Mr. Muratov noted that accepting the Nobel’s prize money could, in theory, open him up to being declared a foreign agent. It was an indication of how far the Kremlin’s campaign against the independent news media has gone that Mr. Muratov’s comment about that scenario did not come across as only a joke.
“I posed this question today to the government officials who decided to congratulate me,” Mr. Muratov said. “Will we be declared foreign agents by receiving the Nobel Prize? I didn’t get a straight answer.”
Mr. Muratov said his prize was posthumous recognition of the six journalists who had worked with Novaya Gazeta and been killed; he repeated all of their names twice. The most famous was Anna Politkovskaya, the investigative journalist who was murdered in Moscow on Oct. 7, 2006. As Mr. Muratov spoke, he urged the scrum of reporters listening to him to avoid trampling on the garden that the staff had planted in front of the newspaper’s offices in her memory.
“They don’t give these Nobel Prizes posthumously,” he said. “I think they came up with this as a way for Anya to get the prize, through other, old hands.”