Paying the price of truth: Nobel peace laureate Dmitry Muratov won’t be silenced by Putin; The Guardian, August 20, 2023

Tim Adams, The Guardian ; Paying the price of truth: Nobel peace laureate Dmitry Muratov won’t be silenced by Putin

"Smartphone footage of this event from April 2022 is the opening scene of a documentary film about the life of Muratov, which will be shown on Channel 4 at 10pm on Monday night. The film is called The Price of Truth, and if you were ever in doubt about the human cost of publishing factual news in a time of war and repression, then Muratov’s career establishes it in frank detail.

I spoke to Muratov last week, by Zoom in the office of the newspaper he has edited for 30 years, Novaya Gazeta, standard bearer for the glasnost and perestroika of its founding patron, Mikhail Gorbachev. None of those years have been without challenge and trauma. The photographs of six Novaya Gazeta journalists murdered in the course of their work are on the wall above Muratov’s desk. But even so, he suggested to me, this last year has been the worst.

“All non-state media [including his paper] has been closed,” he says. “Hundreds of thousands of web pages have been blocked.” Government propaganda, he suggests, spreads “like radiation” into every home. “There is no one to control power in Russia, and our society hasn’t understood that yet.”"