And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio, The Axe Files, with your host, David Axelrod.

Five years ago, I sat down here with Vladimir Tara Merza, the democracy advocate and Washington

Post columnist. He was a fellow at the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics then,

but today he sits in a Russian prison, sentenced to 25 years for speaking out against Putin's

war in Ukraine. I'm resharing this podcast today because I hope

all of us will keep this valiant man and freedom-seeking people everywhere in our thoughts and in our

hearts. And I look forward to the day when he and I might meet again. Vladimir Karamorza, so good to be with you, so good to be with you this spring at the Institute of Politics.

You continue to be, despite the discouragement, we'll call it that, and people will understand what we mean later in this,

a huge force for change in Russia. But you kind of come by these instincts naturally.

It's not a new thing. Your family has been involved in journalism, involved in activism,

involved in the movement for reform. Tell me about

the family and how you came to be who you are. Thank you, David, and it's wonderful to be

at the Institute of Politics. It's great to be here on your podcast. Thank you. Thank you very much

for having me here. Well, my grandfather was a historian and a journalist. My father was

a historian and still as a historian and a journalist. And I always thought that, you know,

when it comes to me to choose my profession, I'm going to be whatever I will be, but I'm not

going to be a historian and a journalist. It has to stop somewhere. But then, of course,

as these things happen when it did come the time to choose, I did go. I did do history at university, and I did become a journalist. I began to work as a journalist from the age of 16. I'm not doing that anymore now. Now I'm in full-time politics. I'm an opposition. Politician. You can't really combine the two, obviously. but I was for a while a historian and a journalist.

And I am from the generation whose first conscious political memory in Russia was the Democratic

Revolution of August 1991, you know, the three days that changed the history of the world in so many

ways.

Tell me, tell me about that. Tell me about your memories of those days. Well, I was 10 years old. This was 1991, so unfortunately too young to take part. My father did spend all three days and three nights of the revolution at the barricades by the Moscow White House. But I was certainly old enough to... Did he do that as an activist or did he do that as a journalist?

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