Nobel Peace Prize – Clarification of noble stumbling blocks

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It is not. On the contrary. Let us therefore contribute with a clarification. When the Nobel Committee announced its election in October, Putin was among the first to congratulate Muratov on the award, adding some beautiful words about the importance of the job of editor of Russia’s most important alternative voice over the past 20 years.

That’s true. The job Muratov is doing is so important that six of his employees have been killed for doing it. The most famous of those killed is Anna Politkovskaya, who investigated war crimes and human rights violations in the wake of Putin’s war in Chechnya. But also the newspaper’s lawyer, a sub-editor and three other journalists were killed. They are taken by day with everything from poison to firearms. They were killed because they were dangerously close to revelations of corruption and crimes with branches of “power”, Putin’s multi-headed and multi-fingered control over ever larger sections of Russian society. It is a system where the heads require thought control, and the fingers nibble much more than their shards of what may be left of money.

This is Muratov with great personal courage – and with the loss of six close co-workers and good friends – has stood up to. But he has done it with great ingenuity, and he has done so knowing that Putin has always needed an example to show in order to say that Russia is not a full-blooded dictatorship. The trick is that Muratov has been meticulously careful not to get funding from abroad, for example, so that the newspaper could be branded as a “foreign agent”, as all other critical media are now. And as the oldest and most prestigious critical medium in Russia, Muratov is aware that Putin would like at least one example of a truly independent media that he can show.

Muratov’s paradox is, however, that he can not give a penny of the prize money from this year’s Peace Prize to his own newspaper. Then it will immediately be branded as a “foreign agent”, with the problems it creates for future funding from Russian sources. In this stumbling block lies the Putin regime’s very real nature in relation to the country’s ‘free press’.

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