Vladimir Kara-Murza was late to our interview because he was at the hospital, receiving treatment for being poisoned. Again. He’s not a spy, he’s not KGB—he’s just a journalist and political activist, and not really all that threatening. But twice in the past two years, Kara-Murza has experienced sudden and rapid multiple organ failure due to a mysterious poison. That’s what can happen when you speak out against the Putin regime and advocate for democracy in Russia for two decades.
I sat down with Kara-Murza in northwest Washington, D.C., where he lived from 2004 to 2012 while working as a TV news bureau chief, before returning to Russia. To read his blog, go here.
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Ben Parker: How are you feeling?
Vladimir Kara-Murza: I’m much better than I felt five months ago. Obviously there are still some residual effects, a few things still to fix before I’m able to go back, which is why right now I just came from the hospital. But much better than five months ago, slowly restoring and recovering.
Last time, after the first poisoning, it took me more than a year to get more or less back into shape, so I’m expecting this time it will take something similar. I’m still in the process, but I’m very fortunate and very grateful to be sitting here and talking to you.
BP: Last time you were treated in Russia or in the U.S.?
VKM: Both times in Russia. Because that’s where the poisoning happened. It wasn’t possible to get me transported. I needed, basically, a room of medical equipment around me all the time.
Both times it was the same doctor who saved my life—the same intensive-care doctor. The first time it took them I think two or three days to even work out what was happening. I was very fortunate to survive for those two or three days because the way this poison works, it goes after different organs one at a time, so they shut down in a cascade. Something would go, like the kidneys would switch off, and they would start dealing with the kidneys. Then the liver would fail. Then the heart. Then the lungs. It took them two or three days to work out that this was some kind of a poisoning. And they put me on hemodialysis to start cleaning my blood system.
But this time, when the symptoms began of course I knew straight away it was the same thing. I called my wife, she called the same doctor who saved me last time. They brought me to him, and as soon as he saw me and the symptoms he said, “This is exactly the same thing. One hundred percent the same as two years ago.” This time they knew what they were doing and everything was much quicker.
The symptoms were progressing quicker, too. I was still weak from the first time. Last time it took two or three days for my organs to all fail. This time they were all down within six hours.
But of course the doctors also knew what they were doing so they were dealing with it quicker, too. The first time I was in a coma for three weeks; now [in February] only for one week.
BP: What was the toxin?
VKM: My official discharge papers from the Moscow hospital say, “Toxic action by an undefined substance,” so they don’t know what the precise toxin is. We presume some kind of a sophisticated and strong chemical toxin.
My wife and my lawyer managed to get some blood samples out of Russia to get them tested by toxicologists here in the U.S., in Israel, and in France. They’re still working on those, so of course if they do find something out we’ll let it be known.
But frankly given the way this was done, I can only conclude that this was done by people who either are or have been connected with the Russian domestic security service. This is their signature: sophisticated and very strong toxin. Unfortunately one thing they really do know how to do is to poison people. They’ve been doing it for decades.
Many of these poisons are not only strong and sophisticated but also untraceable, so I don’t know if we’ll ever find out precisely what this was. After the first time, when there were toxicology tests done in France, they found traces of heavy metals in my blood dozens of times over the normal limit, which doesn’t tell us what exactly the cause of the poisoning was.
Both times doctors assessed my chance to survive at 5 percent. That’s what they told my wife, so I’m very fortunate, very lucky, and very grateful to be sitting here.
BP: If you’d been successfully poisoned, you’d be yet another journalist who has been a critic of the Putin regime who has been killed. As you say, a lot of these poisonings have been successful.
VKM: And not just poisonings. There are very many ways. “Accidents.” Fake suicides. Plane crashes. A lot of poisonings. And of course, sometimes, plain assassinations like with Boris Nemtsov, the leader of the Russian opposition, who was shot dead 200 yards from the Kremlin walls.
BP: Anna Politkovskaya was shot in an elevator.
VKM: Yes. Actually, two years before she was shot, she was also poisoned on her way to Beslan in 2004. And then she was shot in 2006.
If you look at the past 17 years, there’s been an unusually high mortality rate among people who have crossed the Kremlin’s path: opposition activists, opposition leaders, independent journalists, anti-corruption investigators, and so on and so forth. It’s a mortality rate that defies any normal statistical model. And every time, the Kremlin claims they have nothing to do with it, just as they have publicly stated in my case. Dmitry Peskov, who is the press spokesman for Vladimir Putin, said on record that they have nothing to do with my poisoning.
BP: I take it that you consider that they did not achieve their goal when they tried to poison you?
VKM: Thankfully they did not, no. Sometimes people ask me, “Do you think this was to send a message or to kill?” And I say to this, when your chance of survival is 5 percent—in other words, you have a 95 percent chance of not surviving—that’s not to scare you or to send a message. That’s to kill.
I have no doubt that this was—both of these cases were—attempted murder, that it was politically motivated, that it was retribution for my political activities in the Russian democratic opposition, and I think most likely specifically for my involvement in the campaign in support of the Magnitsky Act—the personal, targeted, individual sanctions that are still being imposed by Western countries against corrupt officials and human rights abusers in Putin’s regime.
We have been successful at achieving this in the U.S. Since the U.S., two countries in the European Union, Estonia and (partially) the United Kingdom have adopted the same laws. I’m hoping that within the next few weeks Canada will become the next country to adopt its own personal, targeted sanctions. We’re working in other European Union countries. We’re not going to stop with this.
The way the Putin regime works, there is this double standard and this hypocrisy at the heart of the rotten system. There are so many similarities between what is happening today in Russia and what was happening in Soviet times: We have political prisoners today just as we had under the Communists; we have media censorship just as we had under the Communists; we have the lack of free and fair elections just as we had under the Communists.
But for all these similarities, there is one very important difference. Members of the Soviet Politburo didn’t keep their money in Western banks. They didn’t send their kids to Western schools. They didn’t buy real estate and mansions and yachts in Western countries. People connected with the current regime do all that. They want to rule inside Russia like it’s a third-world dictatorship, violating basic human rights and freedoms, but they themselves want to use the privileges and the opportunities that the Western world offers for themselves and for their families. They want to steal in Russia and spend in the West.
It’s a really basic principle that those people who violate the most basic norms of the civilized world should not be allowed to use the privileges that the civilized world has to offer.
We know that there is nothing that enrages the Kremlin more than these personal sanctions. For years, they’ve been trying to prevent those targeted, personal sanctions from being implemented. We know that one of the first decrees Vladimir Putin signed on his inauguration day for the current presidential term in May 2012 was tasking the foreign ministry to stop the Magnitsky Act from being passed. Once it was passed, they’ve tried everything to overturn it, to undermine it.
There are only two things the Kremlin is mortally afraid of. One is mass protests on the streets of Russia, which we are increasingly seeing in the last few months. Secondly, it’s those targeted, individual, personal sanctions directed against the crooks and the human rights abusers in the Putin regime, because it strikes at the heart of their rotten, kleptocratic system.
I’m proud that I could play my part in helping to get this law passed in the United States, hopefully helping to get similar sanctions passed in other countries. But I think that was the most likely reason for them trying to kill me. Again, there were no specific warnings or threats, so I can’t say this for certain, but I am almost sure that was the most likely reason.
BP: Can we talk a little bit about Nemtsov, your movie? It’s been shown in Europe, in North America, and in Russia. Can you talk a little bit about how audiences have reacted to it in different countries?
VKM: In Russia, this film has now been shown in more than 30 cities across the country from Kaliningrad to Khabarovsk, all the way from the Baltic Sea to the Far East. I myself took it to 11 cities before I was poisoned for the second time. We are now beginning the screenings outside of Russia, so we did Western Europe: Brussels, London, Berlin. In the United States we did most of the East Coast: Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Boston. The week after next I’m taking it to Stanford over on the West Coast. And then we have a few more planned as well.
Of course it’s important for me to show it everywhere, but most especially in Russia because that’s my country and Boris’s country.
And also because it’s in Russia that Putin’s propaganda machine has spent years trying to defame and slander and lie about Boris Nemtsov. Every day, state TV would talk about him as a traitor, as a foreign agent, as an enemy of Russia. All this—I was going to say “nonsense” but it was more than nonsense; it was incitement. This propaganda helped create the atmosphere that made it possible to assassinate the leader of the opposition. Too many people in my country know about Boris Nemtsov from this fake caricature, this completely made-up image created by the Kremlin propaganda machine.
I’m heartened by the reaction that I’m seeing across Russia as we do these screenings. There are always many people, always a lot of interest, very vibrant discussions afterward. People ask difficult questions, too, because a lot of them have this propaganda image, so I’m happy to answer.
I knew Boris Nemtsov very well. He was my closest friend. I spent 15 years working alongside him. He’s actually godfather to my young daughter, so in Russia this makes you family. He’s the reason I’m in politics. He brought me into politics all those years ago.
People say—certainly in Russia but probably outside of Russia, too—that politics is a dirty business. A lot of people think it has to be manipulative, it has to be dishonest, it has to be cynical.
Well, I reject that. I know politics doesn’t have to be a dirty business because I’ve seen Boris Nemtsov in politics. I think politics is like the hands with which you make it. If you make it with dirty hands, then sure, it’s going to be dirty and cynical and manipulative and dishonest.
But he didn’t do it that way. For him, politics only had a purpose if there was a meaning to it, if it was a means to an end. And the end for him was always to make life better for his country and for his people. He was never cynical. He was always honest, he was always principled. He always said what he believed. He always did what he said. He never betrayed his friends or his principles.
When Putin consolidated his authoritarian regime, so many people chose the easy path, the comfortable path of silence or collaboration or exile to a safe country. He didn’t. He never chose what was expedient or easy. He chose what was right and what was principled. He chose to stay and to fight for the future of his country, and he couldn’t have done it any other way. He gave his life for it. I want as many people as possible to see this man for who he really was. I hope I was able to achieve at least some of that.
This film was the most difficult thing I ever did in my life, including the two poisonings. As I found out, it’s almost impossible to make a film about a close friend who was murdered. There were so many times I felt like stopping and giving up, but I forced myself to continue, to carry on, and I’m grateful that I was able to complete it. I’m grateful to all the people who made it possible.
We’re still in the process of doing those public screenings. Once we do all of them, probably in the fall, we’re going to make this film accessible publicly, openly, online for everyone to see. I hope that many people both in Russia and outside of Russia will see it.
