By Alsu Kurmasheva ripped the strings off her face mask and carefully threaded the soft ends through the eyelets of her running shoes. The Puma Velocity Nitro 2s 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. She realised the jailers didn’t want prisoners to walk freely, but to shuffle around the exercise courtyard in defeat. Alsu wouldn’t surrender so easily.
The makeshift laces worked. Walking in an almost normal stride around her cell, she silently exulted in the small victory against her captors.
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Day 9 of her detention had been the hardest so far – nine hours of relentless interrogation. Now that she’d had a taste of a Russian prison the security forces apparently thought she might be demoralised enough to confess to their bogus spying charge. But she wasn’t guilty of anything, other than being a journalist and naturalised US citizen visiting family.
The Federal Security Service (FSB) agent, a grey-faced middle-aged man, drilled for details about her work: how she gathered information, the people she talked with. He insisted her employer, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), served as a front for the CIA. Alsu kept repeating that wasn’t true. The FSB agent tried to exhaust her to the point where she no longer recognised the truth. If she made a video confession, he suggested, she might even be released. She rebuffed the offer, and the interrogation wore on for hours, the agent jabbing with lies, Alsu parrying with the truth. By the time he gave up and delivered Alsu back to her cell, she’d missed her daily hour of exercise, and her chance to shower.
The next day, October 29, 2023, broke clear but cold, a foretaste of a long, bitter winter. Alsu couldn’t imagine spending winter in prison. Surely the Russians would drop the charges. Surely she would be on a flight home to Prague in time to celebrate Thanksgiving in November.
After missing her exercise the day before, Kurmasheva was eager to employ her improvised laces in a walk around the courtyard, a 4-by-6-metre cell with a roof open to the weather. As her cellmate lit a cigarette and shivered, Kurmasheva began pacing around the perimeter.
She’d only taken a few steps when something extraordinary happened. ‘It was spontaneous,’ says Alsu. ‘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 along the Vltava riverfront in Prague, alive to the pulse of the city; she, Pavel and their two daughters running the monthly 3.2K Pancake Run in Prague’s Stromovka park.
As she followed the spontaneous movement of her legs and heart, she couldn’t foresee how deeply running – and the idea of it – would sustain her and her family during their ordeal. That afternoon, she finally took a shower. In her diary she wrote: Two things happened today that made me feel human again.
Alsu grew up in Kazan, capital of the Russian Republic of Tatarstan. 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 oil-producing region prospered, the rich mix of cultures and languages and the independent spirit of its citizens threatened the Moscow government. After a short-lived autonomy following the fall of the Soviet Union, Tatarstan became a constituent republic of the Russian Federation in 1994. Determined to exert control and establish a monolithic Russian society, Putin’s regime restricted teaching the Tatar language and discouraged Tatars from observing their customs and heritage.
Alsu’s parents were educators who encouraged her to explore the world. In 1998, after graduating from Kazan Federal University, the then 22-year-old moved to Prague, home to RFE/RL. Part of the Voice of America programme, the media organisation 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 there.
In 2001, Alsu met Pavel Butorin, a Russian about to start his own career at RFE/RL. Sharing a 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,’ says Kurmasheva. ‘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 US citizenship. Alsu retained dual citizenship with Russia.
Alsu hadn’t been back to Kazan since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The war had changed everything, including her job, which now involved producing stories telling the truth about the crisis in Ukraine. She also coedited a book, Saying No to War: 40 Stories of Russians Who Oppose the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, in which citizens of the Tatarstan region described their quietly heroic acts of protest.
In spring 2023, Alsu’s mother became ill, and she needed to see her. She knew she’d be visiting a more repressive, possibly more dangerous Kazan, but she wasn’t travelling for work and wouldn’t be reporting from there. She’d only be gone for two weeks. As she prepared for her trip on May 20, she envisioned birch trees budding along the Volga riverfront and spring sunshine glinting off the Kazan Kremlin.
To save space in her suitcase, she’d only take the shoes she’d be wearing – the Pumas Pavel had bought 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,’ she says. ‘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 running another chance.
Pavel had recently returned from the Vltava Run, a 230-mile relay through the heart of the Czech Republic. Bibi and Miriam ran for their American school’s cross-country team, Alsu ran regularly through Prague. When planning holidays, the family chose lodging with access to running routes. They had just booked a rental for that summer on the coast of Spain.
‘Mum, 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. Pavel recognised the potential hazards. While visiting Russia to renew his passport in 2002, he’d been questioned and temporarily prevented from leaving the country by FSB.
Over the past 21 years and with the war in Ukraine rousing geopolitical turmoil, the Putin regime’s war on independent journalists had 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 travelling 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.
The two weeks with her mother were busy but passed uneventfully: medical appointments, shopping and cooking, visiting 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. She watched her flight depart with a pit of dread growing in her stomach. 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.’
An agent 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. It was 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. Then a week passed. Lacking travel documents and under investigation, the terms of her confinement were relatively light and deliberately vague. She could leave the apartment but couldn’t travel outside Kazan. She could speak to 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, followed by months, 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 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’d run to relieve her stress. Kazan was an inviting city for runners, with leafy trails in Gorky Park and a scenic route along the Volga riverfront by the Kazan Kremlin, a World Heritage Site. But most of the time 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 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 voices speaking out in Alsu’s book had been arrested or otherwise intimidated into silence.
Perhaps for the first time, Alsu realised 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 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 filmed the arrest, parading the slight, pale, terrified woman as a captured American spy.
The charges were serious: 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 taken to SIZO-2 detention facility in Kazan, housed in a 19th century former Russian Orthodox monastery. She was placed in a basement cell with one other female inmate. Her only permitted outside contact was with her Russian lawyer. 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 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 grey stone walls that magnified the pervasive chill. Odours from the prison kitchen and inmates’ cigarettes predominated, but at times the wind carried the fresh scent of the nearby Volga River. 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 kilometre, she’d have to run 50 laps. She ran 10 clockwise, then 10 anticlockwise: five sets around a space smaller than her office’s conference room, in shoes held together by face mask strings. She grew dizzy, but despite the hardships, these improvisational runs became the relative jewel of her 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 watched Alsu run with a kind of awe. ‘”Your face changes when you run,” one woman told me,’ Alsu recalls. ‘”Your expression softens. You look at peace and happy.”’
In Prague, Alsu had found renewal and purpose in unstructured runs. She liked to run solo, listening to the birdsong, watching the play of light through the trees. Cyclists, dog walkers, tourists – the city moved around her, and she felt at one with the flow. She enjoyed the way she felt afterward – the settled nerves, the resonant thoughts – more than the run itself.
But in this grey courtyard, amid the din and stink, Alsu savoured 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. 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.’
Through the summer of Alsu’s house arrest, Pavel’s lawyers and advisors counselled him not to call attention to her case. The Russian security machine was notoriously fickle, he was told. Maybe they’d decide 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 work 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 them on the planned holiday to Spain. By September, 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. He felt strong and lined up just behind the elites. When the horn sounded, the 8000+ runners began to weave through the city’s cobblestone streets. The pavements pulsed, thick with spectators celebrating the end of summer. After 21 years running, Pavel knew you should never go out too hard, but he couldn’t help himself: He hadn’t seen his wife for more than three months, as she languished, under house arrest in a hostile foreign autocracy. He channelled all his repressed energy, worry and anguish into speed. Although he couldn’t maintain his early 5:45 pace, Pavel battled to a 44:11 finish, his late-race pain eased by knowing Bibi and Miriam would be at the finish.
After that race, Pavel stuck with the wait-and-see advice. But when Alsu was arrested, he launched a campaign to publicide 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.’ he says. What if Alsu didn’t come home? Was he doing enough to free her? Was he being a good enough parent for the girls?
Pavel hated being 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 while attending Ohio University. In 2003, when he moved to Prague, running became a passion. Travelling to cities around the world for work, he staved off jet lag with dawn runs. ‘For me, a day without running feels like a day wasted,’ he says.
But most important to Pavel’s was serving as a role model for his wife and daughters. As the separation from her mother continued, Bibi found refuge in running. ‘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 autumn and winter, the pace of Pavel’s advocacy quickened. Daily routines in Prague alternated with advocacy trips to Washington and New York. Often accompanied by Bibi, Pavel appeared in interviews on major US TV shows. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other leading news organisations published stories.
Her story was reaching the public, but the US 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. Pavel kept lobbying members of Congress. During his morning miles, he 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.
Winter struck early 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 realised I had to focus on where I was,’ she says. Alsu began to study the craft of confinement. She listened 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. You runners understand me like no one else. I can’t wait to join you because I choose health, freedom, and beauty.”
As 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,’ she says.
Denied US consular visits, Alsu’s captors tormented her that she’d been forgotten, that no one was working for her release. ‘All done to test me, frighten me, unsettle me,’ she says. After months of stress, poor diet, patchy sleep and lack of medical care, she’d lost 10kg. 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,’ she says.
By the time the courtyard snow melted and Alsu prepared to resume running, the strings she’d transplanted from her face mask had finally disintegrated. 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 silicone cord, which she laced through the eyelets of her 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, 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 prison.’
One rainy day she stepped outside for a breath of air. A cellmate from one of the Ukrainian regions controlled by Russia joined her and sang a song in her native language. ‘That hour in the rain, with her singing in her beautiful voice, still stays with me,’ says Alsu.
Back in Prague, in mid-May, it was time for the annual Vltava Run, normally a highlight on Pavel’s calendar. In May 2023, just days before flying to Kazan, Alsu had driven Pavel to a meeting spot with his relay team, then followed them to the finish in Prague. Now, a year later, 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 Alsu’s plight.
On one of the toughest legs, a 15km trail run through Šumava National Park, as Pavel picked his way through the fragrant stands of larch, following the beam of his headlamp, he realised 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. 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 development in her case. A few weeks earlier, then-President Joe Biden had overseen a diplomatic breakthrough, convincing German chancellor Olaf Scholz to include Vadim Krasikov, an FSB agent serving a life sentence for murdering a Russian dissident in Berlin, in a proposed multination prisoner swap. Krasikov would form the key bargaining chip in a trade for Evan Gershkovich and other political prisoners – including, Pavel hoped, Alsu.
Pavel and his teammates ran Vltava wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the message ‘Free Alsu’. Some spectators raised their fists in support, others stared blankly. 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. Kilometre by kilometre, Pavel and his teammates battled the lie. As Alsu had shown, a run – even few steps around a courtyard – could strike a blow for the truth.
An adage popular 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 closed-door trial and 288 days in confinement, a court in Kazan found Alsu guilty. The judge sentenced her to six and a half years in prison. It was a move in a geopolitical chess game, labelling Alsu a convicted spy justified a trade for Krasikov, a convicted murderer.
‘The Russian legal system is elaborately procedural, but in fact it’s arbitrary,’ Pavel explains. ‘There’s the official local investigation, but the FSB in Moscow is really pulling the strings.’
Alsu again wavered between hope and fear. She understood that her conviction might be the opening gambit in a deal to bring her home. But deals often collapsed; instead of Prague, she might be bound for the Russian gulag, where innocent political prisoners perished wholesale.
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.’
A week later, at 7am, Alsu began the peculiarly Russian ordeal of inmate transfer, a grinding, glacially paced rail odyssey that often ended in a forced-labour camp in Siberia. The trip could be perilous; while in transit, the prisoner’s location and condition were unknown to her outside advocates. A prisoner might ‘disappear’ en route.
Alsu would later remember the following days as some of the longest of her life. Alone in a windowless prison car, 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 travelled 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. The direction seemed promising, but Alsu tried to maintain her jail-forged stoicism and not hold out hope.
Late on Monday she disembarked and was taken to a former KGB jail. When she asked to phone her lawyer, 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 loaded onto a bus with Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter, and Paul Whelan, a former US Marine who’d been imprisoned in Russia for more than five years. Sitting apart, each supervised by an FSB agent, they travelled to a Moscow airport.
Three hours later, their plane landed at Ankara Esenboğa Airport in Turkey, where the largest East-West prisoner exchange since the end of the Cold War was underway. Along with Gershkovich and Whelan, Alsu was taken to a transit lounge. 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 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. Only gradually, as her plane to the US achieved cruising altitude, did Alsu realise she wasn’t dreaming.
The morning of July 31 was oppressively steamy, even by Washington DC standards. Pavel rose early to run a four-mile route that was typical for him when in the US capital. Yet this run was different.
A few days earlier, the White House had called, urging him to extend his stay; he and his daughters were visiting for interviews and meetings. Pavel had learned to temper his hopes, but along with other positive signs that a prisoner swap was pending, it was the most positive news the family had received during their 14-month 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, Pavel thought about Alsu’s captors.
He envisioned the Putin henchmen, bureaucrats who told themselves they were just doing their jobs, looking down at Alsu in the courtroom as she hurled her brave words of pity in their faces. What did they talk about at dinner with their families after spending a day tormenting an innocent mother of two children? Unlike Alsu, he felt no pity for them.
Late on August 1, the silver Bombardier jet traveling from Ankara landed at Joint Base Andrews. The three freed detainees disembarked in a predetermined order, one at a time. Alsu watched on a phone screen as Gershkovich, the best-known of the group, descended the stairs to shake hands with President Biden and Vice President Harris, then hugged 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 can’t remember what she said. 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.
Over the following 10 days of rest, medical treatment and debriefing, Alsu marvelled at her daughters’ growth. Every simple experience felt like a revelation: a glass of clean water, the taste of an avocado. Alsu walked the centre’s grounds as she regained 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.
That August, Alsu and Pavel returned to Washington for a thank-you tour, visiting the people who’d fought for her release. One morning Alsu felt strong enough to join Pavel for a run, her first one since May, when she’d laced up the silicone cord in her Pumas and churned laps of resistance around the SIZO-2 courtyard.
Pavel had bought her new running shoes. ‘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, zigzagging among tourists, waving to passing runners. Now she ran with the attention – and gratefulness –developed at SIZO-2.
Leaving Pavel to log a few more miles, Alsu ran slowly back to their hotel to prepare for their visit to the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Washington 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.