UK – The Independent, September 24, 2024
From her mother’s balcony in her hometown in southwest Russia, Alsu Kurmasheva saw the swarm of men in black masks on her street and knew they were coming for her.
Four months earlier, in June 2023, the Russian-American journalist who worked for US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty had been detained at Kazan airport when she tried to leave the country. The mother-of-two, who usually lives in Prague, had made the trip back to Russia to care for her ailing mother.
On her way out, the authorities confiscated her Russian and American passports and accused her of not declaring her US passport, which is illegal in Russia.
Now, she braced herself for the worst.
“I saw the men in masks in my neighborhood, and I didn’t have a good feeling. I called my husband, I called my lawyer, and I prepared myself. I tried to prepare my mother,” she told The Independent from New York, where she had been speaking in a session about press freedoms alongside former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
She waited for the men to burst through the door and “storm the flat.”
“From that moment, I just shut down all my emotions. I didn’t cry for days.”
That would be the beginning of a 10-month torment that, after a secret trial, saw her sentenced to six-and-a-half years in jail for “spreading false news”.
It ended in August 2024 with Ms. Kurmasheva being included in the largest US-Russian prisoner swap in post-Soviet history. Among the 16 people that Russia released with her were American citizen and Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and Vladimir Kara-Murza, a prominent British-Russian dissident who spoke of his own ordeal in Russia’s gulags in an exclusive interview with The Independent last week. As part of the deal, Russian security service hitman Vadim Krasikov was freed by Germany.
During those months in prison in Kazan, Ms. Kurmasheva was effectively held in solitary confinement, barred from phone calls to her family, denied medical treatment, and deprived of US consular visits. Her jailers applied crushing psychological pressure to try to break her.
“They would tell me that no one wanted me to be released, that nobody was responding to the requests to free me, that the whole world had forgotten about me,” she said, her voice cracking.
“They deprived me of phone calls to my daughters. I couldn’t see family. They kept saying no one’s coming for you, you’re here forever,” she added.
She said that in prison she had dreamed of being freed and seeing her daughters again, even during the process of release.
“Everything was so fragile. I didn’t believe it until I had my family in front of me. It was an incredible moment.”
“My message to my colleagues behind bars is to stay strong, stay resilient, and to the families: keep fighting for your loved ones, because it is possible. It’s hard, but it is possible.”
