Prominent Russian Journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza Sr. Dies Age 59

Vladimir Kara-Murza Sr., one of Russia's most prominent journalists and a pioneer of independent post-Soviet television, has died at the age of 59 in Moscow.

The journalist's son, Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr., wrote on Twitter that his father died on July 28 He did not reveal the cause of death.

Kara-Murza Sr. gained prominence as a television journalist in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union and during democratic reforms that came under President Boris Yeltsin.

In 1993, he was a founding member of a team of journalists at the newly created NTV, Russia's first independent television channel, and anchored a popular information program at NTV called Today At Midnight.

He, along with a number of other leading journalists, left NTV in 2001 after the television station was seized by the Russian government.

After leaving NTV, Kara-Murza Sr. worked at different independent television channels, as well as for RFE/RL's Russian Service and the Ekho Moskvy radio station in the Russian capital.

Kara-Murza Sr. had been a vocal critic of President Vladimir Putin and his government.

In 2004, he co-founded an opposition movement, Committee 2008 -- Free Choice, that warned of a drift toward autocracy by Putin and his administration.

Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr. is also an outspoken Kremlin critic and was a top aide to former Russian Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, an opposition politician who was gunned down just outside the Kremlin in 2015.

In September 2018, Kara-Murza Jr. was a pallbearer for John McCain when the coffin of the late Republican senator was taken to Washington's National Cathedral for the memorial service.