“Now I Feel Safe”: Prague-based journalist speaks to Czech Radio after nine months in Russian detention
Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalist, was released in a landmark prisoner exchange in August, following nine months in Russian detention. The mother of two was sentenced to 6.5 years in prison on charges of spreading false information about the Russian military. On August 1, she was finally reunited with her family, along with Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, and Paul Welan. Kurmasheva sat down to speak to Czech Radio’s Matěj Skalický about her experience.
How are you feeling?
“I feel safe, that’s the most important thing for me. And I'm free, which is pretty much exactly what I feel. I'm free to wake up in the morning when I want to or rather need to. I'm free to go out with anyone, anytime and come back, close my door myself, open my door myself. And that really is very important, it makes sense. We usually don’t think about it too much, but it's very important to me.”
How was your homecoming? How was that first meeting with your loved ones, with your family?
“I always imagined that moment in detail. I dreamt about it several times. I imagined that I would walk off the plane, my husband would hand me a white suitcase out of which I would take clean white clothes. Then he would take my hand, we would walk off together and we would never look back, never turn back, and then there would be my children waiting for me. The reality was very similar. The first time I dreamt it, it was winter, and winter in Russia, especially this last winter, was brutal, it was minus thirty. Our cell heaters didn't work for several days. I thought I was hallucinating, because that winter, the word “exchange” or possible exchange wasn’t yet being used and I couldn't imagine getting to freedom, because the future was still quite sad for me. So the winter was very dark for me. But I had that dream several times and it kept me going, gave me hope. It was a happy moment.”
So when you dreamt it, it gave you energy, it gave you something to live for and then it actually happened. Was the reality the way you dreamt it?
"I'm free to wake up in the morning when I want to or rather need to. I'm free to go out with anyone, anytime and come back, close my door myself, open my door myself. And that really is very important, it makes sense. We usually don’t think about it too much, but it's very important to me"
“It was beautiful, it was just as I imagined and even more. I had absolutely no idea, of course, of what was going on in the world, in the free world, to help set me free. And now it's been three months that I've been free, I'm home and I still don't know all the details. That's why it's very important for me to meet all the people who worked for my liberation and to learn even more details about what happened. And it's very interesting.”
You said things weren't looking very promising in the winter. That the prospects for your release, for your exchange, were not good. When did you first become aware of the plan, that it might happen?
“In the spring, late March. Communication with the investigators changed a bit. They indicated to me that there might be an exchange. I knew that there were still prominent people, Americans, ahead of me, such as Evan Gershkovich, the journalist, and Paul Whelan. And I knew that they had been in custody for a long time and would probably have priority. There was only very little hope of an exchange. So we waited and the investigators hinted at it, they said I would have to go through the trial first.”
And they started treating you a little differently, you say?
“A little better.”
A little better.
“The investigation was essentially over, they didn't have any more questions for me. I was in custody and I was waiting for something and nobody could tell me exactly what and when it was going to happen.”
What did D-Day look like? When it actually happened, you woke up in the morning and…?
“I was in Lefortovo in Moscow. They brought me there on Monday. Every person who is transferred from one detention facility to another in Russia has the right to a shower and a phone call to either a lawyer or family. I requested that, but they said not till Friday. So I asked what was going to happen on Friday. Someone from the prison service told me that even they didn't know what was going to happen, but definitely something good, so I would be able to call on Friday. It happened on Thursday, the 1st of August, so I was looking forward to Friday.
“I saved the last hundred pages of my book to read on Thursday. That was just part of my life in prison. I always had to have some plan that I could control. That was very important to me, so I saved those 100 pages.”
It's important to have a little something to look forward to.
“Exactly. So I was looking forward to finishing the book that I had with me. They brought me tea, black sweet tea, but that was all I had. And some porridge. Then I sat down to read at about eight in the morning. And suddenly the prison service brought me my suitcase, my personal things. They gave me fifteen, maybe twenty minutes to change my clothes, to sign something, that I had obtained my things and that I was leaving. Nobody answered my question about where I was going. They closed the door again and told me to be ready in twenty minutes.
“Those 20 minutes were awfully long. There is no clock, nobody knows if it was twenty or ten or two hours. But I left almost everything there, because I really hoped that was the moment that I wouldn’t need anything else from the cell. All I took with me were my diaries, postcards and letters that I had received in prison in Kazan, some medicines and that’s all. So I left with a very small bag, got on the bus where the other liberated people already were.”
I guess by then it was clear to you what was happening?
“It was clear to me then, but I was in such shock that I couldn't even speak. Evan Gershkovich was sitting behind me and I greeted him with my eyes, but we couldn't talk for a long time. We really couldn't talk until we got on the plane, because everyone was in shock.
“So it was D-Day. It was raining heavily in Moscow and of course I had a lot of emotions, I had all kinds of thoughts going through my head about my whole life. Even now, as I’m talking to you, after so many months, I still get upset... I was leaving the country not the way I imagined. For over 20 years I went there to visit my family, my mother, for my culture, my Tatar, my language. It's my country, it's where I grew up, and now suddenly - the country didn’t want me.”
On the other hand, I'm sorry to butt in, but that was a happy moment because of what you had been through and you were probably very happy to leave those places.
“That was the other thought, which of course was stronger than the first one, that I was so happy to be going back to my children, to my family, to my life, which really has always been the real and true one. So this was going through my mind until I got on the plane to Ankara, where we met the people from the American Embassy who welcomed us in Ankara. And then we flew to America.”
You talked about Kazan, you talked about Lefortovo prison in Moscow. Where was it worse?
"They threatened my children, my family. In general, and I don't know how it is in the Czech Republic, but in Russia, women in detention are controlled by fear. They don't have the same support from the free world, for example, that men have. Almost every man in detention in Kazan, from the minimal communication we had at times, has a wife, a girlfriend, at least a mother who supports him, waits for him. Women don't have that."
“It was bad everywhere. It doesn't depend on the conditions. For example, the food in Lefortovo is better than in Kazan. I think the showers are better in Lefortovo than in Kazan. I know for a fact from Evan that the library is better in Moscow than in Kazan. But that's not the point. Any detention in Russia robs people of their dignity. The psychological violence - because there was never any physical violence towards me - but the psychological violence is enormous.”
Were you humiliated?
“Humiliated, threatened. They threatened my children, my family. In general, and I don't know how it is in the Czech Republic, but in Russia, women in detention are controlled by fear. They don't have the same support from the free world, for example, that men have. Almost every man in detention in Kazan, from the minimal communication we had at times, has a wife, a girlfriend, at least a mother who supports him, waits for him. Women don't have that. The women who ended up in detention really have no one to look forward to, because most of them have children in the orphanage, they have problems with their family, with their mom, their dad. I saw so many fates, though not every woman suspected of a crime has to be charged. There are some cases where women do not necessarily end up in custody, if the court so decides. But I didn’t really see it and I didn’t really talk to the women about it. There, each woman focuses on the particular thing she has now and today. I read Václav Havel's Letters when I came back. It resonated with me a lot, especially the way he described the fate of each person in detention, that everybody is drinking their bucket of bitterness. Everybody has their own bucket, so they don’t want someone else’s bucket. So we really just talked about kids, about traveling, about food, and that's basically it.”
I talked to your husband, Pavel Butorin. He was here on Vinohradska 12. We talked a lot about you. And I asked him if he had any contact with you, if he could talk to you. Whether he could call you. Whether you wrote to one another. He told me, at the time, which was a couple of months ago, that it was terribly complicated. That it was just writing, and just through lawyers. And that you didn’t have any direct contact. That they didn’t even let you have contact with your children. How difficult was that?
"The irony is that they kept me in detention because I'm an American and a journalist. But they treated me like a Russian citizen and even worse. Communication with the children was minimal."
“It was very difficult. It was very unfair. Because the other women had visitors. They were allowed phone calls. At least once or twice a week. The investigators didn't allow me anything.
“The irony is that they kept me in detention because I'm an American and a journalist. But they treated me like a Russian citizen and even worse. Communication with the children was minimal. Sometimes I got these shorter letters through lawyers that they sent from Prague. My husband wrote to me briefly and nothing specific. No details about, say, interviews with you or other media. Or even about the work he was doing to free me. I didn't know about it at all. Except that I was given these sentences that I then sat on and thought about for a long time. Like: “Alsu, now I have hope.” So I knew something had happened, or that he had met someone that gave him hope. So my imagination was working so hard that I couldn't even imagine what it could mean.”
And he also did that because you were probably not the only one who read those letters from him, right? Because it was all censored.
“Yes, it was censored. And I was getting letters from people all over the world. That was more important.”
Even from the Czech Republic?
“Yes, from the Czech Republic. I got dozens of postcards and letters from the Czech Republic. One lady wrote to me... “Dear Alsu…” She wrote in Russian. She wrote: “I thought I'd never write in Russian again. I haven't used the language for forty years and I didn't want to. But your case was so strong that I decided to write it in Russian.” And I'm very grateful that Russian is not to blame for what happened to us, to people, to countries, to states in general. And I'm very grateful to her.
“Unfortunately, people didn't write their full names. So I can't even say exactly who they were. But I got postcards from Prague, from Beroun, from Moravia. And there is a beautiful organization in Prague which does so much meaningful work, it’s called Grandmothers Without Borders. I got several postcards from them. One lady was at a Czech Philharmonic concert. She sent me a postcard from the Czech Philharmonic and wrote out the whole program. And I have a music education and I've been to the Czech Philharmonic many times. “I've even played there quite a bit with the orchestra. I play the cello. So for me, that one sentence in that postcard…”
That was the whole concert.
“I heard a whole concert via that postcard in a Russian prison. It was so beautiful. The whole cell was looking at me and saying, well, Alsu's drifted off somewhere again and she doesn't want to talk to us. And really, I always created those moments where I wasn't there. But I was at the Czech Philharmonic. I was in Prague. I was in Šumava. My friends sent me a beautiful postcard from Sumava, because they know I love it there. So I'm very, very grateful to everybody who was involved. After I was released, I also sent dozens of letters to people who are still in Russian detention.”
Alsu, has anyone ever explained to you why they detained you in the autumn of 2023?
“Not from the Russian side.”
No one ever told you why you were there? Why they were holding you against your will?
“I asked several times. No, nobody told me. Only we here in the free world can answer that question.”
Moreover, you didn't go to Russia to work. You didn't go there as a journalist.
“I never went to Russia to work. My work has always been in Prague. So no, Matej, no one answered my question. By staying at home with my mother for five months and waiting…”
Which is exactly why you went to Russia.
“Yes, I went to see my sick mother. Then I was detained at the airport. And by not registering my U.S. passport and waiting five months for what should have been a simple investigation, we now know that they wanted that time to produce another…”
To find something on you, some fake evidence.
“To find more fake evidence against me.”
So they took your ID first, and then a few months later they just detained you. And from then you were in jail for several months…
“What happened was difficult, it was ugly, but it also showed us exactly the values of Russia now - and I'm not saying the people, but the values of the government in Russia - which are completely different from our values here in the free world, in Europe and in America. The world should know that and behave accordingly toward Russia and other countries where freedom of the press is under threat.”
Until the Spring, you didn’t feel any hope about your possible release. What thoughts were running through your mind during the months prior in prison? I can imagine that one might think they will never get out.
“The first month was the worst. The longest interrogations. I still didn’t understand what was going on. And every day, when the door, the metal door, opened, I was sure that there would be someone who would say: “Alsu Kurmasheva, this was a mistake, goodbye.” Maybe I really was naive, but on December 1st, I was in the first court where they extended my detention until February. On that day, the lawyer told me in the courtroom that the Memorial organization - I'm sure you know them, the biggest human rights organization, they are here in the Czech Republic now - he told me that they designated me as a political prisoner. And I knew what that meant, that it was a key designation, that it was very important. And I understood that I was going to be in detention for a while.
"The first month was the worst. The longest interrogations. I still didn’t understand what was going on. And every day, when the door, the metal door, opened, I was sure that there would be someone who would say: “Alsu Kurmasheva, this was a mistake, goodbye.” "
“The winter was very harsh, as I said. I was sick several times, we didn’t have many meds. Fortunately, I had garlic and lemon carefully packed by my mother. It took a long time, but I got over the flu. I have always thought that everything has a beginning and an end. In our Tatar language we say, let the end be a good one. Let it be good for everyone and for me. God will show the right way. And another thing that helped me a lot was the idea, we use in Tatar a lot, that God doesn't give more than one can take. So I thought, here I am, here I will be for a while, here I will endure. Because I have somebody to look forward to and something to look forward to.”
You said your mother packed or sent you lemon and garlic for the sickness?
“Yes, she did.”
And did you write to each other?
“We wrote letters to each other by mail, regular mail. It took three or four days. But we communicated, yes.”
And are you in touch with your mom now?
“Yes, of course.”
How's she doing?
“She's very happy that I'm free. Of course, she misses me very much and she'll miss me, but my mother and I have a very precious, warm relationship. We've always supported each other all our lives and we will continue to support each other. No matter if we're together physically now or not, we'll always be together.”
Sorry, this is a very personal question, but does that mean you are not considering seeing each other in person now?
“I don't want to go there now. Nobody has banned me from Russia, they've returned my Russian passport. I've been specifically told I'm not banned, but I wouldn't want to go there now.”
I know you said that you are still very much reliving the experience, and of course the memories are very vivid and crushing, but have you been able to move on a bit since you've been free? Do you feel you have processed the experience somewhat?
“Yes, I've moved on quite a lot. Now I am thinking about what I can do next and how I can use my experience. I'm currently working to support the families of other journalists who are in detention, other Radio Free Europe journalists. There are four right now. Ihar Losik and Andrey Kuznechykare in detention in Belarus. We have had no communication with Ihar for four years. We don't even know if he is healthy, what kind of help he needs. That is very complicated. Vlad Yesypenko is in Crimea. He hasn't seen his family and his young daughter for three months. Then there is a colleague in Azerbaijan. His little girl was born and he hasn’t seen her yet. He's been in detention in Azerbaijan since May. I know exactly what these families are going through. I know exactly that they wake up every morning and their only thought is what else can they do for their loved one. So given the experience I had, I'm trying to help them.”
Alsu, you have to tell me - and I'm sure you've thought about this - will it ever fully heal? Is it possible to just close the door on what happened and move on, to never think about it again?
“I don't think so. I don't even want to forget it. Rather, I want to build my life and my work on what happened to me, build a very strong foundation. It certainly made us stronger, it made me stronger as a professional, it made me stronger as a journalist, it made our family stronger, it made Radio Free Europe stronger. That's what I hear from my colleagues, that's not just my idea. So we want to use what happened to me, take it further and work with it.”
It’s always or often better to talk about things. Not just for you as a person therapeutically, but for others who it can help.
“I'm going to focus on the positive aspects of being free, being healthy, relatively healthy, sitting in front of you, talking openly about it and, like I said, I'm open to talking to anyone about it. It's not a secret and I think that's our strength here in the free world. Just talking, communicating, not closing doors, not destroying bridges, but building, building and talking. It's important and it's a strength, it's a certainty that we can look forward to.”
It was very good to see you, very good to see you here, and thank you very much for coming.
“Thank you so much. And I want to take this opportunity to thank everybody who's listening to me right now. If you'd like to message me, you can find me on LinkedIn and on Twitter, or X, whatever it's called now. I need to learn this new vocabulary. Communication is important. I am really grateful for everything you have done for me here in the Czech Republic. For me and my family. Thank you so much.”
Edited by: Kristýna Vašíčková, Kateřina Pospíšilová.
Dubbing: Nikola Bartová
