Carole Cadwalladr writes:

The last time I met Evgenia Kara-Murza, it was a grim day in early March. The timing couldn’t have been worse. As we spoke, Alexei Navalny’s coffin was being lowered into the frozen ground in a Moscow cemetery. Meanwhile Evgenia’s husband, Vladimir Kara-Murza, was still incarcerated in a Siberian prison cell almost identical to the one in the Arctic Circle in which Navalny had been found dead, presumed murdered.

The parallels were eerie. Because Vladimir, a journalist turned political activist, was not just also loathed and feared by the Kremlin and imprisoned on spurious charges, he’d also been poisoned – twice – targeted by the same FSB (Federal Security Service) unit that had poisoned Navalny.

The prospects were so grim and the news from Russia and Ukraine so unrelentingly depressing, it feels almost unimaginably miraculous six months later to see Evgenia walk into the lobby of a London hotel, this time with Vladimir right next to her. Six weeks ago, he was in a Siberian gulag. Today, he’s a free man on a trip to London with his wife and their youngest son, nine-year-old Daniel, the result of the largest prisoner exchange between Russian and the west since the cold war.

I find myself suddenly overwhelmed by the sight of them together so I can’t begin to imagine how Evgenia is feeling. “I cry all the time,” she says. “And I make other people cry. Just when I speak, people start crying in the audience. I just seem to have that effect on people.” She’d been so exasperated when we’d last met, fresh from a meeting she’d waited two years to get with the foreign secretary with the steely demeanour of a woman who can’t afford to give up.

“There has been so much emotional trauma. I mean, let alone the fact that Vladimir was in prison in those horrible conditions and solitary confinement in Western Siberia, but I also had to deal with people who couldn’t really understand this. It’s so difficult for a person living in a normal democratic country to grasp what political repression is in the 21st century. They just couldn’t get it.” [Continue reading…]