Persecuted Russian Advocate for Freedom Vladimir Kara-Murza Has Won a Pulitzer Prize

Vladimir Kara-Murza, the Russian historian, author and politician who is a leading advocate for freedom against the tyrannical regime of Vladimir Putin, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for journalism for his columns, published in an American newspaper, that were written from prison detailing his experience as a persecuted Russian dissident. He is serving a 25-year sentence for his speech before the Arizona House of Representatives in which he criticized the ex-Soviet intelligence officer Putin’s aggression against the former Soviet Republic of Ukraine—the longest sentence any critic of the war has received. The British-Russian citizen Kara-Murza’s story is similar to that of late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Twice poisoned and then imprisoned by a judicial system controlled by the tyrannical regime, he has been transferred to a prison in Siberia, and sent to solitary confinement for lengthy periods. Kara-Murza’s wife and children live in exile in America and advocate for his release. Other Russian dissidents have won other prestigious awards, such as the Nobel Prize for Peace and the Sakharov Award as Putin, who is trying to restore the Soviet/Russian Empire has supplanted the elective representative government by which he came to power with autocracy under the appearance of legitimacy from elections that are not free and fair, as he has become increasingly authoritarian and tramples on basic freedoms.