When the dissident Russian journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza Sr. died in Moscow last week, at age 59, there was some initial confusion in the Western press and on social media.
Some publications and commentators conflated him with his son, Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr., who is also a prominent critic of post-Soviet Russia’s gradual slide into authoritarian rule. Complicating matters is the fact that the elder Kara-Murza’s cause of death was not immediately reported and remains unknown at this writing, though it appears to have been natural, while Kara-Murza the younger has twice been hospitalized on suspicion of poisoning.
The wrath of that other Vladimir, named Putin, can be lethal.
It seems likely that Vladimir Kara-Murza died of natural causes: He had a history of heart disease, and was known to have been in ill health for some time. But the confusion also serves as a disheartening metaphor for contemporary Russia. The democratic hopes that flourished in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse have declined to the point where the poisoning death of a scholarly, critical, low-key chronicler and analyst of events seems all too plausible.
Kara-Murza’s life of resistance might have been foreordained. Born in 1959, two years after Sputnik, he came of age in the final, dilapidated phase of Soviet Communism. He was nearly expelled from Moscow State University for defacing portraits of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and, while teaching history in secondary schools, disdained serving the state and gradually evolved into a journalist-activist.
With the end of the Soviet Union, in 1991, Kara-Murza came into his own. In the midst of Boris Yeltsin’s democratic reforms, he became an editor and on-camera correspondent for Channel One; two years later he joined Russia’s first independent television channel, NTV. These were intoxicating times and Kara-Murza was a refreshing novelty in Russian media — indeed, in modern Russian history and popular culture. As the anchorman of NTV’s popular news program, “Today at Midnight,” he offered detailed coverage and critical commentary on Russia’s emerging democracy and free markets. His calm, restrained demeanor and training in history gave him a particular authority as well.
Then, in 1999, Vladimir Putin rose to power. In 2001, NTV was purchased by Gazprom, the government-owned oil and gas monopoly, and Kara-Murza joined several colleagues in moving to another independent channel, TV6, where “Points of View,” his new evening news broadcast, was even more widely watched throughout Russia than “Today at Midnight.”
By that time, Kara-Murza was arguably his country’s most influential, and independent, journalist — which, of course, led to a now-familiar sequence of events in Putin’s Russia. In 2002, TV6 was closed by the government. Six months later, however, a favorable court ruling enabled Kara-Murza and fellow journalists to reclaim the frequency and return the channel (now called TVS) to the air. One year later, in June 2003, the Russian Press Ministry closed TVS down for good.
Thereafter, Kara-Murza subsisted in the twilight existence of dissidents laboring in Putin’s shadow, associating himself with independent channels that came and went, and settling into analytical radio programs and commentary on Radio Liberty’s Russian service. His life seems never to have been in jeopardy but his influence, by the time of his death, was long diminished.
In one sense, his life and aborted career are tragic. The dream of a free, democratic Russia seems especially forlorn, and Vladimir Kara-Murza’s heyday was a mere dozen years. But there is another way of looking at things. Almost from scratch, he helped establish a standard of fearless, fair, and informative journalism in a country almost wholly unfamiliar with such traditions. Then again, Putin is not Stalin: The tradition lives, if precariously, and may someday be revived in Kara-Murza’s image.
To that end, the work of his son and namesake, which earned Kara-Murza Jr. a place as pallbearer at John McCain’s funeral last year, may yet redeem his father’s legacy, and Russian democracy.
Philip Terzian, a former writer and editor at The Weekly Standard, is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
