Press Freedom Under Fire: Kara-Murza Offers Stark Warning in Marie Colvin Distinguished Lecture

Russian journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza has survived two poisonings linked to Russian security services.

In April 2023, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for speaking out against the invasion of Ukraine, spending months in solitary confinement in Siberia before being released in August 2024 as part of the largest Russia-West prisoner exchange since the Cold War.

On March 10, Kara-Murza addressed a capacity crowd at the Charles B. Wang Center, offering a riveting Marie Colvin Distinguished Lecture highlighting the suppression of independent media by authoritarian regimes, using Russia as a case study.

"I feel privileged to be with you tonight, and it is a special honor to be delivering this year's Marie Colvin lecture, an enduring tribute to a courageous journalist who lived her life and who gave her life in the pursuit of truth," began Kara-Murza. "There's nothing dictatorships hate more than truth, and the first targets in that quest for absolute power are almost always independent media voices."

From 1917 to 2000, more than 450 opposition newspapers were shut down in Russia. In 2000, Vladimir Putin's government raided NTV, Russia's largest private media holding, and later took over its studios. The closure of independent media continued, with TV6 shut down in 2002 and TVS in 2003.

"With the closure of TVS, Russia's last nationwide, independent television network, the government had re-established its Soviet state and monopoly on the largest source of information for millions of our citizens," he said. "The story of Russian media since then has been a story of a non-stop tightening of the screws, with the number of news outlets that are independent of the government shrinking and shrinking with each coming year."

The remaining pockets of uncensored media in Russia were destroyed in early 2022, when Putin launched a war against Ukraine. Within days of the invasion, Russia's Parliament enacted a package of laws making it a criminal offense not only to oppose the war, but to even report about it accurately.

In the eyes of the Russian state, said Kara-Murza, there was no war in Ukraine, no deliberate bombings of schools, hospitals and maternity wards, and anyone who said otherwise was now a criminal.

"George Orwell could not have known how faithfully his dystopian reality would be recreated in Putin's Russia," he said. "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. The same week those laws were adopted, Russia's remaining major independent media outlets were closed down by the government. And at the same time, the Russian government imposed a blanket blockade of the internet, shutting off Russian citizens' access to social media and independent media outlets that continue to operate from abroad."

Kara-Murza noted that this year marks the 26th anniversary of Putin's "war on truth."

"And when I use the word war, this is not just a figure of speech, because the casualties of this war include not only independent media outlets or opposition political parties, but also very real human lives."

Before taking questions from the audience, Kara-Murza ended on a personal note, paying tribute to fellow Russian journalists who lost their lives working to bring truth to Russian citizens, and warned that political repression in Russia has intensified today and urged both people in Russia and the west to be prepared to meet the moment when a post-Putin era can begin.

"It's shocking that today's Russia holds more political prisoners than the whole Soviet Union did in the mid-1980s," he said, adding that those who have publicly opposed the war in Ukraine now make up the fastest-growing category.

In the Q&A that followed, Kara-Murza was asked how he survived two years in solitary confinement.

"If you look at the history of Russia over the past three centuries or more, you will see a constant alternation between repression and reform, repression and reform," he said. "This dictatorship will fall, and there will be a period of reform. That's how it's been for the past three centuries, why would it be different now? Knowing that helped me sustain myself, because I knew this is not forever, even though it may seem forever. But one day it will be no more."

Kara-Murza ended by citing a documentary he made in 2005 about the Soviet dissident movement, They Chose Freedom. One of the subjects for the film was Vladimir Bukovski, a Soviet and Russian human rights activist and writer. Bukovski was a prominent figure in the Soviet dissident movement, spending a total of twelve years in psychiatric prison-hospitals, labor camps, and prisons during Brezhnev's rule before being expelled from the Soviet Union in 1976.

"I asked him this same question, 'What made you go through all this? How did you survive? How do you stay sane?'," said Kara-Murza. "I was expecting some sort of long, detailed response, but he just looked at me and he said, 'I knew that I was right.' I didn't understand what he meant at the time, but I certainly do now. The knowledge that you are right no matter what happens is really, really important. The entire time in that Siberian prison, I knew that I was not the criminal. They are the ones who started this war, they are the ones killing kids in Ukraine every day. They are the criminals, not me. When you know that you're right, the fear and doubt go away."

Provost Carl W. Lejuez thanked Colvin Center director Sarah Baxter and Stephanie Kelton, interim dean of the School of Communication and Journalismfor hosting the event.

"Our world is full of opinions masquerading as facts and lies masquerading as truth, and it's never been more difficult to tell one from the other," Lejuez said. "Journalists and journalism, with their clear commitment to ethics and doing the hard work of verification, are a crucial piece of the unending global effort to distill truth from fiction and lies from reality. As a leading university, it's Stony Brook's responsibility and our honor to host these conversations."

- Robert Emproto