The family of Hersh Goldberg-Polin appears on a screen via video link during a news conference in Tel Aviv

Former US president Trump's hush money criminal trial continues in New York City, USA - 13 May 2024

Trump

The Washington Post

US-POLITICS-JUSTICE-COURT-TRUMP

Contributor

For The Washington Post

(Chris Gash for The Washington Post)

APTOPIX Israel Holocaust Remembrance

op-allen-democracypromo

Stormy Daniels

UGCR

RUSSIA-US-DIPLOMACY-BASKET-COURT

(Michelle Kondrich/The Washington Post)

**ONE TIME USE ONLY FOR OP-LAMOTT

Sonia Sotomayor,Clarence Thomas,John Roberts,Samuel Alito,Elena Kagan,Amy Coney Barrett,Neil Gorsuch,Brett Kavanaugh,Ketanji Brown Jackson,Michael Dreeben

Children holding hands

ONE TIME USE FOR OP-CARNEY KIDS 

FEDERALISTGALA

Four Dalmatian Puppy

other

People visit the site of the Nova festival, in Reim

Fake Electors Indictment Arizona

Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

Show NLP summaries collection recirc on article pages

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Washington Post contributing columnist who has been imprisoned in Russia since April 2022, was awarded the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

Arrested voicing his opposition to the war in Ukraine, Kara-Murza courageously continued to send his incisive, historically informed columns about the Russian system to The Post from his prison cell. The Pulitzer judges <a href="https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/vladimir-kara-murza-contributor-washington-post" target=_blank>recognized</a> Kara-Mura’s “passionate columns written under great personal risk from his prison cell, warning of the consequences of dissent in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and insisting on a democratic future for his country.”

In April 2023, Kara-Murza received a 25-year prison sentence. He is being held in a prison colony in Omsk in central Russia. Here are the seven columns for which he was honored:

1. Many Russians refuse to be silent accomplices to Putin’s war

“Some people in the West are asking why more Russians aren’t protesting against Putin and his brutal war. Perhaps, a more apt observation would be that — given the circumstances and the cost — so many Russians are. According to human rights groups, since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, nearly 20,000 people have faced police detention across Russia for antiwar protests. Not a week goes by without another arrest, indictment or sentencing of antiwar protesters. Artists and journalists, politicians and priests, lawyers and police officers, students and railroad workers: Russians of different backgrounds and vocations have refused to become silent accomplices to Putin’s war, even at the cost of personal freedom.” [<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/15/kara-murza-anti-war-russian-arrests-protests/" target=_blank>Read the full column.</a>]

2. What happened when I saw Alexei Navalny

"The room on the video screen looked like a school gym. At the head of the court, under a double-headed eagle clumsily fastened to the wall, sat Moscow City Court Judge Andrei Suvorov, with his chair behind a small (also school-type) desk. His judicial gown looked strikingly out of place, given the circumstances. The room was filled with men in black masks and khaki uniforms. At a table by the wall on the left side of the screen sat the defendant surrounded by his lawyers — and it was only when he stood up to approach the camera and speak that I realized it was Alexei Navalny." [<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/30/kara-murza-navalny-russia-prison/" target=_blank>Read the full column.</a>]

3. Putin thinks he can bend history to his will

“As could be expected from a regime led by a KGB officer who spares no effort to whitewash and glorify the Soviet past, the new textbooks have very little to do with actual history. Instead, they resemble compilations of propaganda slogans that have for years been advanced by Kremlin officials and state media outlets.” [<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/12/karamurza-putin-russia-history-dictators/" target=_blank>Read the full column.</a>]

4. Russians are living in a frightening, distorted reality

“Propaganda is not limited to news bulletins and talk shows — it also permeates documentaries, cultural programs and even sports coverage. New Year’s Eve, when millions of Russians tune in to listen to popular songs and watch favorite movies, was also filled with propaganda messages.” [<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/17/karamurza-putin-propaganda-russia-accountability/" target=_blank>Read the full column.</a>]

5. Putin’s war on Ukraine makes a mockery of law

“Today in our country, it is not those who are waging this criminal war but those who oppose it who face judgment: Journalists who tell the truth. Artists who put up antiwar stickers. Priests who invoke the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” Teachers who call a spade a spade. Parents whose children draw antiwar pictures. Lawmakers who allow themselves to doubt the appropriateness of children’s competitions when children are being killed in a neighboring country.” [<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/07/kara-murza-putin-russia-ukraine/" target=_blank>Read the full column.</a>]

Kara-Murza delivered these remarks on April 10, 2023, at the closing session of his trial in Moscow.

“Members of the court: I was sure, after two decades spent in Russian politics, after all that I have seen and experienced, that nothing can surprise me anymore. I must admit that I was wrong. I’ve been surprised by the extent to which my trial, in its secrecy and its contempt for legal norms, has surpassed even the “trials” of Soviet dissidents in the 1960s and ’70s. And that’s not even to mention the harshness of the sentence requested by the prosecution or the talk of “enemies of the state.” In this respect, we’ve gone beyond the 1970s — all the way back to the 1930s. For me, as a historian, this is an occasion for reflection.” [<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/10/vladimir-kara-murza-final-statement-court/" target=_blank>Read the full column.</a>]

7. Change will come to Russia — abruptly and unexpectedly

“Political change in Russia always comes unexpectedly… The next time, change will come in exactly the same way — abruptly and unexpectedly. None of us knows the specific moment and specific circumstances, but it will happen in the foreseeable future. The chain of events leading to these changes was started by the regime itself [with its full-scale invasion of Ukraine] in February 2022. It’s only a matter of time.” [<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/11/russia-post-putin-democracy-window-nuremberg-lustration/" target=_blank>Read the full column.</a>]

Washington Post staff

washpost

Vladimir Kara-Murza’s Pulitzer Prize-winning commentary on Russia

the-washington-post

Michelle Kondrich

**ONE TIME USE ONLY ILLUSTRATION. MANDATORY CREDIT. For op-karamurza0409, portrait of Vladimir Kara-Murza.

Michelle Kondrich/The Washington Post

Editorials

Columns

Guest opinions

Cartoons

Submit a guest opinion

Today's Opinions newsletter

Opinions

Sign up for Democracy, Refreshed, a newsletter series on how to renovate the republic.

Opinion Columns

Opinion Columnists

Sign up for the Prompt 2024 newsletter for opinions on the biggest questions in politics

Washington Post Opinions

The Washington Post Opinions section features opinion articles, op-eds, editorials by the Editorial Board, global opinions and letters to the editor on the issues of the day. Offerings include columns by Washington Post opinion writers, political cartoons by editorial cartoonists Ann Telnaes and Michael de Adder and podcasts by Jonathan Capehart.