Just before the train pulled away from Kazansky station in Moscow, the door to his carriage was flung open and a masked man threw a bucket of stinking red liquid over him, shouting the words: “This is for our boys!” The liquid – it turned out to be paint mixed with acetone – drenched Muratov in crimson and half-blinded him, but he still had the presence of mind to chase his attacker down the platform. He apprehended the masked man talking to a police officer and demanded his arrest. No action was taken.
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.”
The Price of Truth begins three days after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when the Kremlin stepped up its attack on domestic media. What remained of an independent press was first ordered not to use the word “war”, then suspended; scores of Russian journalists were officially declared traitorous “foreign agents”.
Muratov’s response was, typically, both canny and robust. Knowing what was coming, he suspended Novaya’s production in advance of official sanction, and his editorial team left for Riga, in Latvia, where a Novaya Gazeta Europe edition would report the war in exile. He himself stayed – against all pleading – in Moscow.
In his editorial office last week, Muratov, 61, had the air of a man who has faced down the worst that life could throw at him, yet maintained not only his clear sense of mission but also his human warmth. Patrick Forbes, the director of The Price of Truth, recalled to me how, when he first met Muratov 20 years ago in those same offices while working on a film about Russian oligarchs, the editor barrelled in at 11 in the morning, put a whisky bottle down on the table and demanded: “What are we drinking?” Forbes left some hours later, “drunk and incredibly well-informed”. Even on a Zoom screen, speaking through a translator, to an audience of me in London, Muratov conveys a good deal of that bullish charisma.
I ask him first what work is going on in the offices in the absence of his newspaper and nearly all of his staff. He smiles.
They are busy doing three things, he says. They are making reports to camera that are shown on YouTube and Telegram channels; they are creating a basic pdf version of the paper, which is sent by email every week to half a million Russian readers; and they are organising a letter-writing campaign to imprisoned journalists in Russia. Muratov holds up a letter to the screen addressed to the Wall Street Journal’s correspondent Evan Gershkovich, falsely imprisoned on spying charges in March. “The international community of journalists needs to show more solidarity,” he says.
I wonder if he feels bereft not to have his own family of reporters at Novaya around him? Though by law he cannot be connected to the Novaya journalists in Riga, he says, he feels that those who are working in exile still have “the same DNA”. That keeps him going.
Was he not tempted to join them, to work from abroad? Muratov says he stayed behind in Russia for two reasons. The first was that “he had a contract with the newspaper” that he was obliged to fulfil – and “despite the 100 laws” trying to prevent him, he would do that to the best of his ability. The second is personal: his mother is ill and facing an operation and, as the only son, he must be on hand to care for her.
Watching the film and talking to Muratov, you guess there is a further unspoken reason. His simple continued presence, even in muted form, offers an image of an alternative Russia, the more open nation that his friend and sponsor Gorbachev once envisaged.
As Forbes, who has made films about Vladimir Putin, suggests to me: “The pair of them are total opposites. Putin is paranoid and alone, and his people are bound to him by fear. Dimi [Muratov] is ridiculously brave, and the people around him are bound by loyalty and affection. Those are two characteristics you don’t see much of in the Kremlin.”
Muratov gave the film-maker only one pre-condition: don’t put our lives in danger. A combination of trust and journalistic principle meant that he demanded no editorial control of the film.
You hesitate to ask Muratov, a man who calculates risk hour by hour, whether his current actions are not themselves incendiary to the authorities. For obvious reasons, he doesn’t speak about fear or about security. In the course of our conversation, there are only a couple of moments when he, understandably, closes down a question. At one point, I ask him how he felt when Putin addressed him personally on screen to congratulate him on his Nobel prize. He says, simply: “Since 24th February 2022 [the date of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine] my memory is not good.”
Muratov did his national service in the Russian army in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and his first job as a journalist was as a war correspondent for the official paper of communist youth, Komsomolskaya Pravda. I wonder if those early experiences of war shaped his feelings about the current horrors?
There are, he says, many parallels: “15,000 Russian soldiers, and 640,000 civilians were killed in Afghanistan,” he says. And, as a correspondent, “he brought home many IDs and letters to grieving mothers and widows… The current, as we must call it, ‘special military operation’ has no sense and will have the same outcome for a whole generation.”
The pain and outrage at the Russian body count in that earlier war, I suggest, was one of the reasons for the collapse of Soviet power – and the emergence of Gorbachev. Can he see any evidence of a similar sentiment?
Not clearly, he says. In the earlier war, and later in Chechnya, the mothers of lost sons became a powerful collective voice against war. Mindful of that, he says, in the current conflict Putin passed a law paying tens of thousands of pounds in compensation to each bereaved family. Any individual protest would mean that money would not be paid, and bodies would not be repatriated.
The Kremlin, Muratov suggests, “has learned many lessons in manipulating the public”. He points to the words of Putin’s unhinged political adviser, Alexander Dugin, who has shaped the extremist rhetoric of war: “Dugin said that [to prevail] Russia needs repression and censorship, an exact repetition of the words Stalin’s propagandists used in the last century…”
Given this level of repression, one of the questions the film raises is how Muratov himself has escaped direct personal sanction from his nemesis, Putin. Up until Gorbachev’s death last year – Muratov led the funeral procession – there was tacit protection from his friend and mentor. But since then?
Forbes suggests a couple of reasons. “First of all, his long running status as the champion of free speech. The Kremlin isn’t stupid, never has been. And they know that if they targeted [Muratov] directly it would be such a huge signal to the world that they don’t want to take that step. The Nobel prize has added to that. And then there are his instinctive smarts about knowing exactly where the line is.”
Even so, there are two instances documented in the film where Muratov’s courage is startling. The first is the sale of the Nobel medal (it seemed, Forbes recalls, “insanely brave because it is such a clear ‘fuck you’ ”). The New York auction raised a staggering $103m (£81m), which Muratov donated to Unicef to support its work with child refugees from Ukraine.
The second is perhaps the most chilling part of the film, which documents the kidnap and brutal beating of Novaya’s reporter Elena Milashina in Chechnya last month. Milashina had been reporting on the state torture and murder of members of the LGBT community, and was threatened directly by the Putin-backed Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. Hearing the news of the attack, Muratov himself, at great personal risk, flew late at night directly to Grozny to personally secure Milashina’s safe return to a Russian hospital.
In answer to my question of how Milashina is recovering, he holds up to the screen a graphic photograph of the mass of scars and bruises on the journalist’s back. Milashina is determined to return to Grozny to continue her work. Though he has counselled her not to go, Muratov says he will lead a group of many Russian journalists who have pledged a symbolic return alongside her.
There is a moment in the film where Muratov recalls how, in the worst of times, he promised himself that he would never succumb to one emotion: self-pity. Towards the end of our conversation, I ask him how he guards against it.
He gives three different answers. One is that he simply owes it to his journalists. Ever since the murder of Novaya Gazeta reporter Anna Politovskaya in 2006, he says, his primary motivation has been to try to keep his reporters as safe as he can. The second is that there are stories that must be told – as a case in point he talks me through the newspaper’s investigation into the growing power of the mercenary Russian Wagner forces in the Central African Republic.
The third answer is a bit more intangible; it is, he says, that he keeps the unbending faith that despite everything, he “lives in a society, a community, not in a state”. And is that where he places his hope? “Da,” he says, firmly. “Yes.”
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