Washington D.C. – VOA, September 09, 2024
Being able to open a door whenever she wants is one of the many freedoms Alsu Kurmasheva is enjoying after months of wrongful detention in Russia.
“I’m enjoying freedom. I’m loving every minute of it,” the American journalist told VOA, just a few weeks after she was freed as part of a historic prisoner swap between the United States and Russia.
An editor with VOA’s sister outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague, Kurmasheva was back in Washington late last month to accept an award from the National Press Club. The visit was the start of what she described as her “thank you tour.”
A dual U.S.-Russian national, Kurmasheva traveled to Russia in May 2023 to visit her ailing mother in the Tatarstan city of Kazan. But authorities blocked her from leaving and later jailed her for more than nine months on bogus charges.
“What happened to me was so wrong, and it shouldn’t happen to any innocent person. It shouldn’t happen to any journalist,” Kurmasheva said. “I was jailed for 288 days, and every minute of it is suffering. It’s going through humiliation. And inmates in Russia and Belarus, they don’t have any rights.”
In prison, daily life was monotonous for Kurmasheva. “It was endless,” she said, adding that she forced herself to remain optimistic.
“I couldn’t write in my letters to my mom or to my husband or family or friends that I was falling apart, that I was collapsing, because I knew they were trying so hard to get me out,” she said.
Letters that she received from supporters from all over the world helped, said Kurmasheva, holding up some of the postcards she received from supporters in New York and Oregon.
“When my spirit was really low, I just opened my cards and letters, and I kept reading them,” she said.
At one point during her detention, Kurmasheva shared a cell with nine other women. There was more social interaction, she said, but that didn’t make the situation any easier.
“The doors were still locked, and every woman was there with her own bad luck and uncertain future,” she said.
When it was time for Kurmasheva’s release, her captors obscured that she was being freed, telling the journalist she was heading to a destination other than Moscow.
It wasn’t until she was hugging her husband and daughters at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington that reality set in. “Only then I felt it was real,” Kurmasheva said. “That was the moment I was dreaming of for months and months.”
