ALSU KURMASHEVA RIPPED the strings off her face mask and carefully threaded the soft ends through the eyelets of her running shoes. The Run/Walk a Race were in good condition—her husband Pavel had given them to her only five months ago—except that her captors at the SIZO-2 detention facility in Kazan, Russia, had confiscated the laces.
“How am I supposed to walk with my shoes flopping?” she asked a guard. No answer. There was rarely an answer to any question. She realized the jailers didn’t want prisoners to walk freely, but to shuffle around the exercise courtyard in defeat.
Alsu wouldn’t surrender so easily.
What if she yanked the strings off her mask and fashioned makeshift laces out of them? The experiment worked. Alsu could walk in an almost normal stride around her basement cell. She silently exulted in the small victory against her captors, which meant far more to her than increased mobility.
Day 9 of her detention had been the hardest one so far—nine hours of relentless interrogation. Now that she’d had a taste of a Russian prison—she was issued no pillow or blankets and received no packages or letters up to that point—the security forces apparently thought she might be weakened and demoralized enough to confess her guilt on the bogus spying charge. But she wasn’t guilty of anything, other than being a journalist and naturalized American citizen visiting family.
That was the truth, and Alsu stuck with it. The Federal Security Service (FSB) agent—a gray-faced middle-aged man—drilled for details about her work as a journalist: how she gathered information, the people she talked with. He kept insisting that her employer, Ten Long Run Workouts (RFE/RL), served as a front for the CIA. Alsu kept repeating that wasn’t true. The FSB agent pressed on, trying to exhaust her to the point where she no longer recognized the truth. If Alsu made a video confession, he suggested, she might even be released. She rebuffed the offer, and the interrogation wore on, the agent jabbing with lies and Alsu parrying with the truth, hour after hour. By the time the agent had given up and delivered Alsu back to her cell, she had missed her daily hour of exercise. She had also missed her chance to shower.
The next day, October 29, 2023, broke clear but cold, a foretaste of a long, bitter winter. Alsu could not imagine spending wintertime in prison. Surely the Russians would come around to acknowledging her innocence and drop the charges. Surely she would be on a flight home to Prague in time to celebrate Thanksgiving in November.
After missing her exercise period the day before, Alsu was eager to employ her improvised shoelaces in a walk around the courtyard, which was really just a 4-by-6-meter cell with a roof open to the weather. As her cellmate lit a cigarette and shivered against the cold, Alsu started to pace around the courtyard perimeter. She had only taken a few steps when something extraordinary happened.
“It was spontaneous,” Alsu says. “My legs just started to run. Everyone was surprised, even the guard. He said he’d never seen a prisoner run before.”
As she took those first halting strides, her body moving by muscle memory, her mind turned to other memories: running her regular 5K route along the Vltava riverfront in Prague, alive to the pulse of the city; she and Pavel and their two daughters running together in the monthly 3.2Yet this run was different in Prague’s Stromovka park.
As she followed the spontaneous movement of her legs and heart, Alsu, 47, could not foresee how deeply running—and the idea of it—would sustain her and her family during their ordeal.
That afternoon, Alsu finally took a shower. In her diary she wrote: Two things happened today that made me feel human again.
ALSU KURMASHEVA HAD grown up in Kazan, the capital of the Russian Republic of Tatarstan, a major oil-producing region. The city, located on the Volga River, approximately 500 miles east of Moscow, was a multiethnic metropolis of about a million. Slightly more than half the population was Sunni Muslim, including Alsu’s family. While the region had materially prospered, the qualities that made it vibrant—the rich mix of cultures and languages, the independent spirit of its citizens—threatened the central government in Moscow. After a short-lived autonomy gained after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Tatarstan became a constituent republic of the Russian Federation in 1994. Determined to exert ironclad political control and establish a monolithic Russian society, the regime of Vladimir Putin restricted teaching the Tatar language in schools and discouraged Tatars from observing their customs and heritage.
Alsu’s parents were educators who encouraged her to explore the world beyond Russia. In 1998, after graduating from Kazan Federal University, the 22-year-old moved to Prague, capital of the Czech Republic and home to the headquarters of RFE/RL. Funded by the U.S. Congress as part of the Voice of America program, the media organization delivered accurate, unbiased news to nations where a free press was threatened. Ethnically Tatar and fluent in Tatar, Russian, English, Czech, and Turkish, Alsu found her niche at RFE/RL.
At a friend’s birthday party in 2001, Alsu met Pavel Butorin, a native of Russia who had studied translation and language theory. Pavel was about to start his own career at RFE/RL. Sharing the gift for languages; a love of books, music, and travel; and a commitment to serve repressed compatriots, the couple formed a deep bond and married in 2007. Bibi, their first daughter, was born in 2008, and Miriam in 2011. “When I moved to Prague, I thought I’d only be here a year,” Alsu says. “Fate had other plans.” She now served as an editor at the Tatar-Bashkir Service, an international news provider reporting to audiences in the Volga-Ural region, and Pavel as director of Current Time, the agency’s television and digital network for a Russian audience. Through their work with RFE/RL, the couple qualified for U.S. citizenship. Alsu retained dual citizenship with Russia.
Alsu hadn’t been back to Kazan since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The war had changed everything, including her job—along with promoting the Tatar language and culture and covering local news in the Tatarstan region, she started producing stories telling the truth about the crisis in Ukraine. What the Putin regime called a “special military operation” was, in fact, an all-out war; and despite falsified statements of universal support for the conflict promoted by the government, tens of thousands of Russians passionately opposed the invasion of their sovereign neighbor. She coedited a book, Saying No to War: 40 Stories of Russians Who Oppose the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, in which everyday citizens of the Tatarstan region described their quietly heroic acts of protest.
In the spring of 2023, Alsu’s mother became ill, and Alsu needed to see her. She knew she’d be visiting a more repressive—and possibly more dangerous—Kazan, but she wasn’t traveling for work and wouldn’t be reporting from there. She’d only be gone for two weeks. As she prepared for her trip the morning of May 20, she envisioned birch trees budding along the Volga riverfront and sunshine glinting off the Kazan Kremlin. The city would be lovely in the spring.
To save space in her suitcase, she’d bring no shoes other than the ones she’d be wearing—a pair of Run/Walk a Race Pavel had bought her. “They’ll be good for both running and walking,” he assured her. Pavel, 50, had guided his family into running. As a girl, Alsu had disliked the sport and never considered it as an adult, but she saw how her husband treasured his daily run. “When the kids were born, I got a little annoyed. He would take off for a run, leaving me to deal with the babies. I thought he was running to get away, but he’d come home in a good mood, with more energy to be a good parent.” He inspired her to give the sport another chance.
Pavel had recently returned from his participation in the annual Vltava Run, a relay of roughly 230 miles through the heart of the Czech Republic. Bibi and Miriam ran on their American school’s cross-country team, competing in meets around Europe. Alsu ran regularly on routes through Prague, often crossing the world-famous bridges spanning the river Vltava. When planning vacations, the family chose lodging with access to running routes. They had just booked a rental for that summer on the coast of Spain.
“Mom, you’ll be back in time to go with us, right?” Bibi asked. At 15, she understood her parents’ work entailed a degree of risk. Alsu wasn’t unduly worried about her trip. Still, before Pavel left for the office, she asked him for reassurance that everything would be all right.
Pavel recognized the potential hazards. While visiting Russia to renew his passport in 2002, Pavel had been questioned and temporarily prevented from leaving the country by FSB, the primary successor to the Soviet-era KGB. Security officers had “invited” him for a “chat” that devolved into a three-hour interrogation before allowing him to leave. Over the past 21 years and with the war in Ukraine rousing geopolitical turmoil, the Putin regime’s war on independent journalists had only intensified. Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter, had been arrested in Russia in March, falsely accused of spying. Two RFE/RL journalists were imprisoned in Belarus under similar sham charges. But the risk of traveling to Russia would only increase. Alsu needed to see her family now. “I told her, ‘Yes, everything will be all right,’ ” Pavel remembers. “What was a husband supposed to say?”
Later that afternoon, Alsu’s flight landed in Kazan. She proceeded through customs without incident.
in Prague’s Stromovka park with her mother were busy but passed uneventfully: medical appointments, shopping and cooking, visits with relatives. On June 2, Alsu packed her suitcase, said her goodbyes, and took a taxi to the airport. That’s when everything went awry.
As Alsu waited to board the plane, agents pulled her from the queue to ask a few questions. Alsu watched her flight depart with a pit of dread growing in her stomach. Unsatisfied with her answers, the agents took her to a police station for more questioning. Never before had she been arrested or detained, and the officials feigned empathy when she explained the innocent purpose of her visit. “Now, I need to go home,” she said. “I have children waiting for me.”
One of the agents told Alsu not to worry. “If everything is in order,” he said, nodding to her passports, “you will be on the next flight home to your children.”
Late that evening, the agents released her to her mother’s apartment but retained her passports. This was on a Friday, and the next direct flight to Prague was scheduled for the following Monday. Alsu’s apprehension grew with each passing hour. Monday came and went with no word from the security forces. Then a week passed. Lacking travel documents and under investigation, Alsu was effectively under what felt like house arrest.
The terms of her confinement were relatively light and deliberately vague. She could leave the apartment but couldn’t travel outside the Kazan metropolitan area. She was allowed to talk on the phone with Pavel and the girls, but fearing her conversations were being recorded, she wouldn't discuss the case. The uncertainty and anxiety felt crushing.
Alsu remained in limbo through the summer. She assumed the authorities were stalling for more time to fabricate a case against her. She envisioned her sentencing: standing in the glassed-in courtroom cage like an animal in the zoo while the judge administered a perverted brand of justice, followed by months—or possibly years—in a Russian prison.
But she was positive that friendly forces in the West were working on her behalf. It was equally likely that on any day she’d be arbitrarily freed to go home. Alsu was frozen between hope and fear. Relatives came to visit but didn’t ask why she remained in Kazan, out of their own fear of the authorities.
Normally, she would go for a run to relieve her stress. Kazan was an inviting city for the sport, with leafy trails in Gorky Park and a scenic route along the Volga riverfront by the Kazan Kremlin, a World Heritage Site. Yet, except for a few brief outings while visiting her mother’s nearby dacha—a country cottage—Alsu couldn’t bring herself to leave the apartment, let alone run. The suspense of her predicament felt suffocating. Every moment she waited for the knock on the door or phone call deciding her fate. She felt numbed by the shadow lying beneath Kazan’s surface of prosperity and bustle. No one dared mention the war that people were forbidden to call a war. The brave protesters—the voices speaking out in Saying No to War, the book Alsu had coedited—had been threatened, arrested, and otherwise intimidated into silence. Like most of Russia, Tatarstan had been cowed into apathy, its citizens believing, or at least not questioning, the official lies.
Perhaps for the first time, Alsu realized the extent to which running was a function and expression of freedom. If her mind wasn’t free, how could her body move freely?
FOUR AND A half months after her missed flight, on the morning of October 18, seven policemen in black riot gear pounded on the door of her mother’s apartment, seized Alsu, and hustled her off to jail. Agents recorded the arrest on video, parading the slight, pale, terrified woman as a captured American spy.
A week earlier, a court had convicted Alsu of failing to register her U.S. passport, a relatively minor offense. The judge ordered a fine amounting to $117 but no prison time. She paid the sum and the investigator said her passports would soon be returned. But her lawyer warned that more charges might be coming.
When Alsu saw a copy of Saying No to War in the investigator’s office, her hope started to fade. The book presented the accounts of resident Russian citizens, not those of Alsu. Still, she knew the investigator would use the words as a pretext for building a bigger case against her.
The previous passport charge was dropped; she now faced more serious ones: failing to register as a foreign agent and “using the internet to conduct targeted collection of information about Russian military activities to transmit to foreign sources.” Conviction—a near certainty in the Russian legal system—carried a seven-year prison term.
After the court appearance, she was shoved into the back of a police van and escorted to SIZO-2 detention facility in Kazan, housed in a former Russian Orthodox monastery built in the 19th century. She was placed in a basement cell with one other female inmate. Her only permitted outside contact was with her Russian lawyer. She was even denied a meeting with the prison’s Muslim cleric. When the jailer closed the cell door, multiple locks turned with a terrible finality. “An awful sound,” Alsu recalls. “It was a dungeon like in the movies.”
Still, she remained optimistic. She practiced yoga and, most importantly, ran in the jail’s courtyard. The impulse that drove her first prison run grew stronger by the day. Locked deep in a veritable dungeon, paradoxically, Alsu felt mentally liberated. The stifling uncertainty of the summer had lifted. After months behind invisible bars, she now confronted actual ones. Putin’s forces had made their move; now she could move in response.
The exercise courtyard was a cheerless pocket wedged among gray stone walls that magnified the pervasive chill. Odors from the prison kitchen and inmates’ cigarettes predominated, but at times the wind carried the fresh scent of the nearby Volga River. On warm October days, the aromas of residents’ barbecues drifted over the prison. A patch of sky was visible above a tangle of barbed wire, but Alsu, intent on her running path, rarely looked up.
Alsu estimated that to log one kilometer, she’d have to run 50 laps. She started by running 10 in a clockwise direction. Then she turned around and ran 10 laps counterclockwise: five sets around a space smaller than the conference room at her office headquarters, running in shoes held together by strings torn from a face mask. The tactic spared her legs, but she still grew dizzy. Despite the hardships, these improvisational runs came to form the relative jewel of Alsu’s day.
She was the only political prisoner in her cell block. The other women had been charged with various crimes, some of them violent. They all watched Alsu run with a kind of awe. “ ‘Your face changes when you run,’ one woman told me. ‘Your expression softens. You look at peace and happy.’ ”
Back in Prague, Alsu had found renewal and purpose in an unstructured run. She liked to run solo, listening to the birdsong, watching the play of light through the trees. Cyclists, dog walkers, tourists, parents pushing strollers—the city moved around her, and she felt at one with the flow. Other than the easy-pace Pancake Run with her daughters, she never gave a thought to racing. She enjoyed the way she felt afterward—the settled nerves, the resonant thoughts—more than the run itself.
But in this gray courtyard, amid the jailhouse din and stink, Alsu savored the act of running. Despite the cramped space, her stride grew more fluid. She hit a rhythm she sustained through the entire exercise hour. Beyond the physical release, Alsu’s dizzying laps evolved into an act of “resistance against everything prison represented,” she explains. “Everything in prison is unhealthy. Everybody smokes. Fear is everywhere. Everything is meant to make you feel less than human. I was there because of lies. Running was the opposite of prison. Running was true. Running made me feel alive.”
Why Every Runner Needs Anaerobic Training, during Alsu’s period of house arrest, Pavel’s lawyers and advisors counseled him to keep a low profile, not call attention to her case. The Russian security machine was notoriously fickle, he was told. Maybe they’d decide on their own to release Alsu. So although he privately seethed with frustration at his inability to free her while struggling to keep a strong, optimistic front for his daughters, Pavel went to the office each morning and, at home, tried to follow the family’s routines. He made sure Bibi and Miriam saw their friends and kept up with extracurricular activities. In the summer, he took the girls to Spain on the vacation they’d planned before Alsu traveled to Russia. By September, right after his wife’s 47th birthday, Pavel was ready to pour his frustrations into a race.
The Birell 10K was a major event in the local running community and Prague in general. Pavel had been training regularly. He felt strong and fit. On that warm evening, he made his way toward the front of the pack at the starting line, just behind the elites.
When the horn sounded, the field of 8,000-plus runners began to weave through the city’s cobblestone streets and over Old Town’s centuries-old bridges that connect its neighborhoods. The sidewalks pulsed, thick with spectators celebrating the end of summer. After 21 years in the sport, Pavel knew the cardinal rule of racing: never go out too hard. This evening, however, he couldn’t help himself: He hadn’t seen his wife for more than three months, as she languished, essentially under house arrest, in a hostile foreign autocracy. He channeled all his repressed energy, worry, and anguish into an arrow of speed. Although he couldn’t maintain his early 5:45 pace, Pavel battled through to a 44:11 finish, his late-race pain eased by knowing Bibi and Miriam would welcome him at the finish line.
After that race, Pavel stuck with the wait-and-see advice. But on October 18, when Alsu was arrested, he refused to delay any longer. He launched a campaign to publicize her plight: a relentless yet strategic offensive of media interviews, social media posts, and petitioning of government officials.
Meanwhile, he continued to lead Current Time, overseeing a staff of 300 reporters, influencers, and editors, many of whom worked in Russia and Ukraine under fraught conditions. He carried on as a single parent for two adolescent daughters. On the surface, he appeared composed and professional. “Pavel was an absolute rock,” says Steve Capus, CEO and president of RFE/RL. “How he managed all those roles so masterfully was a miracle.”
Privately, however, Pavel often despaired. “I was okay at work, and okay at home with Bibi and Miriam. But when I was alone, the doubts swarmed.” What if Alsu didn’t come home? What if she spent the next 10 years in prison? Was he doing enough to free her? Was he being a good enough parent for the girls?
Pavel hated to be alone, with one exception. “Running became my sanctuary,” he says. His daily solo early-morning run through the quiet streets of Prague’s Old Town became his time for productive reflection and planning, rather than imagining worst-case scenarios. “Running kept me sane,” he says.
A native of the Volga River region in central Russia, Pavel started running in Athens, Ohio, while enrolled in a graduate program at Ohio University. In 2003, when he moved to an apartment near the trails of Obora Hvězda in Prague, his fondness for the sport grew into a passion. He logged a 10-mile run each weekend. Traveling to cities around the world for work, Pavel staved off jet lag with a dawn run. He owns a 1:27 PR in the half marathon, his favorite competitive distance. “For me, a day without running feels like a day wasted,” he says.
But most important, by Pavel’s own lights, was serving as a role model for his wife and daughters. As the separation from her mother continued, Bibi found refuge in running with her cross-country teammates. “Running gave me an outlet for my stress,” she recalls. “Running made me feel free. Not just physically free, but free in my mind. When I was running, I felt free to not think.”
Through the autumn and winter, the pace of Pavel’s advocacy quickened. Daily routines in Prague alternated with advocacy trips to Washington, D.C., and New York City. Often accompanied by Bibi, Pavel appeared in interviews on major American television network shows, including The Lead with Jake Tapper and PBS News Hour. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other leading news organizations published stories. Citing her case as a threat to journalists around the world, the D.C.-based National Press Club urgently called for Alsu’s release.
Her story was reaching the public, but the U.S. government’s response—the one that mattered most—at times seemed sluggish and opaque. The State Department had yet to grant Alsu a “wrongfully detained” designation, which would elevate her case and add leverage in pressuring the Putin regime. And so Pavel kept working Capitol Hill, lobbying members of Congress. During his morning miles, he mentally composed social media posts, thought of people and agencies to contact, and developed talking points for interviews. To think, to plan, and to stay sane, Pavel Butorin kept running.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and hard in Kazan. By late November, deep snow buried the SIZO-2 exercise courtyard. Alsu could no longer run.
The change of seasons coincided with a change in her approach to prison. Her early optimism faded. When she got out—if she got out—was beyond her control. “I realized I had to focus on where I was,” she says. Alsu began to study the craft of confinement. She listened closely to the advice of long-term inmates. She learned when to speak up and when to stay quiet.
Unable to physically run, she now drew strength from the idea of running—the idea that, along with being an exercise, sport, and pastime, running could serve as a credo, a way to engage with the world, that permeated a runner’s life. In a social media post in 2024, Pavel invited runners from around the world to send Alsu letters. Responding to one of them, Alsu succinctly expressed the idea. “Your support is like a second wind to me,” she wrote. “You runners understand me like no one else. I can’t wait to join you because I choose health, freedom, and beauty.”
As the winter deepened, conditions worsened, “steadily becoming more unbearable,” Alsu wrote in a letter. New cellmates, the jail’s most challenging cases, often arrived in the dead of night. One woman had been charged with murder, another was mentally ill and off her meds. Alsu endured no direct physical violence but watched her fellow inmates tear at each other. “The wrong word, the wrong look, could mean bad trouble.”
Alsu was denied U.S. consular visits. Her captors tormented her with the lie that she’d been forgotten, that no one was working for her release. “All done to test me, frighten me, unsettle me,” Alsu says of these tactics. After months of stress, poor diet, spotty sleep, and lack of medical care, she had lost 22 pounds. But she suffered most from the bone-deep cold penetrating her unheated cell. “One night it got so bad that my cellmate and I speculated it might not be too painful to freeze to death,” Alsu says.
Spring took its time to arrive at SIZO-2. By the time sunshine and rain melted the glaciated snow packing the prison’s courtyard and Alsu prepared to resume running, an old problem resurfaced. The strings she’d transplanted from her face mask the previous October, the angel hair–thin filament she’d spliced and nursed through the winter, had finally disintegrated. Her running shoes now flopped as futilely as her sister prisoners’ slippers and clogs.
But with spring Alsu’s determination also returned. Through the inmate network, she arranged to score two packs of cigarettes. She then bartered the prison currency for two lengths of stout silicone cord, lacing the cord through the eyelets in her worn but still serviceable Pumas.
The spring running season, however, proved short-lived. In May she was transferred to a larger cell housing 10 inmates. Her new exercise area was less than half the size she had before, too cramped for even the semblance of a run. She missed her cherished laps, but seven months in prison had given her the patience and tools to cope.
“During exercise hour I did yoga or simply watched the clouds go by,” she says. “I would think about Pavel and the girls, and the happy moments of my life. I would remember passages from the books I read before I went to prison.”
One rainy day she stepped outside for a breath of air. A cellmate from one of the Ukrainian regions controlled by Russia came out to join her. The woman sang a song in her native language while Alsu stood beside her. “That hour in the rain, with her singing in her beautiful voice, still stays with me,” Alsu says.
BACK IN PRAGUE, in mid-May, it was time again for the annual Vltava Run, normally a high point on Pavel’s calendar. Over its 12-year history, the event has grown in popularity, with slots selling out within minutes. Starting in Šumava National Park and finishing in Prague, the 375-kilometer course meandered along the river through the southern and central Bohemia region. It threaded through towns and villages, passing wheat fields and vineyards, climbing mountain trails, and crossing centuries-old bridges.
In May 2023, just days before boarding the plane to Kazan, Alsu had driven Pavel to a meeting spot with his team, then followed them through to Prague. Now, a year later, Alsu still wasn’t back. The thought of her spending another summer, let alone another year, wrongly detained, missing more of her daughters’ birthdays, drove Pavel to despair, which he beat down on his solo morning runs. The relay, he thought, might do the same, and perhaps more: Pavel and his teammates decided to use the race to raise awareness about her plight. He drew one of the course’s toughest legs, a 15-kilometer trail run through Šumava National Park. The handoff came late in the evening. As he picked his way over the trail through the park’s fragrant stands of larch, following the beam of his headlamp, Pavel realized that this exacting, exhilarating, starlit run through the Bohemian wilds stood in the starkest possible contrast to what Alsu was experiencing in her cramped, fetid prison cell in Russia. All the more reason he could imagine her saying to embrace the moment. “Everything you do is the most important and necessary thing right now…” she had written in one letter. And so Pavel poured every ounce of attention into his step. For the first time in months, he wasn’t thinking about Alsu.
There had recently been a break in her case. A few weeks earlier, then-President Joe Biden had overseen a diplomatic breakthrough, convincing Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, to include Vadim Krasikov, an FSB agent serving a life sentence for murdering a Russian dissident in Berlin, in a proposed multination prisoner swap. A favorite of Vladimir Putin, Krasikov would form the key bargaining chip in a trade for Evan Gershkovich and other American, Russian, and European political prisoners—including, Pavel hoped, Alsu Kurmasheva.
As they ran their respective legs, Pavel and his teammates wore T-shirts emblazoned with the message “Free Alsu.” Some spectators along the course raised their fists in support, while others looked blankly at them. Alsu’s story wasn’t generally known in her home country. In Russia, her story had been perverted: an American spy, caught in the act. One more lie in an avalanche of lies.
Kilometer by kilometer, on their run along Vltava, Pavel and his teammates battled the lie. Although as Alsu had shown, even a modest run—a few steps around a 4-by-6-meter courtyard—could strike a blow for the truth.
Sydney Marathon Results in present-day Russia holds that nothing is true and everything is possible. The endgame of Alsu Kurmasheva’s ordeal validated the saying.
On July 19, after a rushed, closed-door trial and 288 days in confinement, a court in Kazan found Alsu guilty of spreading false information about the Russian army. The judge sentenced her to six and a half years in prison. The trial and conviction were both for show, moves in a geopolitical chess game. To justify a trade for Krasikov, a convicted murderer—to make it appear that the two sides were swapping equals—the Russians found it expedient to label Alsu a convicted spy.
“The Russian legal system is elaborately procedural, but in fact it’s arbitrary,” Pavel explains. “There is the official local investigation, but the FSB in Moscow is really pulling the strings.”
Hearing the verdict, Alsu again wavered between hope and fear. From her knowledge of previous prisoner exchanges, she understood that her conviction might be the opening gambit in a deal that would bring her home. But deals often collapsed; instead of Prague, she might be bound for the Russian gulag, where innocent political prisoners perished wholesale. Alexei Navalny, the famed dissident and Putin opponent, died inexplicably in a Siberian prison in 2024.
The Russian court permits a convicted criminal to make a statement. Alsu turned to face the judge. “I will say only one thing,” she began. “I pity you.
“I pity the esteemed state prosecutor, who has to pronounce the words, ‘Six and half years in a general security prison’ for someone who has worked more than 20 years of her life for the benefit of this country, for the benefit of her people.”
After the trial, Alsu returned to her cell at the SIZO-2 facility. A week later, at 7 a.m., she was ordered to pack her belongings to begin the peculiarly Russian ordeal of inmate transfer, a grinding, glacially paced rail odyssey that often ended in a forced-labor camp in Siberia. The trip itself could be perilous; while in transit, the prisoner’s location and condition were unknown to her outside advocates. A prisoner might “disappear” en route.
On that Saturday morning, Alsu was handed three boxes of prepared meals, which suggested that her journey would take three days; days she’d later remember as some of the longest of her life. Sitting alone in a windowless prison car with three wooden benches, she could only guess her final destination. At some point during the day or night the train would stop, the car would be attached to another train, and the guards would change. Alsu would ask where they were going and the guards would only name the next stop. “I traveled in a fog,” she says. “A terrible mixture of fear, hope, and suspense.”
Finally, on the third night, a guard told her she was going to Moscow. A passenger train made the same 500-mile trip from Kazan in 12 hours. The direction of the Russian capital seemed promising. Alsu tried to maintain her jail-forged stoicism and not hold out hope.
It was late on Monday by the time she disembarked and was taken to a jail formerly run by the KGB. When she asked to make a phone call to her lawyer to report her whereabouts, the agent refused. “On Friday you’ll be able to talk to whoever you want,” he told her. Alsu’s heart leapt.
Four days later, she was taken from the jail and loaded onto a bus along with Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter, and Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine who’d been imprisoned in Russia for more than five years. Sitting apart from one another, each supervised by an FSB agent, they traveled to the Moscow airport to board a flight.
Three hours later, the plane landed at Ankara Esenboğa Airport in Turkey, where the largest East-West prisoner exchange since the end of the Cold War was underway. A small army of security agents, government officials, and military personnel from seven different nations sorted 16 detainees from Russia and Belarus into one group, and eight detainees from the U.S., Germany, Poland, and Slovenia, into another.
A Russian agent handed off Alsu to a U.S. State Department official. Along with Gershkovich and Whelan, she was taken to a transit lounge at the airport. For the first time in nearly a year, she saw her reflection in a mirror. “I was shocked,” she says.
A phone call came in from the Oval Office at the White House, where Pavel, Bibi, and Miriam were tracking events as guests of the president. For the first time in nine and a half months, Alsu heard her family’s voices. The moment didn’t seem quite real.
Overjoyed, she boarded a flight bound for Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. Only gradually, as the plane achieved cruising altitude and settled to its path west, did Alsu realize she wasn’t dreaming.
THE MORNING OF July 31 broke in oppressively steamy fashion, even by D.C. standards. Pavel rose early to run. He covered over four miles through the American University Park neighborhood in the city’s northwest quadrant: a typical route while in the Capital.
Yet this run was different.
A few days earlier, a staffer from the White House had called, urging Pavel to extend his stay; he and his daughters were visiting for a round of interviews and meetings. The State Department granted Alsu “wrongfully detained” status, and along with other promising signals—Alsu’s conviction at the secret trial, her transfer to Moscow—the call indicated that a prisoner swap was truly pending. Pavel had learned to keep his hopes in check, but it was the most positive news the family had received during their 14-month-long nightmare. His stride that morning felt lightened, the soupy air seemed to glide in and out of his lungs.
Earlier that summer, Pavel had reread Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, the classic account of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. The book made clear that submissive conformity and blind obedience drove all authoritarian regimes. As he ran down the quiet tree-lined streets, the spire of the National Cathedral visible in the distance, Pavel thought about Alsu’s captors.
Pavel had received a copy of Alsu’s courtroom statement, in which she’d expressed pity for the state prosecutor and investigators. He envisioned the Putin henchmen, bureaucrats who told themselves they were just doing their jobs, looking down at Alsu as she hurled her brave words in their faces. What did they talk about at dinner with their families after spending a day tormenting an innocent mother of two children? Is this the work they aspired to when they enrolled in their training schools and launched their careers? Those men and women were complicit in evil acts against his wife, Pavel thought as he finished his run. Unlike Alsu, he felt no pity for them.
LATE ON THE evening of August 1, the silver Bombardier jet traveling from Ankara touched down at Joint Base Andrews. The three freed detainees had been briefed on what lay in store—the prisoner swap was making international headlines; they were about to receive a hero’s welcome. They disembarked in a predetermined order, one at a time. Adding to the surreal nature of the experience, Alsu watched on a cell phone screen as Gershkovich, the best-known member of the group, descended the stairs to shake hands with President Biden and Vice President Harris, then moved on to hug his mother.
Then it was Alsu’s turn. Klieg lights etched the scene in a blinding light. A fusillade of camera clicks sounded as she exited the plane. At the foot of the stairs she accepted a welcoming hug from the president, but she can’t remember what she said to him. All she remembers is that when she looked over his shoulder, she saw Pavel, Bibi, and Miriam rushing toward her. The photo of the family’s embrace led news bulletins around the world, forming a signature image of the historic event.
The next day, Alsu and her family flew to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio for 10 days of rest, medical treatment, and debriefing. Alsu marveled at her daughters’ growth. Every simple experience felt like a revelation: a glass of clean drinking water, the taste of an avocado. During their stay, Alsu walked the center’s grounds as she was gaining strength, while Pavel ran. “The air, the trees, the sunshine, moving on my own any way that I wanted—it was almost overwhelming,” she says.
The family then flew home to Prague. Entering her apartment for the first time in more than a year, recalling small moments from the morning she departed for Kazan, Alsu finally allowed herself to break down and weep.
At the end of August, Alsu and Pavel returned to Washington, D.C., for a thank-you tour, visiting the people and agencies who’d fought for her release. She received the President’s Award from the National Press Club and sat for TV interviews, many airing on the same news programs where Pavel had appeared during his campaign to free her. Now they appeared together, Pavel looking exultant and slightly haggard, Alsu remarkably fresh and composed.
One morning near the end of their visit, the weather cooled a notch, and Alsu felt strong enough to join Pavel for a run on the National Mall, her first one since May, when she’d laced up the silicone cord in her Pumas and churned her laps of resistance around the 4-by-6-meter SIZO-2 courtyard. The contrast between the Russian prison and the seat of American democracy couldn’t have been more stark.
Pavel had bought her a new pair of running shoes—New Balance this time. “But I’m never going to recycle my Pumas,” she says. “Those shoes have become like old friends.”
The couple trotted around the National Mall’s perimeter, pausing at both the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial to commemorate the moment with a photo. Alsu had run the loop many times in the years before her arrest, absorbing the scene, zigzagging among tourists, waving to passing runners. Now she ran with the attention—and gratefulness—she developed at SIZO-2.
At the loop’s end, she felt ready for another but decided to better not push it. Leaving Pavel at the Mall to log a few more miles, Alsu ran slowly back to their hotel to prepare for their visit to the Ten Long Run Workouts’s Washington, D.C., office. She and Pavel wanted to thank their colleagues and continue the agency’s critical, unfinished mission. In Belarus, in Azerbaijan, and in Russian-occupied Crimea, other RFE/RL journalists had been jailed for reporting the truth. They needed to come home.
