Dmitry Muratov Nobel Lecture
Nobel Lecture given by Nobel Peace Prize laureate 2021 Dmitry Muratov, Oslo, 10 December 2021.
Antidote against tyranny
Honorable members of the Nobel Committee, honorable guests!
On the morning of October 8, I received a phone call from my mother. She wondered how things were going.
-Well, Mom, we’ve got the Nobel Prize …
-That’s nice. Anything else?
… Look here, mom I’ll tell you everything,.
***
“I am convinced that freedom of conscience, together with the other civic rights, provides the basis for progress.
I defend the thesis of the decisive significance of civic and political rights in moulding the destiny of mankind!
I am convinced that international confidence, <…> disarmament, and international security are inconceivable without an open society with freedom of information, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech <…>.
Peace, progress, human rights – these three goals are insolubly linked to one another.”
These words are a quote from the Nobel lecture of member of the Academy of Science Andrei Sakharov, a citizen of the world, a great thinker.
His wife Elena Bonner read it out here, in this place, on Thursday, December 11, 1975.
I felt an urge to repeat Sakharov’s words here, in this world-famous hall.
Why is it important today for us, for me?
The world has fallen out of love for democracy anymore.
The world has become disappointed with the power elite.
The world has begun to turn to dictatorship.
We’ve got an illusion that progress can be achieved through technology and violence, not through human rights and freedoms.
This is progress without freedom?
It is as impossible as getting milk without having a cow.
The dictatorships have secured access to violence.
In our country (and not only) it is common to think that politicians who avoid bloodshed are weak.
While threatening the world with war is the duty of true patriots.
The powerful actively promote the idea of war.
Aggressive marketing of war affects people and they start thinking that war is acceptable.
Governments and their propaganda supporters are fully responsible for the militaristic rhetoric on state-owned television channels.
But there are other TV screens, that show honest and gruesome pictures. I have seen them.
During the Chechen war, five white refrigerator cars were placed on the railway track at a train station. They were guarded twenty-four hours a day. They were mortuaries on wheels that belonged to the Ministry of Defence’s laboratory no. 124.
The refrigerator cars contained unidentified bodies of soldiers and officers.
Many of the bodies did not have faces as a result of direct hits or torture. The head of the laboratory, Commander Shcherbakov, did everything in his power to ensure that there were no unknown soldiers left. In a small house next to the train tracks there was a TV. Mothers and fathers of missing soldiers sat there, as if it were a waiting room. A cameraman sent pictures of the bodies to the screen. One at a time. 458 times. So many soldiers were lying in the berths of these carriages at minus 15 degrees on their last train trip from War to Death. Mothers who had been looking for their boys in the mountains and gorges of Chechnya saw their son’s face on the screen and cried: “It’s not him! It’s not him, no!”
But it was.
