WASHINGTON, D.C. — On December 14, 2026, Russian pro-democracy leader and Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian Vladimir Kara-Murza will deliver the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)’s 23rd annual Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture on Democracy in the World. The lecture, “No Peace Without Freedom: Why a Safer World Requires a Democratic Russia,” is co-hosted by the Embassy of Canada to the United States.
Kara-Murza has spent decades advancing democracy and human rights in Russia. A longtime colleague of murdered Russian pro-democracy leader Boris Nemtsov, he played a critical role in advocating for Magnitsky sanctions against Kremlin officials. For this work, he was twice poisoned and left in a coma. In 2022, he was arrested and later sentenced by a Russian court to 25 years in prison for his vocal opposition to the war in Ukraine. While Kara-Murza was in prison, he and his wife, Evgenia, launched the 30 October Foundation to advocate on behalf of Russian political prisoners and provide financial support to their families.
“Vladimir Kara-Murza has endured the Kremlin’s worst abuses without surrendering his faith in the Russian people or their democratic future,” said NED President and CEO Damon Wilson. “As America marks 250 years since its founding, his example affirms a principle at the heart of our democratic tradition, that no people are destined to live under tyranny. Russia’s future belongs to its citizens, and those working peacefully to build that future deserve the support of democracies everywhere.”
Kara-Murza was released from prison in the 2024 East-West prisoner exchange and has continued his advocacy for democracy and Russian political prisoners. He is the vice president of the Free Russia Foundation and serves as one of the 15 Russian representatives to the Platform for Dialogue with Russian Democratic Forces at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). He is also a contributing writer to the Washington Post and received a Pulitzer Prize for essays on Russia’s democratic future written while imprisoned between 2022 and 2024.
Inaugurated in 2004, the Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture on Democracy in the World is a joint initiative of NED, the Embassy of Canada to the United States, and the University of Toronto’s Department of Political Science and Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. Named after celebrated democracy scholar Seymour Martin Lipset, the lecture is delivered both in the United States and Canada by leading thinkers who have made important contributions to the study of democracy.
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About the National Endowment for Democracy: NED is a private, nonprofit foundation dedicated to advancing freedom and democracy worldwide. Established in 1983 as part of President Reagan’s vision to foster an “infrastructure of democracy” with a bipartisan Congressional mandate, NED supports grassroots leaders striving for the freedom to think, speak, worship, engage politically, and support their families without fear. It mobilizes key pillars of American democracy, from political parties to business and labor, to support their counterparts abroad through the Core Institutes that form the NED family: the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, the Center for International Private Enterprise, and the Solidarity Center.
Media Inquiries: Please reach out to press@ned.org.
