Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian activist, political dissident and former politician who was released from a Russian prison in August as part of the largest prisoner exchange since the height of the Cold War, criticized Russia’s “botched” democratization in a lecture Monday. He encouraged more transparency in the nation’s next attempt at moving away from authoritarianism.
The lecture was part of the Wesson Lecture Series, which has been a feature of the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI) since 1988 and aims to provide a platform for international relations scholars and practitioners to speak at Stanford. Kara-Murza was initially detained in Russia in 2022 and sentenced to 25 years in prison for treason after he publicly criticized the war in Ukraine.
Kara-Murza said the event was taking place around the time of two anniversaries for the country — “one a very happy one and the other one not so much.” This past weekend marked the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall while next month will mark 25 years since Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia and “began to transform the imperfect democracy we had back in 1990 to the perfect dictatorship that we live in today,” he said.
Kara-Murza attributed Russia’s turn towards dictatorship fewer than 10 years after the beginnings of democracy to a failure of “transitional justice.” He said the devolution of Russian democracy seemed unlikely in the 1990s.
When transitioning from dictatorship to democracy, Kara-Murza said “past evil” must be “publicly reckoned with, it must be publicly accounted for, and it must be publicly condemned” to prevent its return. “There will be another window of opportunity for change in Russia and we do not have a right to repeat the same thing,” he said.
A longtime advocate for democracy, human rights and civil society in Russia, Kara-Murza was instrumental in the adoption of the Magnitsky Act, which sanctioned and froze the assets of Russian leaders complicit in human rights violations. He survived two assassination attempts by the Kremlin in 2015 and 2017 yet returned to the country to organize on behalf of Russian opposition movements like Open Russia.
His public denunciation of the Russian government’s acts of aggression amid the Russia-Ukraine war led him to face 25 years of imprisonment in a maximum security prison in Omsk, Siberia. He was released in August after a prisoner exchange deal negotiated by the United States and German governments, through which Russia released 16 prisoners. In exchange, Russia received eight prisoners.
During the lecture, Kara-Murza told the story of Vladimir Bukovsky, a Soviet dissident who returned to Russia in 1991 and attempted to convince Boris Yeltsin — the first President of modern Russia — to open the archives documenting Soviet aggression and to hold the former regime accountable in public trials. Other activists also worked to pass legislation preventing former Communist officials from holding political office again, which would have prevented Putin from taking power, Kara-Murza noted.
The bill had more than 50% public support from the Russian population but was never passed. The Soviet archives were closed to the public shortly after they opened and Yeltsin was never convinced to hold public tribunals for Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) leaders.
“The inertia of post-Soviet bureaucracy proved stronger than the urgency to turn the page on the totalitarian past,” Kara-Murza said.
Kara-Murza believed the lack of “transparency and accountability” ultimately set the stage for Putin’s rise and Russia’s return to autocratic rule.
Kara-Murza also cautioned that Russia’s failure to achieve lasting democracy was also a result of the failures of Western democracies who were “unable or unwilling to fully embrace that nascent democratic Russia into its ranks.” He described the hesitancy with which North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) officials responded to Yeltsin’s request for Russia to join NATO.
“This hesitancy on the part of the West left many Russians feeling that they were being kept at the doorstep,” Kara-Murza said. “It is very skillfully played by Putin’s propaganda in its efforts to turn Russians away from the West.”
When asked about the war in Ukraine, Kara-Murza encouraged the audience to remember the “thousands of both prisoners of war and civilian hostages” from Ukraine held in Russia. “Ukrainians were my neighbors in Omsk [prison],” Kara-Murza said.
He also strongly denounced the idea that all Russians were responsible for the atrocities in Ukraine, asking the world to remember that “the real criminals are those people in the Kremlin who started the war in Ukraine, not those of us who are in prison because we opposed it.”
Lev Pushel, a second-year Ph.D. student in history who attended the lecture, said he considers Kara-Murza a hero and admires his work in fighting for the liberation of all Russian political prisoners and Ukrainian territories. Pushel said that while he disagrees with some of Kara-Murza’s points, he appreciates how Kara-Murza delved into the history of Russia in the 90s.
Sophia Browder ’28, also in attendance, told The Daily she thought “it was a really inspiring event, and [she’s] really happy to see Vladimir [Kara-Murza] out of prison.”
Kara-Murza concluded by looking to Russia’s future.
“There will have to be a full and public reckoning by Russian society of the crimes committed by Putin’s regime,” Kara-Murza said, naming the war crimes committed by Putin’s regime in Ukraine, the assassination of Russian dissidents and the persecution of political prisoners.
Kara-Murza also outlined the responsibilities of the rest of the world, stating, “There will have to be a roadmap from the international community on how to assist a post-Putin Russia in their time of transition and how to reintegrate into a rules-based international order.”
“This is about the future,” Kara-Murza said. “There will be another chance for change in Russia.”