On the day of Alexei Navalny’s funeral in Moscow last week, I held my nose and turned on Russian state television. The evening news on state TV, which is still watched by millions across Russia, led with a funeral. Except it wasn’t Navalny’s. Nikolai Ryzhkov, a former prime minister of the Soviet Union who died at the age of 94 on February 28, was also buried on the same day. He laid in state in Moscow’s main Christ the Savior Cathedral, surrounded by a handful of solemn apparatchiks from Russia’s ruling party. There was no mention on state TV of the alternative vision of Russia that was being buried that day or of the tens of thousands of people who defied the heavy police presence and walked across the city to pay their final respects to Navalny. 

With Navalny dead, the chilling title of Russia’s highest-profile political prisoner now belongs to Vladimir Kara-Murza. Kara-Murza, a 42-year-old historian, journalist and opposition politician, is currently held in Siberia, in the same type of punitive solitary confinement cell that Navalny had occupied before he was transferred to a penal colony in the Arctic, where he died on February 16. 

Kara-Murza, who comes from a long line of Russian dissidents, was arrested in April 2022 and sentenced to 25 years in prison for charges related to his criticism of President Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine. By then, he had already survived being poisoned twice, once in 2015 and again in 2017. In February 2021, a Bellingcat investigation uncovered that Kara-Murza had been followed by the same unit of Russia’s Federal Security Service that allegedly poisoned Navalny with a nerve agent in 2020. Kara-Murza was also a close associate of Boris Nemtsov, another slain Russian opposition politician who was gunned down in Moscow in 2015. 

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the eventual murder of Navalny, and Russia’s descent into a Stalinesque dictatorship were still only hypothetical scenarios when Kara-Murza and I sat down for an interview in Tbilisi, Georgia, five years ago. He was there for a conference. We talked about disinformation, his hopes for Russia and what makes him angry. (Spoiler: It was the complacency of the so-called “golden billion,” the people who live in democratic countries and take their freedoms for granted, while so much of the world is not free.