CWC Docs: Antidote

Vladimir Kara-Murza is a Russian politician, author, historian, documentary filmmaker, and former political prisoner. A close colleague of the slain opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, he served as deputy leader of the People’s Freedom Party and was a candidate for the Russian Parliament. Leading diplomatic efforts on behalf of the opposition, Kara-Murza played a key role in the adoption of Magnitsky sanctions against top Russian officials by the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, Canada, and Australia. For this work, he was twice poisoned and left in a coma; a joint media investigation by Bellingcat, The Insider, and Der Spiegel has identified FSB officers behind the attacks. In April 2022, Kara-Murza was arrested in Moscow for publicly denouncing the invasion of Ukraine and war crimes committed by Russian forces. Following a closed trial at the Moscow City Court, he was sentenced to 25 years for “high treason” and kept in solitary confinement at a maximum-security prison in Siberia. He was released in August 2024 as part of the largest East-West prisoner exchange since the Cold War negotiated by the U.S. and German governments.

Kara-Murza is a contributing writer at The Washington Post, winning the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for his columns written from prison, and has previously worked for Echo of Moscow, BBC, RTVi, Kommersant, World Affairs, and other media organizations. He has directed three documentary films and is the author or contributor to several books on Russian history and politics. Kara-Murza currently serves as vice president at the Free Russia Foundation, as chairman of the Freedom for Political Prisoners Initiative at the McCain Institute, as senior advisor at Human Rights First, and as senior fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights. He was the founding chairman of the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom and has led successful international efforts to commemorate Nemtsov, including street designations in Washington D.C. and London. He has lectured at universities worldwide, including Cambridge, Harvard, and Stanford, and has taught a seminar course on Russia at the University of Chicago. Kara-Murza is a recipient of several awards, including the Council of Europe’s Václav Havel Human Rights Prize, and is an Honorary Fellow of Trinity Hall at the University of Cambridge. He holds an M.A. in History from Cambridge.

Sara Pankenier Weld is a professor of Russian in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at UC Santa Barbara, as well as an affiliate of the Comparative Literature Program. She specializes in Russian literature, comparative literature, and Scandinavian literature, and researches childhood across disciplinary and national boundaries. Her books include Voiceless Vanguard: The Infantilist Aesthetic of the Russian Avant-Garde (2014, published in Russian translation in 2023), An Ecology of the Russian Avant-Garde Picturebook (2018), and the forthcoming Miniature Revelations: Childhood in Nabokov’s Writings. She also advocates for the humanities, languages, and children, and was one of UCSB’s inaugural OpEd Project’s Public Voices fellows in 2024. She was a visiting fellow at Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge in 2025, and she is now an inaugural Arnhold Faculty Fellow (2025-2027) at UCSB. For the past three years, she has served as a faculty co-convener of the IHC Global Childhood Media Research Focus Group at UCSB, and she is currently President of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature, with members from over fifty countries.