A Russian Nobel laureate, living on a knife’s edge
GENEVA — For years before he won the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2021, Russian editor Dmitry Muratov — bluff, bearded, Hemingway-esque — was routinely described as a burly man. These days he is nearly gaunt, having shed 45 pounds and sworn off liquor for as long as war rages in Ukraine, a sobriety program that seems durable.
Muratov, 62, is living on a knife’s edge in the vanishing space between inspirational bravery and futile resistance in Russia. His courage is indisputable; he has been physically assaulted and, his associates tell me, he is frequently threatened. Still, he speaks out. Yet the tangible effect of his or anyone’s dissent is muted amid Russian President Vladimir Putin’s flood tide of despotism.
How can even the most forthright and righteous voice make a difference in a country where public opinion is becoming irrelevant?
In his Nobel acceptance speech in Oslo, Muratov noted that Russian journalists, though “going through a dark valley,” remained the “antidote against tyranny.” A few months later, soon after Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, tyranny came calling. As Muratov rode a train in Russia, an attacker splashed his face with acetone-laced red paint, an assault that U.S. officials said was conducted by Russian intelligence. “Muratov,” cried the assailant, “here’s one for our boys” — apparently a reference to Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine.
Six journalists from Muratov’s newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, have been murdered, including the crusading reporter Anna Politkovskaya, executed at her Moscow apartment building in 2006 with a pistol shot to the head. It was them to whom Muratov dedicated his Nobel.
Novaya Gazeta’s publishing license has been rescinded. The paper’s website is blocked in Russia, though it can be accessed online by Russian readers using VPNs. And in September, Muratov was designated as Russia’s 665th “foreign agent,” in effect branded as a traitor along with more than 100 other Russian journalists. He stepped down last year as Novaya Gazeta’s chief editor, a position he had held for most of the 30 years since he helped found the paper.
Nonetheless, Muratov remains in Moscow, where he is the most prominent dissident who has managed to escape sudden death or imprisonment.
He is loath to discuss his personal safety. But he remains outspoken, as I found while interviewing him this month in Switzerland. He was attending the International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights in Geneva, where he appeared at the preview of a documentary, “Of Caravan and the Dogs,” in which he features prominently. (Another documentary about him, “The Price of Truth,” was issued last year.)
Muratov insisted that Russia’s deepening darkness will give way, eventually, to a new day. “Putin’s generation will get older, even as they search for the secret of immortality, like all rulers who think things will collapse without them,” he told me. “They will go, and this new younger generation is great — it is free, it is empathetic, it is professional and creative.”
Yet Muratov can have no illusions that the Nobel shields him from Putin’s predations. Last month, a Russian court imposed a 2½-year prison sentence on Oleg Orlov, the 70-year-old co-chair of the Russian human rights group Memorial, which won the Nobel Peace Prize a year after Muratov did. Muratov testified at Orlov’s trial, having failed to persuade him to drop his appeal and leave the country.
“I told him not to give them a chance of victory, that he was needed in freedom,” Muratov told me. “I said I didn’t want him to be a victim. And he said, ‘I’m not a victim, I’m just going to jail.’”
In the final months before charismatic Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny died in an Arctic detention camp in February, he organized an online survey asking who might lead the resistance to Putin’s regime. The results from nearly 50,000 respondents, released in November by Navalny’s team, show Muratov among the most popular options.
Muratov admired Navalny’s creative political theatrics in mocking the regime and exposing its extravagant corruption, and testified for Navalny in his prison trial last year. But he has never aspired to a role like Navalny’s — he remains a journalist, not a provocateur, and has made no attempt to organize a political opposition.
But by denouncing the war in Ukraine as a futile bloodbath, by insisting that most Russians want it to end, by shining a light on the swelling roster of the regime’s victims beaten, persecuted or jailed, Muratov’s message registers with other Russians dismayed or disgusted by the regime’s immorality. It is a reminder that they are not alone, even as the state tightens its vise on what can be publicly expressed.
That message is psychologically important in Russian society, where politics is too dangerous for open discussion. It might not topple tyranny, but it can have the subversive effect of piercing the miasma of official propaganda, which, along with Putin’s make-believe “reelection,” aims to convince Russians that support for the regime is all but universal.
“Propaganda means to convince people that their dissident thoughts are shared by no one, that they must remain unspoken,” said Kirill Martynov, chief editor of a reconstituted, European edition of Novaya Gazeta, produced by the newspaper’s staff who fled into exile in Latvia after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine two years ago. The result, he told me, “is that people feel alone” and “don’t trust each other.”
The other, possible effect of dissidents such as Muratov is to warn the regime that its scope for cruelty might be finite — even if Putin thinks things are going his way or that Russia’s interests and his are indistinguishable. As Sergei Guriev, a Russian economist in exile who is provost at France’s Sciences Po university told me: “What prevents things from getting worse even faster is Putin understanding that there are many who oppose him.”
For now, Muratov does what he can for the hundreds convicted on political charges, often for the most trivial infractions. A recent issue of Novaya Gazeta was dedicated almost entirely to those prisoners of conscience, jailed by courts weaponized to suppress any utterance at odds with the regime’s suffocating lies: The grocer who got 18 months for taping antiwar slogans to the window of his shop. The Moscow city council member serving seven years for criticizing the war in Ukraine. The cancer-stricken activist sentenced to 7½ years for his antiwar Facebook posts.
Muratov tests his own room for maneuvering repeatedly. He has appeared as a spectator and witness for dissidents at their trials, including that of Vladimir Kara-Murza, a contributing Post columnist jailed two years ago. And a few months after he was awarded the Nobel, which he shared with Filipino editor Maria Ressa, Muratov sold his medal at auction, where an anonymous buyer paid the staggering sum of $103.5 million. Muratov donated the money to UNICEF for children from Ukraine and elsewhere driven from their homes by violence.
Muratov’s frank warnings about Russia’s darkening future, including the encroachment of fascist ideology and prospects that the government will use nuclear weapons, is matched by his frustration with the West. He singles out its complicity in filling Putin’s coffers before the war when Europe, ignoring the Kremlin’s growing repression, was content to live off cheap Russian energy. And he strikes a cynical note now about the West’s capacity for resignation in the face of setbacks in Ukraine, and its passivity as Putin snuffs out the remaining embers of civil liberty.
“Where is the West’s support for political prisoners?” he demanded. “Where is the antiwar or pro-peace movement?”
Instead, he said, “what do we have? ‘Oh, Putin is winning!’ But who invested all that money in Russia? So now the Russian army is learning from its mistakes, Putin is sticking hard to his position and [the West] just tells Ukraine, ‘We are getting tired of this story, we waited for your victory but it didn’t happen, so let’s go home.’ That is what is happening.”
Muratov’s warning is worth heeding in Washington and European capitals. He should be heard, for as long as it’s possible to hear him.
Lee Hockstader has been The Post's European Affairs columnist, based in Paris, since 2023. Previously he was a member of the Post editorial board; a national correspondent, a foreign correspondent, and a local reporter. He was awarded The Post's Eugene Meyer Award for lifetime achievement in 2014
