Being able to open a door whenever she wants is one of the many freedoms Alsu Kurmasheva is enjoying after months of wrongful detention in Russia.
“I’m enjoying freedom. I’m loving every minute of it,” the American journalist told VOA, just a few weeks after she was freed as part of a historic prisoner swap between the United States and Russia.
An editor with VOA’s sister outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague, Kurmasheva was back in Washington late last month to accept an award from the National Press Club. The visit was the start of what she described as her “thank you tour.”
A dual U.S.-Russian national, Kurmasheva traveled to Russia in May 2023 to visit her ailing mother in the Tatarstan city of Kazan. But authorities blocked her from leaving and later jailed her for more than nine months on bogus charges.
“What happened to me was so wrong, and it shouldn’t happen to any innocent person. It shouldn’t happen to any journalist,” Kurmasheva said. “I was jailed for 288 days, and every minute of it is suffering. It’s going through humiliation. And inmates in Russia and Belarus, they don’t have any rights.”
In prison, daily life was monotonous for Kurmasheva. “It was endless,” she said, adding that she forced herself to remain optimistic.
“I couldn’t write in my letters to my mom or to my husband or family or friends that I was falling apart, that I was collapsing, because I knew they were trying so hard to get me out,” she said.
Letters that she received from supporters from all over the world helped, said Kurmasheva, holding up some of the postcards she received from supporters in New York and Oregon.
“When my spirit was really low, I just opened my cards and letters, and I kept reading them,” she said.
At one point during her detention, Kurmasheva shared a cell with nine other women. There was more social interaction, she said, but that didn’t make the situation any easier.
“The doors were still locked, and every woman was there with her own bad luck and uncertain future,” she said.
When it was time for Kurmasheva’s release, her captors obscured that she was being freed, telling the journalist she was heading to a destination other than Moscow.
It wasn’t until she was hugging her husband and daughters at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington that reality set in. “Only then I felt it was real,” Kurmasheva said. “That was the moment I was dreaming of for months and months.”
Before returning home to Prague, Kurmasheva went to a military base in Texas, where she received care from doctors and psychologists.
The recovery process after wrongful detention varies greatly from person to person, according to Katherine Porterfield, a consulting psychologist at the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma in New York.
“The experience of incarceration is one of loss of liberty, loss of agency, loss of freedom of movement, as well as lots of other disconnections,” Porterfield told VOA, speaking generally about how journalists and others are helped after a wrongful detention.
“It’s basically moving a person from powerlessness to a sense of agency again,” Porterfield said.
Throughout Kurmasheva’s imprisonment, press freedom groups criticized the State Department for not declaring her wrongfully detained. The designation — which The Wall Street Journal’s Gershkovich received within two weeks of his arrest — opens up extra resources and support for families and commits the U.S. government to secure their release.
The State Department in August said it had declared Kurmasheva wrongfully detained shortly before the prisoner swap took place.
“If any journalist is detained anywhere in the world doing their job, they should immediately be designated as wrongfully detained,” Kurmasheva said.
Kurmasheva’s own freedom feels bittersweet, she admits. At the top of her mind are her three RFE/RL colleagues who are still unjustly jailed.
Andrey Kuznechyk and Ihar Losik are jailed in Belarus, and Vladyslav Yesypenko is jailed in Russian-occupied Crimea. RFE/RL has condemned all three cases as politically motivated.
Kurmasheva isn’t sure whether she wants to stick with journalism or try something new, she said, but she does know that she wants to help free her jailed colleagues and other political prisoners.
“I feel the pain that their families are going through,” she said. “I feel the pain of those journalists.”
With Kurmasheva’s own family, she takes every opportunity to thank her daughters, as well as her husband, for fighting so hard to secure her release.
“They were the leaders of my advocacy group. It all started at home,” she said.
Noting how her daughters have matured significantly in the time Kurmasheva was in jail, she says she is relishing her newly reclaimed freedom and figuring out what comes next.
“I want to enjoy my life from now on,” she said.
