Mincing no words, he said, ``This regime that is in power in 
     our country today--it's not just corrupt, it's not just 
     kleptocratic, it's not just authoritarian. It is a regime of 
     murderers. And it is important to say it out loud.''
       He went on to say, ``It's tragic, frankly, that it took a 
     large-scale war in Europe for most Western leaders to finally 
     open their eyes to the true nature of this regime.''
       His interviewer asked him about being in Russia, after all 
     that had happened to him, and others. Wasn't he afraid of 
     being killed? Kara-Murza answered, ``Look, I'm a Russian 
     politician, I have to be in Russia, it's my home country. I 
     think the biggest gift we could give to the Kremlin--those 
     of us who are in opposition--would be to just give up and 
     run, and that's all they want from us.''
       He was arrested that night. Five or six agents rushed at 
     him when he was returning to his apartment building and 
     parking his car. They dragged him into a van and took him to 
     a police station. He was denied the right to call a lawyer. 
     The next day, the authorities sentenced him to 15 days in 
     prison for resisting arrest (something Kara-Murza had not 
     done). It is typical for the government to sentence a 
     dissident to 15 days on some little charge, while they cook 
     up a bigger charge. Agents took Kara-Murza to a detention 
     center.
       Eventually, he did have lawyers, and very good ones: Vadim 
     Prokhorov and Olga Mikhailova. (The latter is also lawyer to 
     Navalny.) Kara-Murza does not have access to a phone or the 
     Internet or anything like that. But, in detention, he was 
     able to dictate a column to one of his lawyers.
       On this matter of resisting arrest, Kara-Murza said the 
     following:
       Sofia Kalistratova, the legendary Moscow lawyer who 
     defended dissidents in the ``anti-Soviet'' trials of the 
     1960s and 1970s, told her charges: ``Everyone else may cross 
     the street on a red light, but you must always cross on 
     green.'' She knew that her clients couldn't give the 
     authorities the slightest excuse to accuse them of breaking 
     the law.
       I have always tried to follow this principle.
       In the column he dictated, Kara-Murza also reported a very 
     interesting detail. When agents brought him to the detention 
     center, they rang the doorbell and said to the person 
     opening, ``Here's a political for you. They should have 
     called you from headquarters.'' (By ``a political,'' they 
     meant a political prisoner, not a common criminal.)
       ``Among the inmates in the special detention center,'' said 
     KaraMurza in his column, ``are a young man and woman who had 
     staged a protest in response to the murders in Bucha, 
     Ukraine.'' Also, there were ``students of the Higher School 
     of Economics who were detained for an antiwar 
     demonstration.''
       Altogether, some 15,000 Russians have been detained for 
     protesting the assault on Ukraine. These people have assumed 
     great risks and have exhibited notable bravery. In a column 
     before his arrest, Kara-Murza recalled the seven people who 
     protested in Red Square against Moscow's invasion of 
     Czechoslovakia in August 1968. (Horrible things happened to 
     them, naturally.) The Kremlin of the time was saying that the 
     whole nation supported the invasion. One of the protesters, 
     Natalia Gorbanevskaya, a poet, reflected on those days, many 
     years later.
       ``A nation minus me,'' she said, ``is not an entire nation. 
     A nation minus ten, a hundred, a thousand people is not an 
     entire nation.'' So, thanks to the Red Square protest, the 
     government ``could no longer say that there was nationwide 
     approval for the invasion of Czechoslovakia.''
       On April 22, when Kara-Murza had been in prison for a week 
     and a half, the authorities lodged their bigger charge 
     against him. They accused him of violating a new law, 
     instituted on March 5. This law essentially criminalizes any 
     criticism of the Ukraine war whatsoever. It is punishable by 
     up to 15 years in prison.
       Before the war, there were a few independent media outlets 
     left in Russia--the venerable radio station Echo of Moscow, 
     for example, and the venerable newspaper Novaya Gazeta. (Over 
     the years, six of the paper's correspondents have been 
     murdered.) Now all independent media have been shut down. 
     Social media have been blocked. In another of his pre-arrest 
     columns, Kara-Murza wrote, ``Near-total darkness has 
     descended on Russia's information space with frightening 
     speed.''
       The first person charged under the new law--the March 5 
     law--was a blogger, Veronika Belotserkovskaya, who does not 
     live in Russia, but in France. Her response: ``I was 
     officially recognized as a decent person!'' In Kara-Murza's 
     case, the authorities cited the Arizona speech in particular. 
     As of this writing, he is awaiting a court date.
       Earlier this year, I talked with Kara-Murza about what 
     seemed to me the increasing, galloping re-Sovietization of 
     Russia. The government had shut down Memorial--the leading 
     civil-society organization in the country. Memorial was 
     founded at the urging of Andrei Sakharov in the late 1980s. 
     Sakharov--the great scientist and dissident--was its first 
     chairman. The purpose of the group was to uncover and tell 
     the truth about the past, and to promote freedom and 
     democracy in the present.
       As Kara-Murza pointed out to me, plenty of Soviet men are 
     in the Russian government now--starting with the KGB colonel 
     at the top. Who wants to be reminded of his past crimes? Or 
     his present ones?
       In Russia's supreme court last December, the chief 
     prosecutor, Alexei Zhafyarov, said, ``Memorial creates a 
     false image of the Soviet Union as a terrorist state.'' He 
     also said that Memorial ``makes us repent of the Soviet past, 
     instead of remembering glorious history''--and ``probably 
     because someone is paying for it.''
       Over the past eight years--since Putin's initial invasion 
     of Ukraine--Kara-Murza and I have had several conversations 
     about just that: Ukraine. Kara-Murza's view is that Putin is 
     very, very nervous about a democratic example in that 
     country. It's one thing if New Zealand, let's say, is a 
     democracy. New Zealand is far away, and, besides, it's 
     ``Anglo.'' But Ukraine? There are many ties between Ukraine 
     and Russia: cultural, religious, linguistic. Millions of 
     families have direct ties across the border. And if Russians 
     see that Ukraine has a decent, open, democratic society . . . 
     they may demand the same for themselves, which makes Putin 
     and his men very nervous indeed.
       In one of our conversations, Kara-Murza put it this way: 
     ``A successful democratic experiment in Ukraine presents an 
     existential threat to Vladimir Putin's authoritarian 
     kleptocracy in Russia.''
       It is Kara-Murza's strong belief that Russia, one day, will 
     be free and democratic. People should avoid ``cultural 
     condescension,'' he says. That is a phrase he borrows from 
     Ronald Reagan. In his Westminster speech of 1982, Reagan 
     said, ``Democracy already flourishes in countries with very 
     different cultures and historical experiences. It would be 
     cultural condescension, or worse, to say that any people 
     prefer dictatorship to democracy.'' Earlier this year, Kara-
     Murza told me, ``I have absolutely no doubt that one day we 
     will have a normal, modern, accountable democratic government 
     in Russia. There's no reason that our nation is destined to 
     be an outlier in Europe or the world, and to live under the 
     yoke of a dictatorship.''
       At the moment, Vladimir Kara-Murza sits in prison, and 
     faces many years of it. His friends and allies are making as 
     much noise as they can. Charles Krauthammer once told me 
     about something that Meg Greenfield had said to him. She was 
     the editorial-page editor of the Washington Post. When the 
     life of Sakharov hung in the balance, she wanted something 
     about him in her pages at least once a week, she said. That 
     way, the Post might help keep him alive.
       Chief among the shouters, or campaigners, today for Kara-
     Murza is his wife. I think of Avital Sharansky, who 
     campaigned for her husband, Anatoly (later Natan), during his 
     nine years in the Gulag. She had obtained a visa to go to 
     Israel, he had not. Sharansky told me a few years ago, ``The 
     biggest mistake the KGB made was letting Avita I out.''
       ``I've never been a public person,'' Evgenia Kara-Murza 
     says, ``and I've never enjoyed being in the public eye. I am 
     a quite introverted person, so I like working from home, and 
     I like taking care of the kids, but unfortunately the 
     situation sometimes changes, and I emerge when my husband is 
     either poisoned or thrown in jail, because this is my 
     partner, my soulmate, and I am prepared to do everything I 
     can to bring my children's father home.''

  Mr. WICKER. Mr. Kara-Murza's imprisonment is part of Mr. Putin's 
larger assault on what remains of political freedom in Russia. In Mr. 
Kara-Murza's words, Putin's regime has gone ``from highly authoritarian 
to near-totalitarian almost overnight.''
  In March, Russian officials passed a new censorship law forbidding 
all criticism of Mr. Putin's war in Ukraine. That law has been the 
basis for more 16,000 arrests since the war began in February, 
including that of Mr. Kara-Murza. Another 2,400 Russians have been 
charged with administrative offenses for speaking out against the war. 
Meanwhile, Putin's propaganda machine is ramping up. Independent 
Russian media outlets have all but vanished, having been blocked, shut 
down, or forced out of the country by the Kremlin.
  The last embers of freedom in Russia are going cold. Putin's 
crackdown on domestic freedom began in 2003, when Mikhail Khodorkovsky 
was arrested on trumped-up charges of tax fraud after he simply 
criticized the government. A former member of the elite, Mr. 
Khodorkovsky had successfully led the Yukos Oil Company through 
privatization after the Iron Curtain fell. And contrary to the 
Kremlin's claims, the company consistently paid its taxes. But that 
didn't stop Vladimir Putin from plundering its assets and throwing Mr. 
Khodorkovsky in jail, where he stayed for 10 years.
  I would note that just before his arrest, Mr. Khodorkovsky displayed 
the

[[Page S3765]]

same courage and patriotism that we now see in Vladimir Kara-Murza. 
Like Mr. Kara-Murza, he knew very well he could go to jail for speaking 
out against the government, but Mr. Khodorkovsky did so anyway and 
refused to flee the country, saying:

       I would prefer to be a political prisoner rather than a 
     political immigrant.

  Of course, by then, Mr. Putin had already shown himself willing to 
violate the international laws of war, having leveled the Chechen 
capital of Grozny in his own Republic of Russia in 1999. In 2008, he 
launched a new assault on international law with the invasion of 
Georgia. In 2014, he started a bloody war in eastern Ukraine. In 2016, 
Russian dictator Putin and his forces attacked the Syrian city of 
Aleppo, killing hundreds of civilians and prolonging the rule of Bashar 
al-Assad.
  Meanwhile, Putin ramped up his attacks on domestic freedom as well. 
In 2015, Boris Nemtsov, leader of the democratic opposition, former 
Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, was shot to death in broad daylight 
just yards away from the Kremlin. Three months later, Mr. Kara-Murza 
was poisoned for the first time. More recently, in 2020, Alexei 
Navalny, the current leader of the opposition, was himself poisoned and 
had to seek treatment in Berlin. This is Vladimir Putin's Russia today. 
When Navalny recovered, he chose to return to Moscow, knowing the 
risks, and immediately upon landing, he was arrested.
  This is the deplorable state of Russia and freedom under Vladimir 
Putin. Time and again, he has shown that he is bent on stamping out the 
aspirations of his people for freedom and the rule of law.
  As leader of the free world, America must continue to condemn Putin's 
lawless acts and stand in solidarity with our Russian friends who are 
courageously fighting against all odds for a better future in Russia 
and are suffering as a result.
  These are modern-day heroes--Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Kara-Murza--and 
we should not forget them.
  My friend the distinguished senior Senator from Maryland, Mr. Cardin, 
and I, along with Congressmen   Steve Cohen and   Joe Wilson, are the 
four House and Senate leaders of the Helsinki Commission, which 
monitors human rights in former Soviet countries. We recently sent a 
joint letter to President Biden calling on the administration to name 
and sanction all of those who have been involved in the arrest, 
detention, and persecution of Vladimir Kara-Murza. I issue that call 
again today, and I invite my colleagues from both parties to stand with 
Vladimir Kara-Murza and work for his release.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Hawaii.
  Ms. HIRONO. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to be able to 
complete my remarks.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.