Vladimir Kara-Murza’s mother speaks to the BBC

Imagine being in court docket and seeing your son – a authorities critic – sentenced to 25 years in jail.

Elena Gordon is aware of precisely how that feels.

Last month Elena stood beside the dock – a glass cage – in a Moscow courtroom. Locked inside it was her son Vladimir Kara-Murza.

One of President Putin’s most vocal critics, he was convicted of treason and different alleged crimes and jailed for 1 / 4 of a century.

Elena, who lives overseas, had flown to Moscow for the verdict.

“I was the only one from the family and friends to get into the courtroom,” Elena tells me.

“Vladimir hadn’t been aware that I would be there. So, he was a little bit shocked, but hopefully pleasantly surprised. I had been prepared [for this outcome], although I thought they would give him 24 years and eleven months, as a kind of an insult. In the end they decided to act blatantly. They gave him the maximum.”

Since her son’s conviction, Elena has managed to safe two conferences or svidaniya with Vladimir in jail.

“He’s become very thin,” Elena says.

“I’m apprehensive about his well being. But he is courageous, clearly, and he says his spirit is unbroken.

“He is surprisingly optimistic. He believes in the way forward for Russia, and he believes in his personal position in the future democratic Russia. But by way of his personal speedy future he’s lifelike. He is preparing to be transferred to a penal colony.”

“What about you, his mother?” I ask Elena. “Are you optimistic or pessimistic?”

“I not solely hope, I imagine that I’ll see Vladimir free,” she replies, “and I do not intend to wait twenty-five years for that.”

For greater than a decade Vladimir Kara-Murza has been a high-profile opponent of the Kremlin. He helped persuade Western governments to impose sanctions, together with visa bans and asset freezes, on Russian officers engaged in corruption and human rights abuses.

Such persistent activism sparked anger in the corridors of Russian energy. He survived two mysterious poisonings, which he and his supporters have linked to the Russian authorities.

In the West he spoke out in opposition to political persecution at residence and in opposition to the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Last yr, in a speech to lawmakers in the US state of Arizona, he condemned the “dictatorial regime in the Kremlin.” Soon after he returned to Moscow the place he was arrested.

“Vladimir will need to have identified he was placing himself in peril by returning to Russia,” I suggest to his mother. “Did you attempt to cease him coming again?”

“I did,” replies Elena. “It’s a painful matter for me, as a mother. I can not distance myself and see him as a political determine solely. He is first and utmost my son.

“I begged him not to go back to Russia. He promised to think about this. And as you see, the result of his thinking was negative.”

“Has he expressed any regret to you that he returned?”

“No, never. Never,” says Elena. “I remorse it very a lot. I communicate for myself.

“He has rules. He actually believes that he have to be along with his nation and along with his folks, and that he would haven’t any proper to have a say in the future democratic Russia if he had fled and stayed in safety.”

Vladimir Kara-Murza’s destiny is a reminder of the hazard by which politicians, activists, people who problem the Kremlin are placing themselves. Most of Russia’s main opposition figures have both fled the nation or are actually in jail.

“I’m afraid that Russia has changed into a dictatorship,” says Elena Gordon. “To me all of it appears fairly grotesque, truly – that in the 21st century we see round us what was described in the anti-utopias of the 20th century. It’s a horrible regression. It’s a disgrace.”