Alexei Navalny’s luck will come
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Like peace itself, the Nobel Peace Prize has never been a stranger to human whims.
In 1895, a descendant of the Russian-Swedish industrial family, Alfred Nobel, created the prizes he believed would make the world a better place.
The money came from his trade in the means of destruction – oil and dynamite.
Nobel’s will – he died the following year – reflected his experience of the previous century and an anticipation of the horrors to come.
Even his decision to entrust his peace prize to the Norwegian parliament, at the time still a colony – his “union” with Sweden was dissolved ten years later – reflected Nobel’s desire to repent and redeem some of his own actions, as well as those of his family and his nation. Although he was primarily interested in the hard sciences, under the influence of his former secretary and romantic friend, Bertha von Suttner, he added Literature and Peace to his list.
Baroness Suttner was a remarkable figure. Born in Prague and belonging to the upper Austrian aristocracy, she fled with her future husband, much younger and less noble, to Georgia.
The couple spent ten years there, engaged in what would now be called demotion – they translated a Georgian epic, The knight with the panther skin, in French but did not earn any money.
After witnessing the wars in Georgia and after fleeing to Austria, Suttner transformed herself into a successful novelist, pacifist and feminist.
She convinced Nobel that literature and peace were as important to humanity as physics and medicine. In 1905, she herself received the Nobel Peace Prize “for writing [her pacifist novel] Lay down your weapons and contribute to the creation of the prize “ – the first woman to receive the award.
Handed over to a strange mix of institutions and personalities, some of them great and powerful but others mere mortals, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate has the power to elevate them to an unusual, almost holy status.
Three laureates learned of their awards in prison.
The first was Carl von Ossietzky, a German journalist who received the award in 1935 for revealing details of German rearmament – prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles (the story was recently shown in Babylon Berlin, a black TV series, although the role of Ossietzky was assigned to a police investigator).
Ossietzky discovered that the Germans were rebuilding their aviation industry in secret collaboration with the Soviets, training their pilots on bases in Western Russia.
Convicted of treason in 1931 and again in 1933, Ossietzky accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in a note his friends smuggled from a concentration camp near Oldenburg. A few months later, he died of tuberculosis. A few years later, the Nazi pilots wiped out the Soviet airfields and schools that had given them refuge and training. In 1991, Oldenburg University was renamed after Ossietzky.
In 2010, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese writer and philosopher who was arrested as one of the authors of Charter 08, a powerful human rights document inspired by the Charter. 77 by Vaclav Havel.
In response, the Chinese called off trade negotiations and banned some exports to Norway.
Like Ossietzky, Liu died while on medical parole – a nonfree man who resisted torture from an almighty state.
Shortly before his death in 2017, the European Union asked Liu, but Norway did not join the call. After his death, the King of Norway traveled to Beijing, met with the Chinese premier and normalized Sino-Norwegian relations.
I wonder where a university will first be named after Liu Xiaobo – in China or in Norway.
In 2021, I was one of the many Russians and Europeans to nominate Alexei Navalny for the Nobel Peace Prize.
When I submitted the online application forms – a process open to all professors – Navalny was still in a coma, but hope grew that the German medical team would be able to save him.
He subsequently made the fateful decision to return to Russia – a move that I took as an act of sacrificial heroism, and entirely appropriate for a future Nobel Laureate.
Now, days after the winners were announced – Novaya Gazeta editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov and Maria Ressa, a journalist from the Philippines – I wonder why Navalny was not selected.
Decisions made by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee require consensus among its five members.
Its current president, Berit Reiss-Andersen, politician and novelist, has sharply criticized the Conservative Party in power in Norway for its inability to defend Liu Xiaobo.
This shows the complicated politics that can sometimes be at stake.
For example, another Committee member, Asle Toje is a political scientist known to be a climate change denier and an opponent of divestment from oil.
Those who relied on climate activist Greta Thunberg to win the award blame Toje for getting in the way.
Toje also attended two meetings of Russia’s annual Valdai Discussion Club, a forum for foreign supporters of the Russian regime to meet with President Vladimir Putin and other senior officials. Toje’s essays and a video interview are available on Valdai’s website.
I respect those who received this year’s award, but I still think something will be missing at the next ceremony in Oslo.
The Nobel Peace Prize, despite its tainted history, is akin to a canonization. Its laureates generally demonstrate a quality above all others: tackling a strategic and historically vital problem of their time, while it is still invisible or underestimated by their peers.
For Ossietzky, it was about German rearmament. For Liu, it was the oppression of human rights in China.
Navalny is of their kind too. His problem is Russian corruption. While all of the themes have local roots and immediate relevance, they will define global affairs for decades to come.
Navalny still has his chance for a Nobel Prize – as long as he’s alive. Otherwise, a university will surely bear his name.
The opinions expressed in opinion pieces do not necessarily reflect the position of the Moscow Times.
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