Vladimir Kara-Murza memoir 'One Day Free' to be released May 18

NEW YORK (AP) — Russian opposition leader and Pulitzer Prize-winning commentator Vladimir Kara-Murza will have a book out next spring, what he calls “a personal testimony and a historical chronicle” of life over the past quarter century under President Vladimir Putin .

Public Affairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, announced Wednesday that Kara-Murza's “One Day Free” will be published May 18.

Kara-Murza said in a statement released through Public Affairs that his book examines Putin's rule and takes an “honest look at those people, both in Russia and in the West, who strengthened and enabled it — and at those who fought it, sometimes at the price of their own lives.”

Kara-Murza, 45, is an activist, journalist and filmmaker who was arrested in 2022 after publicly opposing Russia's invasion of Ukraine and sentenced to 25 years. He was released in 2024 as part of a prisoner exchange and now lives in the United States, where he serves as vice-chairman of Open Russia, a pro-democracy NGO founded by exiled Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

While in prison, he won a Pulitzer for commentary for the columns he contributed to The Washington Post. He also survived 11 months of solitary confinement in Siberia and two poisonings that he blamed on Russian officials.

“In spite of everything, I am optimistic about Russia and its future,” Kara-Murza said. “History knows many examples of once-terrifying tyrannies becoming peaceful civilized democracies — and no nation in the world is ever ‘destined’ to unfreedom.”