Freed in a prisoner exchange, the Russian pro-democracy leader Vladimir Kara-Murza is not going to rest after his two-year ordeal. After knowing Volodya for 20-some years, I’m pretty certain he will resume his struggle for a free Russia as soon as his doctors and his wife, Zhenya, let him—or, most likely, before then.

“Why should I be afraid?” he used to reply every time I asked him to be more cautious. “It is they, Putin and his henchmen, who should be afraid.” Infectiously, his confidence in the eventual victory of liberty in Russia shone through our conversations, private and in front of AEI audiences.

In his final statement before the kangaroo court, which sentenced him to 25 years for “high treason,” he said:

I know that the day will come when the darkness over our country will be gone. When the war will be called a war, and the usurper [in the Kremlin] will be called a usurper; when those who have ignited this war will be called criminals instead of those who tried to stop it… And then our people will open their eyes and shudder at the sight of the horrific crimes committed in their names.

The same conviction, and the same disregard for danger, drove Vladimir’s mentor, the main pro-democracy opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was gunned down a few hundred meters from the Kremlin on February 27, 2015. Three months later, Vladimir nearly died in Moscow from what was almost certainly the first of the Kremlin’s two attempts to kill him by poison. 

Yet in his remarks at AEI before screening his documentary, “Nemtsov”—the film’s first showing in DC—he insisted that just as “streams turned into a river,” the movement for a “modern, democratic Russia” was impossible to arrest.

After Volodya recovers his strength; after he luxuriates in the love of Zhenya and his three young children; after he feels in his hand the weight of the Pulitzer Prize medal, which Zhenya accepted on his behalf while he was in prison; after he is done with the talk shows, interviews, and congressional rounds, I hope we can talk again at length. There is much to talk about! 

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