Abstract
Alexei Navalny is rubbed out after a mural appeared overnight in Vladimir Putin’s home city of St Petersburg
CREDIT: Alexander Demianchuk / TASS
When the Nobel Peace Prize was co-awarded to a bold and good Russian journalist, Dmitry Muratov, Peskov deadpanned: “We can congratulate Dmitry Muratov. He persistently works in accordance with his own ideals, he is devoted to them, he is talented, he is brave.”
When the Kremlin salutes a Nobel Peace Prize winner you sit up and take notice. The elephant not in the room is the man who didn’t win the prize, who is not talented, who is not brave, who cannot be named. That is the man who the Kremlin fears, who they tried to kill, who they have now locked up. That elephant is Alexei Navalny who many, including me, think should have won it.
What makes arguing this point so tricky is that the two joint winners of the prize this year - Muratov and Filipina journalist Maria Ressa - are worthy recipients and morally streets better than some previous winners, such as Nixon apologist Henry Kissinger and Vietnamese Stalinist Le Duc Tho.
Maria Ressa is a fighter for human rights, a restless, bubbly, tiny ball of energy exuding a forcefield. I met her at a recent Magnitsky Awards ceremony and came away feeling almost sorry for the Philippines’ almost-gangster president, Rodrigo Duterte.
Ressa’s journalism has shone a bleak spotlight on Duterte’s corrupt and murderous rule and it is largely due to her that, in October, he announced he was leaving politics next year. But the Philippines does not have nuclear weapons and its leader, despite his many faults, is not in effect undermining democracy in the West. Putin is.
Right now, Putin seems to be throttling gas supplies to Europe so that this winter, shivering in the dark, it will give the green light to Nord Stream 2. This gas pipeline bypasses Ukraine, the Czech Republic and so on, making it easier for the Kremlin to bully its old dominions. Unease at Putin’s knee being on Europe’s gas neck is not diminished by the fact that the man in charge is Matthias Warnig, a former Stasi officer when Putin was a KGB agent in East Germany. Warnig denies this, saying he met Putin only in 1991. Warnig’s boss is the former chancellor of Germany, Gerhard Schröder, married five times with no children. Until, that is, Putin gave him two orphans from St Petersburg. There is, of course, no suggestion that Putin, Warnig and Schröder have done anything wrong.
Muratov helped create Novaya Gazeta, what many call the last good newspaper in Russia. When accepting the award, he said exactly the right thing: “It’s not mine. I’m not the right beneficiary, there are real ones. It’s just that the Nobel Peace Prize isn’t awarded posthumously, it’s awarded to living people. Obviously, they decided to award it to someone living, having in mind Yuri Shchekochikhin, Igor Domnikov, Anna Politkovskaya, Anastasia Baburova, Stanislav Markelov, and Natalya Estemirova.”
Those six people all worked for Novaya Gazeta. They died in the line of fire.
And Muratov himself thinks that the award went to the wrong man: “If I had been on the Nobel Peace Prize committee, I would have voted for the person whom the bookmakers bet on. I mean Alexei Navalny.”
Navalny is locked up in an uber- prison near Vladimir, east of Moscow, for the crime of not honouring his parole while he was in a coma, having been poisoned by the military grade nerve agent, Novichok. Through his lawyers, Navalny congratulated Muratov, reflecting that Novaya Gazeta’s six murdered journalists showed “what a high price those who refuse to serve the authorities have to pay”.
Writing in The New York Times, Anton Troianovski set out how the Kremlin makes hay with the fault line that runs between journalists such as Muratov, who work inside the system, and people such as Navalny, who make few, if any, compromises.
Troianovski wrote: “Muratov acknowledges that he holds back on what has become a particularly explosive sort of investigative journalism in today’s Russia: exploring the hidden wealth of Putin and his inner circle. Muratov says that though his reporters also pursue corruption investigations, ‘we don’t get into people’s private lives. When it comes to children and women — I stop’.”
The Filipina journalist Maria Ressa is ‘a worthy recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and morally streets better than some previous winners, such as the Nixon apologist Henry Kissinger’
CREDIT: (Ressa) Isaac Lawrence / AFP via Getty; (Muratov) Sipa US / Alamy
Others don’t. I’m thinking of Roman Badanin, the journalist working for the Proekt website, who reported on the extraordinary wealth of one-time St Petersburg cleaner Svetlana Krivonogikh and her daughter, who is the spitting image of Putin. Badanin’s flat in Moscow was raided recently. He has now upped sticks and spends his time in the USA - one of many independent reporters and Navalnyites who have been forced to leave Russia for good in the last 12 months.
There is, of course, no better form of censorship than locking someone up for a crime that does not exist - apart from, that is, the ultimate form of censorship.
Navalny, for the moment, is playing a game of dare with Putin, and he is so obviously Public Enemy Number One of the Kremlin that they dare not kill him. But they can make his life miserable. Recently, the prison authorities deemed him “a terrorist” and he faces a further decade in prison if he is convicted.
Two former convicts in the prison told Dozhd TV that a claque of “trusty” inmates were paid 7,000 roubles (about $95) in cash and granted perks to psychologically torture Navalny, dogging his every move. One prisoner urinated on him to provoke Navalny to hit him and on his birthday in June prisoners were shown a short film suggesting he was homosexual - a potentially lethal move among Russia’s homophobic prison population.
Prison bosses placed an inmate believed to be suffering from tuberculosis in a bunk close to Navalny and a second inmate was a mentally ill prisoner in the bunk next to him, who “burped, spat and masturbated” throughout the night.
This is an old trick. My late friend Vaughan Barrett - gumshoe reporter for New York’s Village Voice - crashed the opening of one of Donald Trump’s casinos in Atlantic City in the 1980s. Trump’s security was handled by moonlighting Atlantic City police officers and Barrett spent the night in a police cell, chained to a radiator next to a mentally ill man who spent the night masturbating, no doubt dreaming of making America great again.
The Russian prison service has made no comment on the allegations that Navalny is in effect being tortured.
The black spot against Navalny dates back to around 2007 when he drifted to the nationalist right and put up a video condemning immigrants mainly from Russia’s (mainly Muslim) south as “cockroaches”.
He has since navigated back to the liberal centre, but he has never admitted his mistake. So did the Nobel people dis Navalny because he might have been a racist?
Marvin Rees is the black mayor of Bristol, in the UK, who spent a term at Yale on its World Fellows programme and his mate was Navalny. Rees told me: “When I first got there, I didn’t have a car. Alexei offered to take me to a supermarket, sat outside waiting while I got my supplies.” Later, the two families went apple picking together. “In terms of the charge of being racist, I take someone as I find them. I didn’t meet someone who approached me with any sort of hate or hostility. I met someone who treated me with respect, treated me as a friend.”
So did the Nobel Peace Prize committee make a big mistake by not honouring Navalny?
(By the way, the Nobel prizes were set up thanks only to a cock-up. In 1888, the death of Ludvig Nobel caused several papers to publish obituaries of his brother, Alfred. One French newspaper wrote: “The merchant of death is dead… Dr Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.” Alfred was very much alive, and upset. His great invention, dynamite, was an explosive used in civilian life, not a military weapon. To ensure his legacy, he set up the prizes in his name.)
Prizewinner Dmitry Muratov helped create Novaya Gazeta, what many call the last good newspaper in Russia
The charge against the Nobel Prize nabobs is that they are comfortable people living comfortable lives who were worried about taking a reputational risk on Navalny - and, in ducking the big decision, delighted the Kremlin.
Once again, I admire Ressa and Muratov very much, but right now Putin is riding high. The USA and Europe are divided and democracy is in the doldrums while the authoritarian powers are doing very nicely, thank you.
The one person who counters that narrative is sitting in a prison cell, alone and abused. And on those grounds alone, the prisoner of the Kremlin gets my vote.