On October 7, 2006, Vladimir Putin’s birthday, journalist Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in the stairwell of her building. If the Russian justice investigation has never bothered to go back to the sponsors, observers have always considered that the date chosen for this murder was in no way a coincidence.
Sixteen years later, the one chosen for the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize, on October 7, 2022, is certainly more fortuitous. Nevertheless, the winners are also a message to Mr. Putin, who was celebrating his 70th birthday that day.
The awarding of the prize to human rights defenders from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine sounds like a challenge to the Russian president, or at least to the imperialist conceptions that are dear to him. The Russian NGO Memorial, the Belarusian opponent Ales Bialiatski and the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties fight, each in their own way, both authoritarianism and the fantasized vision of a necessary political unity of the three Slavic neighbors.
In the minds of Russians and foreigners alike, few organizations are more immediately associated with – modest and dying – Russian civil society than Memorial. It is also for this reason that the power of Vladimir Putin never ceased to persecute it, until the dissolution of the organization decided by justice in December 2021. The press conference convened on October 6 in the corridors of the Tverskoï court, where the NGO is trying to save part of its premises and its archives, was all an involuntary snub.
A Legacy of the Maidan Revolution
Another symbolic defeat on Friday, the UN Human Rights Council established for the first time a special rapporteur mandate to monitor the human rights situation in Russia. Seventeen countries voted in favor of such a resolution, introduced by European states, when twenty-four abstained and six voted against, including China.
As for the other two laureates, it would be an insult to reduce them to the Russian context. Many voices were also raised Friday in Ukraine to complain about seeing their country once again assigned to a destiny that would only be post-Soviet. “The Nobel Committee has an interesting understanding of ‘peace’ if representatives of two countries that have attacked a third all together receive the Nobel Prize”also castigated on Twitter Mikhaïlo Podoliak, adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky.
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