Vladimir Kara-Murza: How I survived eleven months of torture in Putin's Gulag

A The British-Russian dissident and opponent of Vladimir Putin, who was released in the most high-profile prisoner exchange since the end of the Cold War, has described the brutal treatment he endured during his 11 months in solitary confinement in Siberia.

Vladimir Kara-Murza spent 23.5 hours a day in a tiny cell as part of his 25-year prison sentence for speaking out against Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine.

The 43-year-old, who served two-and-a-half years of his total sentence before being released in August, spoke of talking to walls and passing the days when he “no longer understood what was real and what was imagined”.

In an exclusive interview with The Independent Hours after landing in Britain for the first time since the historic US-brokered prison deal with the Kremlin, the Cambridge-educated activist relived his horrific experience in great detail.

Kara-Murza said the exchange was not just a barter deal but a “life-saving mission.” The death of dissident Alexei Navalny in prison in February, which he described as a Kremlin-orchestrated murder, underscored the danger he faced.

“Mentally, psychologically, emotionally, it's really, really not easy to be locked in a cupboard day after day, week after week, month after month without even saying hello to anyone,” he said at a hotel near the House of Commons.

“After about two or three weeks, your mind starts playing tricks on you. You start forgetting words. You start forgetting names. You start talking to walls. You stop understanding what is real and what is imagined.”

Kara-Murza was arrested in Moscow in April 2022, two months after Putin launched his large-scale invasion of Ukraine, for giving speeches around the world about the war crimes committed by Russian forces against civilians.

His trial, which he compared to Stalin's show trials during the dictator's brutal rule, was a farce. He was sentenced to 25 years in a Siberian prison, the longest sentence imposed on a political prisoner since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It was not the first time that Kara-Murza had been targeted by the Putin regime, after the Kremlin allegedly attempted to poison him first in 2015 and then again in 2017, after which his wife Evgenia and their three young children fled to the United States.

On both occasions, the Russian opposition leader fell into a coma and nearly died, suffering from a debilitating nerve disease called polyneuropathy that affects the feeling in his fingers and toes.

When a prison doctor in Moscow examined him during his pre-trial detention, he said he needed constant fresh air, walks and medical treatment to prevent his condition from worsening. According to his lawyer Vadim Prokhorov, they gave him three years to live.

But in April last year he was convicted and sent to a prison in Omsk, Siberia. Within a few months he was put in a tiny punishment cell. His only walk was a half-hour walk “in circles” in a closed courtyard with bars over it. During this time, his wife The Independent he would die if he was not released from prison.

Kara-Murza was equally blunt on Thursday about what would have happened if he had remained in prison. “Nobody can survive 25 years in a Russian gulag, especially not after the two poisonings I experienced,” he said. “It was a death sentence.”

Speaking of prisoner exchange – which also included Wall Street Journal Journalist and reporter Evan Gershkovich was falsely accused of espionage and sentenced to 16 years in prison. Kara-Murza described this as “not an exchange, but a life-saving operation.”

They were among 16 prisoners released from Russia. In return, the Kremlin took in eight Russians, including FSB killer Vadim Krasikov, who was convicted in Germany for the murder of Chechen Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in 2019.

Despite the cruelty of his first months in solitary confinement, Kara-Murza says his psychological torture became increasingly severe as his detention continued. The prison guards, his only contact with the outside world, punished him for minor offenses such as unbuttoning his top button or taking off his hat outside. They kept a log of his so-called rebellious behavior.

In other cases, his prison guards tricked him into breaking absurdly strict rules.

In his first Siberian prison, the IK-6 penal colony, he was punished one day for not getting up at 6 a.m., the time prisoners must start their day. But the guards had turned off the alarm and prisoners were not allowed to have clocks in their rooms.

In January, Kara-Murza disappeared from IK-6 and reappeared days later in the nearby penal colony IK-7 – one of the most restrictive prisons in the country.

Authorities claimed at the time that it was punishment for Kara-Murza's “continued violation of the rules for serving his sentence.”

By that point, he already had limited phone rights and was not allowed to speak to the outside world. His last phone call with his family had been in December 2023 and was limited to 15 minutes. His wife gave up the chance to hear her husband's voice and gave each of their three children five minutes each. She used a stopwatch to ensure that each child – the eldest was just a teenager – had an equal amount of time to speak to their father. He only spoke to them three times in 2023.

When he was transferred to IK-7, his telephone rights were completely revoked. Visibly angry, Kara-Murza recalled the cruelty of this move, which was directed not only against him but also against his family.

“My family, my wife and my children had to suffer just because they have the same name as me, just because they are my family,” he said.

He did not speak to his wife and children again until mid-July of this year, by which time he had already missed his daughter's graduation and his 20th wedding anniversary.

From that point on, he was forced to get up at 5 a.m. every day and push his bed against the wall, where it remained until 9 p.m., when the lights went out. They didn't want the prisoners to be able to lie down, he said.

He was allowed 90 minutes a day to conduct court correspondence and write strictly censored letters to his lawyers and wife, and the rest of the time to read one of the two books he was allowed to read in his room at any time.

He chose between a Spanish textbook – learning a language was a tip from his idol, the Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky – or the Bible, which he described as vital to his life.

He was also confronted with the end date of his sentence every day. “Every time you had to make a request in writing, for example what you wanted with your tea, you had to give your name, your mobile number and the date your sentence ended,” he said.

“In my case, it was April 21, 2047. I will never forget that day. At some point, it was so heartwarming to me to write down that date day after day and say it.”

Then, in mid-July, Kara-Murza disappeared again. The authorities said he had been taken to a hospital, but in fact they transferred him to the even stricter IK-11 colony and deprived him of his last right, access to his lawyers.

“The hospital was a hospital in name only,” he said. “When people hear the word 'hospital,' they imagine beds and doctors running around. No, it was nothing like that. It was actually the toughest prison I've been in in all my two years and three months, which was quite an achievement.”

Kara-Murza described his survival after so much psychological torture as a “miracle.” His faith, his determination to learn Spanish and his wife, who fought passionately for his release, were all that kept him from giving up.

And also his belief that one day a peaceful Russia would emerge without Putin at the helm. During the entire time he was in solitary confinement and denied human contact, he kept telling himself: “I know I'm right.”