A British citizen has lifted the lid on his harrowing ordeal inside Vladimir Putin’s toughest gulag, where he spent nearly a year in harsh solitary confinement.
Russian-British dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza faced a brutal solo stretch locked away for 23-and-a-half hours daily after criticising Putin’s Russian onslaught on Ukraine.
Last month saw Kara-Murza’s release following a historic prison swap orchestrated by the USA with the Kremlin, and the dissident has since safely landed back on UK soil. Talking to the Independent, he confessed to talking to walls whilst losing grip of reality during his solitary confinement.
He reckons his get-out-of-jail card came just in nick of time, pointing to fellow campaigner Alexei Navalny’s death in February which Kara-Murza thinks was a Kremlin hit job as proof of the grim peril he escaped.
He revealed: “Mentally, psychologically, emotionally, just to be locked up in a cupboard day after day, week after week, month after month, without as much as saying hello to anybody, it’s really, really not easy.
“After about two or three weeks, your mind really starts playing tricks on you. You start forgetting words. You start forgetting names. You start speaking to walls. You stop understanding what’s real and what’s imaginary,” reports the Express.
His arrest came hot on the heels of Putin’s Ukraine bombardment back in April 2022, snatched up in Moscow just a couple of months post-invasion kick-off.
A year on, in April 2023, he was sentenced in a sham trial and exiled to a prison in the bleak Omsk, Siberia. Putin’s adversary was confined to a tiny cell and only permitted to walk in a circle for half an hour each day.
He was handed a 25-year prison sentence, and Kara-Murza is certain he wouldn’t have survived if he had been made to serve the full term.
The 43 year old stated: “No one can survive 25 years in a Russian gulag, especially after the two poisonings I’ve been through. It was a death sentence.”
(Image: AFP via Getty Images)
Kara-Murza has reportedly survived two poisoning attempts by the Kremlin in the past decade. In 2015, he fell ill during a meeting in Moscow, where he was rushed to hospital and diagnosed with kidney failure.
After his discharge from the hospital, Kara-Murza said it was “difficult to believe it was an accident,” but conceded there was no way of knowing for sure whether he was deliberately poisoned. He was hospitalised again in 2017, where he was treated by the same medical team and put into a medically-induced coma.
Kara-Murza was among the 16 prisoners released from Russia in the prisoner exchange, with the Kremlin receiving eight Russians in return.
During his terrifying time in prison, he was penalised by guards for minor infractions like unbuttoning his top button.
(Image: (Image: PA))
He suddenly vanished from IK-6 and mysteriously resurfaced days later at IK-7 penal colony, known as one of Russia’s toughest prisons. The jail bosses claimed the shuffle was due to his “consistent violation of the rules”.
He talked to his family, including his three kids, only three times in 2023 and reckons it’s a “miracle” he survived at all.
With his faith to back him up, taking a crack at learning Spanish, and his wife battling tooth and nail for his freedom, Kara-Murza has chalked down these factors as essential for weathering the storm in the gulag. Stuck in solitary, he boosted his spirits by reminding himself: “I know I am right.”
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