Vladimir and Evgenia Kara-Murza came to the Bush Institute on Monday to speak at a policy event for the Dallas Committee on Foreign Relations and make a guest appearance on the Bush Institute's 'The Strategerist' podcast. Beforehand, the couple sat down for a 30-minute interview with NBC 5.
"I was in solitary confinement in a maximum security prison in Siberia," Vladimir Kara-Murza said. "That's something that nobody can get you prepared for."
Kara-Murza is a Russian political activist, journalist, and outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin who was poisoned twice before being sentenced to 25 years in a Russian prison.
"Your mind really starts playing tricks on you," Kara-Murza said. "Speaking out it openly, it's really difficult not to get crazy."
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The 'crime' that sent Kara-Murza to prison was speaking out against Putin and the war in Ukraine.
"I'm saying this again now; Vladimir Putin cannot be allowed to win the war in Ukraine. Moreover, Vladimir Putin cannot be allowed to have a face-saving exit from this war," Kara-Murza said. "He's not going to stop unless he's stopped, and he has to be stopped now."
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Kara-Murza said to keep his sanity in solitary confinement, he learned Spanish and wrote. He won a Pulitzer Prize contributing columns to the Washington Post from his prison cell. Kara-Murza spent 2-years and 3-months in a Siberian prison, speaking to his 3 children twice and his wife only once.
"I was very much afraid for my husband's life and I continue to be so, honestly," said Evgenia Kara-Murza, Director of International Advocacy for Free Russia Foundation. "Because we know that Putin's influence, the influence of Putin's propaganda, and his repressive regime goes way beyond Russian borders. So this is why I'm actually sitting here. This is my fight as well."
Vladimir Kara-Murza was among those freed in a complex multi-national prisoner exchange on August 1. Days before he says prison guards woke him up in the middle of the night and told him to get ready to leave.
"That was the moment I was absolutely certain I was going to be executed," Kara-Murza said.
Instead, he was put on a plane to Turkey for the prisoner exchange. At home, Evgenia Kara-Murza got a call from the White House.
"When he (President Biden) invited us into the Oval Office, he said that he had some good news for us and that we would make these phone calls to loved ones," Evgenia Kara-Murza recalled.
"This was the longest day of my life...and in that moment a lady walks up to me wearing a suit and holding a cell phone in her hand," Vladimir Kara-Murza said. On the other end of the line; his family. "And I don't think I'm going to be able to find words in any of the languages that I know to describe the feeling when I heard their voices."
Since that day, the Kara-Murzas have had a busy schedule, flying all over the world, using their voices to speak out for a democratic and free Russia.
"While people are prepared to listen, we have to talk," Vladimir Kara-Murza said. "Now that I have been saved from the Hell that is Vladimir Putin's modern-day Gulag, I am waking up every morning and going to bed every night thinking about those who are still left behind."
"Standing up and saying 'no' is important," Evgenia Kara-Murza said. "Because in the end, that moral courage proves stronger than military might."
We asked Vladimir Kara-Murza if he would go back to Russia.
"I know I will go back," Kara-Murza said. "That's not a question of if, but when."
