I nearly died by poisoning for defying Putin
Leading activist in Russia’s repressed opposition describes ‘politically motivated’ attack
THE sweat, nausea and a galloping heartbeat arrived so suddenly Vladimir Kara-Murza had no time to feel afraid.
“Within the space of 10 to 15 minutes I went from feeling normal to feeling horrible. I was having palpitations, a massive heart rate, sweating, vomiting, losing consciousness.”
Mr Kara-Murza, the deputy leader of PRP-Parnas, a Russian opposition party, was half-way through a routine appointment with two colleagues in Mos- cow last May when the sickness struck.
He still does not know when or how the poison entered his system, even whether he ingested it with food or liq- uid. As he lapsed into unconsciousness, he would not know that he spent the next 24 hours being shuttled between three hospitals as doctors struggled to work out what was wrong with him.
“My vital organs began to fail, one by one: lungs, liver, kidneys, one after another like a cascade,” he said. “The doctors told my wife I only had a five per cent chance of survival.”
In the end, Mr Kara-Murza was saved by doctors at Moscow’s Pirogov hospital. They diagnosed him with “acute intoxication of unidentified origin” – some kind of poisoning – and put him on haemodialysis to clean his blood.
After six months of rehabilitation in the US, Mr Kara-Murza is back on his feet and back in Russia. At the age of 34, he walks with a cane because he has yet to regain full control of his left side.
But he has two aims: to run an antiKremlin political campaign, and to hunt down the people he believes tried to kill him. Mr Kara-Murza has submitted a formal request for Russia’s Investigative Committee, the country’s version of the FBI, to open an inquiry into what he believes is a case of attempted murder motivated by political hatred.
“I have no doubt that this was a deliberate poisoning, that it was intended to kill, and that it was motivated by my political and public activities in the Russian opposition,” he said.
Mr Kara-Murza believes he is the latest in a series of activists, politicians and journalists – all critics of Vladimir Putin – to have been targeted in recent years. Three months before Mr KaraMurza fell ill, his close friend, the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, was shot dead outside the Kremlin on Feb 27. Mr Kara-Murza fears that although five suspects have been arrested, the authorities may protect the “customer” who commissioned them.
Nemtsov’s murder seemed to mark a grim watershed in the intimidation of the regime’s critics, he said. “I don’t think it can get much worse than when a leader of the opposition is assassinated 200 yards away from the Kremlin wall,” said Mr Kara-Murza.
In his own case, he does not know who poisoned him, or on whose orders. He speculates that he may have been targeted for his association with Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the exiled former oligarch, whose Open Russia foundation he works for and who paid for his treatment in the United States. Another possible motive, he said, was his role in campaigning for the Magnitsky Act, a US law that imposes targeted sanctions against Russian officials suspected of involvement in human rights abuses.
Of the alleged poisoning,he added: “It is the special services or people from the special services who have access to these kinds of things.”
Russia’s fractious democratic opposition is effectively banned from most national television stations, vilified by the pro-Kremlin media and has no presence in parliament. But this could be the regime’s undoing, Mr Kara-Murza predicts. “They’ve destroyed every legitimate, constitutional way of changing a government. So when change comes, it will come as a revolution in some form. It’s our responsibility to make that revolution a peaceful one. A velvet revolution, if you like.”