Update. "Чингисхан" в стране янки

Last week I was heartbroken to learn that my dear friend Vladimir Kara-Murza, had been hospitalized in Moscow. Those of us who know the work of this brave Russian patriot could not afford to hope or assume that he was suffering some ordinary illness. Just two years ago, under mysterious circumstances, Vladimir grew very ill and fell into a coma. Many suspected he was poisoned to intimidate him — or worse. That is why last week’s news signaled another shadowy strike against a brilliant voice who has defied the tyranny of Putin’s Russia.

Many Americans are not familiar with the life of Vladimir Kara-Murza, but it is one that reflects the very best qualities of leadership — courage, selflessness, idealism, and patriotism. And it is a life dedicated to the principles we all hold dear — truth and justice, freedom and fairness, human rights and human dignity.

He is the deputy leader of the People’s Freedom Party, Russia’s leading pro-democracy party.

His great-grandfather George Bisenieks was a Latvian diplomat, who was captured after the Soviet invasion in 1940 and was executed by Stalin’s henchmen in Moscow in 1941. Another of his great-grandfathers, Voldemars Bisenieks, took part in Russia’s 1905 revolution. In 1938, he too was executed by the Soviets.

After Boris’s assassination, many urged Vladimir not to return to Russia. And he had every reason not to. He knew his own family’s history with tyranny. He knew what happened to Boris. And he knew all too well about the culture of impunity that Putin has created in Russia, where individuals are routinely persecuted and attacked for their beliefs, including by the Russian government, and no one is ever held responsible.

He knew about Sergei Yushenkov, who was investigating the Kremlin’s potential role in the 1999 apartment bombings in Russia when he was shot and killed at the entrance of his apartment.

He knew about American journalist Paul Klebnikov, who was investigating Russian government connections to organized crime when he was shot to death in Moscow in 2004.

He knew about Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist, human rights activist, and fierce critic of Putin’s brutal war in Chechnya, who was murdered in the stairwell of her apartment building on Putin’s birthday in 2006.

He knew about former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who exposed the Putin regime’s massive corruption, ties to organized crime, and involvement in assassination and murder, and was poisoned to death in 2006 with a radioactive isotope in a brazen act of nuclear terrorism.

And he knew about Sergei Magnitsky…that most unlikely of heroes in the cause of freedom…the humble tax attorney who blew the whistle on tax fraud and large-scale theft by Russian government officials, only to be charged with their crimes and die in a squalid cell inside the prison that once held the political opponents of the tsars and the Soviets.