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
