Page 75 - bne magazine November 2021_20211104 uzbekistan risding

bne November 2021
Opinion 75
a tweet posted on his account: “I sincerely congratulate Dmitry Muratov and @novaya_gazeta with the Nobel Peace Prize. This is a well-deserved reward, and the symbolism of the date suggests itself.”
But Muratov returned to making rude statements about his critics soon enough, including in an interview with the Kremlin’s Channel One.
The Kremlin reacted to the news that Muratov rather than Navalny had received the award with a sense of relief and
a thinly disguised glee. Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov congratulated him, but on the same day the Kremlin designated another batch of Russian journalists as foreign agents –
in a gesture mocking Nobel Commitee’s best intentions.
“Navalny’s chief strategist, Leonid Volkov, responded to it by saying that he “puked’ upon reading the article”
Ironically, Novaya Gazeta stands out in Russia's present
media landscape as the only prominent independent news outlet that has so far avoided getting foreign agent status.
By giving preferential treatment to Novaya Gazeta, the Kremlin is driving a wedge between two generations of journalists and political activists.
Novaya Gazeta’s heyday fell on the first decade of Putin’s rule. Russia was much freer than now, but journalists were more likely to become victims of criminal violence rather than repression by the government law enforcement agencies.
It was between 2000 and 2009 that Novaya Gazeta lost
six of its contributors, who were assassinated or perished in suspicious circumstances. To a varying extent, all of these murders pertained to the atmosphere of lawlessness perpetuated by Putin. Upon hearing the news about the award, Muratov was quick to dedicate it to them.
During the much more repressive second decade of Putin’s rule, the paper continued to produce hard-hitting materials. Some made global headlines, like the investigation into extrajudicial killings of gays in Chechnya.
But the news agenda in Russia was now being driven by a new generation of media outlets and activist investigators. The focus of attention shifted from symptoms to the fundamental causes of the disease Russia has been suffering since the collapse of the USSR.
Ground-breaking investigations into the mind-blowing corruption of Putin’s entourage helped to explain why the
authorities are perpetuating human rights abuses, which Novaya Gazeta has been focusing on all those years. They also reached an infinitely wider audience than Muratov’s newspaper.
This shift was led by Navalny and his investigative outfit. Apart from digging deeper than most journalists, Navalny’s team also revolutionised presentation, turning investigations into gripping videos spiced up with Generation Z humour. His team became the country’s most prolific meme machine.
Released in 2017, a video about Dmitry Medvedev had 44mn views at the time of writing. But that’s overshadowed by the video about Putin's Black Sea palace, posted at the beginning of 2021, which has been watched 119mn times. A plethora of small independent journalistic outfits, which emerged as the regime was destroying or capturing well- established independent news organisations, followed in Navalny’s footsteps.
The generational gap is even more obvious on the political side. Muratov is a member of Yabloko, once a highly respectable, but now an extremely controversial liberal force. Yabloko is tied in a bitter conflict with Navalny’s movement, which is accusing it of playing on Kremlin’s side. In a ridiculously self-defeating act, Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky even called on Navalny’s supporters not to vote for his party in the last Duma election.
Navalny himself happens to be a Yabloko dropout. After flirting with the far right over ten years ago, he drifted towards creating a broad populist movement which strives to break out of the liberal ghetto and unite everyone who is opposed Putin’s mafia state.
Muratov’s generation tends to hold a pessimistic view regarding Russia’s prospects of building a democratic society. In an August interview with znak.com, Muratov said that majority of Russians have no desire for freedom.
On recieving the Nobel Peace Prize, Dmitry Muratov dedicated it to the journlaists that had been murdered at his paper Novaya Gazeta. "Igor Domnikov, Yuri Shchekochikhin, Anna Politkovskaya, Stas Markelov, Anastasiya Baburova, Natasha Yectemirova – these are the people that won today's Nobel prize."
www.bne.eu