‘This eternity will be over soon’: Vladimir Kara-Murza, sentenced to 25 years in prison, publishes letter to supporters

Vladimir Kara-Murza, the opposition politician sentenced to 25 years in prison on a slew of charges including high treason, published, on Telegram, a letter to his supporters.

In his letter, Kara-Murza thanked everyone who had aided his case and showed their solidarity, asking them not to “say goodbye” to him too quickly, since “Russia’s reality is often very different from what the official papers say it is.”

“I really like the story recounted by the Museum of Cinema Director Naum Kleiman about his family’s exile to Siberia at the end of Stalin’s time in power,” wrote the politician.

When the new exiles were let out of the train cars onto the snow, the commandant began reciting the verdict, and one of the women in the group burst out laughing … When the commandant had left, she came up to the others and said: “Why are you all crying? If he had said we were exiled for life, I would have cried with you. But he said we’re exiled ‘for all eternity’! They think they’re masters of eternity! You’ll see: this eternity will be over soon.”

Kara-Murza thanked his attorneys, defense witnesses, and others who supported him during the trial. His grandmother, he recalled, was four years old when her father was executed by a firing squad for calls to overturning state power. Her husband later went to prison on the same charges. “Recently, I sent her a letter from jail for her 90th birthday. That’s a whole epoch, reflected in a person’s life,” the politician noted.

To his wife Evgenia, Kara-Murza wrote: “I love you. Everything will be fine. We’ll definitely see each other again.”