Please join us for a dialogue between Vladimir Kara-Murza (Chairman of the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom and Vice Chairman of Open Russia) and Keith Gessen (George T. Delacorte Assistant Professor of Magazine Journalism, Columbia University) on challenges and prospects in Russian civil society today. Ann Cooper (CBS Professor of Professional Practice in International Journalism, Columbia University) will provide the opening remarks and introduction.
Vladimir Kara-Murza, winner of the 2018 Courage Prize, is vice chairman of the Open Russia movement and chairman of the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom. He was a longtime colleague of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov. Kara-Murza is a former deputy leader of the People’s Freedom Party and was a candidate for the Russian State Duma. He has testified on Russian affairs before parliaments in Europe and North America and played a key role in the passage of the Magnitsky Act, a U.S. law that imposed targeted sanctions on Russian human rights violators. Twice, in 2015 and 2017, he was poisoned with an unknown substance and left in a coma; the attempts on his life were widely viewed as politically motivated. Kara-Murza writes regular commentary for the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, World Affairs, and other periodicals, and has previously worked as a journalist for Russian broadcast and print media, including Ekho Moskvy and Kommersant. He directed two documentary films, They Chose Freedom (2005) and Nemtsov (2016). He is the author of Reform or Revolution (Moscow 2011) and a contributor to Russia’s Choices: The Duma Elections and After (London 2003), Russian Liberalism: Ideas and People (Moscow 2007), Why Europe Needs a Magnitsky Law (London 2013), and Boris Nemtsov and Russian Politics: Power and Resistance (Stuttgart 2018). He has led international efforts to commemorate Nemtsov, including with the 2018 Washington D.C. law designating the block in front of the Russian Embassy as Boris Nemtsov Plaza. Kara-Murza is a recipient of the Magnitsky Human Rights Award, the Sakharov Prize for Journalism as an Act of Conscience, and the Geneva Summit Courage Award.
Keith Gessen is the author of A Terrible Country, a novel, and the editor and co-translator of Kirill Medvedev’s It’s No Good. He teaches journalism at Columbia University.
