Press Release, 8.10.2021

Photo: Dmitry Muratov at the opening of the Public Support Headquarters for presidential candidate Grigory Yavlinsky during presidential election campaign in 2018 / Photo by the Yabloko Press Service

Yabloko leaders Nikolai Rybakov and Grigory Yavlinsky congratulated Dmitry Muratov, a Yabloko party member and Editor-in-Chief of Novaya Gazeta, on being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

We have always respected Dmitry Andreyevich very much and appreciated our joint work, but now it is a special responsibility for Yabloko that a member of our party is a Nobel Prize laureate, Nikolai Rybakov said.

According to the Yabloko Chairman, “The Nobel Peace Prize is an award for the whole editorial board of Novaya Gazeta, whose journalists conduct investigations on the most pressing social and political issues, and risk their lives to tell people the truth. Nikolai Rybakov specially mentioned the journalists of Novaya Gazeta who had been murdered: Yuri Shchekochikhin, who was also a member of Yabloko, Anna Politkovskaya and Natalya Estemirova. He also named Elena Milashina, who has been continuously receiving threats for her work in Chechnya.

“This is an award to the Editor-in-Chief who brought together such a team,” Rybakov emphasised.

The Yabloko Chairman called awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for Dmitry Muratov and Maria Ressa a sign for political journalists around the world that it is time for them to leave the ‘commentary booths’ and realise that the responsibility of modern journalists is to bring people the truth and protect human rights. “This is what Novaya Gazeta has been doing in Russia for nearly 30 years under the leadership of Dmitry Muratov,” Nikolai Rybakov said.

Grigory Yavlinsky, the Chairman of the Yabloko Federal Political Committee, noted that it was fair that it was Dmitry Muratov who became the third Nobel Peace Prize laureate from Russia after Andrei Sakharov and Mikhail Gorbachev.

“It is Muratov who preserved Novaya Gazeta as the last bastion of honest journalism in Russia. It is Muratov who has been saving journalists from deadly threats for many years. It is Muratov who, literally, with his own hands and continuously risking his life, has been defending freedom of speech in our country,” Grigory Yavlinsky wrote.

Dmitry Muratov joined Yabloko in 2003 after the murder of Yuri Shchekochikhin, a Yabloko party member, a Yabloko MP and Novaya Gazeta’s investigative journalist. Muratov was an authorised campaigner for Grigory Yavlinsky when the latter ran in the 2018 presidential elections.