Vladimir Kara-Murza

The Latvian agronomist and publisher Jānis Bisenieks|lv (1864–1923) was their older brother.

His father was a great grandson of Latvian revolutionary Voldemārs Bisenieks (1884–1938), and great-grand-nephew of Latvia's first Ambassador to Great Britain, Georgs Bisenieks (1885–1941), both of whom were shot by the NKVD.

Based on the original 1906 parliamentary record and contemporary newspaper reports, as well as memoirs by participants of the events, the book was launched in both Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

He is related to Sergey Kara-Murza (born 1939), a Soviet/Russian historian, chemist, and philosopher.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Kara-Murza (Владимир Владимирович Кара-Мурза; born 7 September 1981) is a Russian and British political activist, journalist, author, filmmaker, and political prisoner.

A protégé of Boris Nemtsov, he is vice-chairman of Open Russia, an NGO founded by Russian businessman and former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, which promotes civil society and democracy in Russia.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Kara-Murza was born in Moscow on 7 September 1981, the son of Russian journalist and television host Vladimir Alexeyevich Kara-Murza (1959–2019), an outspoken critic of Leonid Brezhnev and supporter of reforms under Boris Yeltsin.

He is Jewish, as is his mother.

He worked as London correspondent for a succession of Russian media outlets, including Novye Izvestia from 1997 to 2000, Kommersant from September 2000 to June 2003, and the radio station Ekho Moskvy from September 2001 to June 2003.

In 2002, he was editor-in-chief of the London-based financial publication Russian Investment Review.

Kara-Murza then briefly became foreign affairs correspondent of Kommersant (July 2003 to April 2004) and Washington correspondent for the BBC (December 2004 to December 2005).

In April 2004 he took over as the Washington bureau chief of the RTVi television network, a post he held for the next nine years.

In 2005, Kara-Murza produced a four-part TV documentary, They Chose Freedom, dedicated to the history of the Soviet dissident movement.

The documentary was based on interviews with Russian dissidents, including Vladimir Bukovsky, Elena Bonner and Sergei Kovalev.

It was first aired in October 2005.

The documentary has since been screened at various locations in Europe and North America, with subtitles added in English.

In 2011, Kara-Murza published his first book, Reform or Revolution: The Quest for Responsible Government in the First Russian State Duma (in Russian only), which recounts the unsuccessful attempt by the Cadets or Constitutional Democratic Party to form a government during the brief existence of the first Russian Parliament or Duma from April to July 1906.

He was elected to the Coordinating Council of the Russian Opposition in 2012, and served as deputy leader of the People's Freedom Party from 2015 to 2016.

He has directed two documentaries, They Chose Freedom and Nemtsov.

As of 2021, he acts as Senior Fellow to the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights.

On 1 September 2012 he was dismissed from this job.

Only hours after the closing ceremony in Sochi, a Moscow court handed prison sentences to seven of the May 2012 Bolotnaya Square protestors.

Pressure was brought to bear not only within Russia.

On 24 March 2014, Kara-Murza, Anne Applebaum, and Vladimir Bukovsky took part in a discussion following a London screening of the film.

In late 2014 and early 2015, he wrote about a number of anti democratic trends in Russia.

President Vladimir Putin, for example, had resumed the Soviet practice of stripping dissidents of their Russian citizenship.

As a result of this and other acts, Kara-Murza urged the Council of Europe not to restore Russia's voting rights, suspended since the annexation of Crimea.

Kremlin SWAT teams, he wrote in December 2014, were breaking up opposition meetings.

Putin's word was therefore "void of value", wrote Kara-Murza, citing as evidence the false statements made by the Russian President and his broken promises.

Putin soft-pedaled his response to the opposition during the Sochi Olympics, Kara-Murza wrote in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, published on 26 February 2014.

Now that the international event was over, the Russian president was rapidly returning to his former oppressive behaviour.

He is a member of the Kara-Murza family, who are descendants of a Tatar aristocrat who settled in Moscow and converted to Christianity in the 15th century AD. The surname name Kara-Murza translated means "Black Prince" or "Dark Lord".

Kara-Murza earned a BA and an MA degree in history at Trinity Hall, Cambridge.

With his wife Yevgenia, he has three children.

Kara-Murza became a journalist at the age of 16.

He was awarded the Civil Courage Prize in 2018.

In April 2022, Kara-Murza was arrested on charges of disobeying police orders; later his arrest was extended after new charges of "discrediting" the military were introduced, and in October, new charges of treason were introduced against him.

Amnesty International and others called the charges politically motivated for his anti-war views.

In April 2023, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

In October 2022, Kara-Murza was awarded the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize.