A Nobel Prize for a Russian Compromise
There’s a reason the Kremlin congratulated Novaya Gazeta editor Dmitry Muratov for his award.
He’s no Navalny.
Photographer: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images
There’s plenty of symbolism to Russian editor Dmitry Muratov’s (shared) Nobel Peace Prize. The media outlet he edits, Novaya Gazeta, started, in a way, with another Nobel — Mikhail Gorbachev’s: He spent part of his 1990 Peace Prize to buy computers for the Novaya start-up in 1993. The award also comes almost exactly 15 years after Novaya journalist Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in Moscow; she was one of several at the publication to lose their lives as a result of their reporting.
And yet, as much as Politkovskaya, for example, may have deserved such a distinction for her courageous coverage of the war in Chechnya, Muratov’s prize — meant to support independent Russian journalism at a time when President Vladimir Putin’s regime appears to be out to eradicate it — sends entirely the wrong message.