With Maria Ressa of the Philippines, Russia’s Dmitry Muratov won the Nobel Peace Prize and gave a striking address.
With Maria Ressa of the Philippines, Russia’s Dmitry Muratov won the Nobel Peace Prize and gave a striking address
T he most recent Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to two journalists: one from Russia, one from the Philippines. The award was meant to honor press freedom, and freedom of speech in general. This freedom, according to the Nobel committee, “is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.”
The award was split between Dmitry Muratov and Maria Ressa. The latter is one of the leading journalists in her country, the Philippines. She co-founded the news site Rappler, which has been a thorn in the side of Rodrigo Duterte, the country’s strongman.
In 2016, Duterte said, “Just because you’re a journalist, you are not exempted from assassination, if you’re a son of a bitch.”
Dmitry Muratov is the editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, one of the few independent outlets left in Russia. Six of his colleagues at the paper have been murdered. In his Nobel lecture, delivered last month, he named them: Igor Domnikov, Yuri Shchekochikhin, Anna Politkovskaya, Anastasia Baburova, Stanislav Markelov, and Natalia Estemirova.
Andrei Sakharov was a namer of names, too. As you recall, he was the great Russian physicist who became a great dissident, a great human-rights champion. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. The Soviet government forbade him to go to Oslo, however, to collect his prize and give his lecture. His wife and fellow dissident, Elena Bonner, was there in his stead.
Why was she allowed to go? She happened to be out of the country already — in Italy, to receive medical treatment. That is, she was out of the country when the prize was announced in October. She stayed on in Europe, to represent her husband in Oslo, in December.
If you would like to read more about this, try my history of the Nobel Prize Prize, Peace, They Say.
Toward the end of his lecture, Sakharov, through his wife, named names: the names of political prisoners. Sakharov had written the lecture; his wife was reading it. “Here are some of the names that are known to me,” said Sakharov. Then he began, “Plyush, Bukovsky, Glusman, Moros, Maria Semyonova, Nadezhda Svetlichnaya . . .” He named about a hundred names, concluding with, “and many, many others.”
Early in his own lecture, from last month, Dmitry Muratov cited, quoted, and hailed Sakharov. But he began as follows:
On the morning of October 8, I received a phone call from my mother. She wondered how things were going.
“Well, Mom, we’ve got the Nobel Prize.”
“That’s nice. Anything else?”
In this lecture, Muratov says many simple things. Simple, yes — but profound, powerful, and true, too. He says, “The world has fallen out of love with democracy.” And: “The world has begun to turn to dictatorship.”
Over the last several years, we have heard a lot about “strength” and “weakness.” Politicians and their supporters claim to be “strong,” while their opponents are “weak.”
Here is Muratov:
In our country (and not only) it is common to think that politicians who avoid bloodshed are weak.
While threatening the world with war is the duty of true patriots.
The powerful actively promote the idea of war.
In Russia, there is a lot of “militaristic rhetoric on state-owned television channels,” says Muratov.
And this is a poignant statement, I find: “Today’s ideologues promote the idea of dying for your country and not living for your country.”
Muratov speaks of Russia and Ukraine, and of Chechnya. He also introduces me to a new phrase: “hawk squawk.” I don’t know what it is in Russian, but it is wonderfully rhyming in English.
Here is Muratov:
I would like to mention another person who received the Nobel Peace Prize here, in 1990.
Moscow. Kremlin. April 18, 1988. A meeting of the Politburo is in progress. One of the Soviet ministers demands that military forces remain in Afghanistan. Mikhail Gorbachev interrupts him abruptly: “Stop your hawk squawk.”
Stop the hawk squawk.
Three Russians have won the Nobel Peace Prize, by the way — and we have mentioned them already: Sakharov, Gorbachev, and Muratov. (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, you recall, won the literature prize.)
In his lecture, Muratov talks about the dictatorship in Belarus, which created a refugee crisis in Eastern Europe. “We journalists have uncovered how it is all organized,” says Muratov. “Our task is accomplished. Now it is up to the politicians.”
Getting on to a new topic, he asks a question: “People for the state, or state for the people? That is the main conflict today.” That is the main conflict of many days, I would add.
Muratov talks about something urgently important:
The practice of torture in prisons and during investigation is alive and well in today’s Russia. Abuse, rape, terrible living conditions . . . Seriously ill people are locked up and beaten in custody, sick children are held hostage . . .
In the West, businessmen and financial people are intimately tied to the Putin regime. Muratov tells us something of great interest:
Criminal cases in our country are often based on false accusations and political motives. Opposition politician Alexei Navalny is being held in jail based on a false accusation from the CEO of the Russian branch of a big French cosmetics company. The accuser was somehow not summoned to the court and did not ask to be an aggrieved party. But Navalny is behind bars. The cosmetics company chose to step aside, hoping that the odor from this case would not harm the scent of the company’s products.
Uh-huh.
About two weeks after Muratov delivered this lecture, the Russian government shut down Memorial, the nation’s leading civil-society and human-rights organization. Previously, the government had branded Memorial a “foreign agent.” This is an equivalent of “enemy of the people.”
“Memorial was established by Sakharov,” says Muratov. “Memorial is not an ‘enemy of the people.’ Memorial is a friend of the people.”
He further says,
. . . journalism in Russia is going through a dark valley. Over a hundred journalists, media outlets, human-rights defenders, and NGOs have recently been branded “foreign agents.” . . . Many of our colleagues have lost their jobs. Some have to leave the country.
. . . That has happened in our history before.
One hundred years ago, ships steamed out of St. Petersburg, bound for Stettin, carrying intellectuals who had been expelled from the Soviet Union. There were almost 300 of these people, all told. The vessels were known as “philosophers’ ships.”
On the ship called the Oberbürgermeister Haken, says Muratov, were the philosophers Semyon Frank, Ivan Ilyin, and Pitirim Sorokin. “Among them there also was the great thinker Nikolai Berdyaev,” he says. Like the others,
he was allowed to bring his pajamas, two shirts, two pairs of socks, and a winter coat. This is how the Motherland said goodbye to its great citizens: Leave your things behind but take your brain with you.
The same thing is happening with journalists and human-rights defenders today.
The “philosophers’ ship” has been replaced by the “journalists’ plane.” This is of course a metaphor, but dozens of journalists are leaving Russia.
What a striking phrase: “Leave your things behind but take your brain with you.” You can hear Russian spoken on practically every block in New York, London, Tel Aviv . . .
Be acquainted with three more names — names of the recently murdered. Says Muratov,
Russian journalists Orkhan Dzhemal, Kirill Radchenko, and Alexander Rastorguyev were brutally shot in the Central African Republic, where they were investigating the activity of a private Russian military company. Orkhan’s widow, Ira Gordienko, works for Novaya Gazeta. Since the day of the murder, June 30, 2018, she has revealed lies in the official investigation.
Of journalists in general, Muratov says,
Yes, we growl and bite. Yes, we have sharp teeth and a strong grip.
But we are the prerequisite for progress.
We are the antidote against tyranny.
After the body of his lecture, Dmitry Muratov said the following:
I wanted to save a minute of time.
Let us rise and honor my and Maria Ressa’s reporter colleagues, who have given their lives for this profession, with a minute of silence, and let us give our support to those who suffer persecution.
He ended, “I want journalists to die old.”