A few days after he announced he would sell his Nobel peace prize medal at auction – and give the millions of dollars raised to Ukrainian refugees – the Russian newspaper editor Dmitry Muratov was sitting on a train bound for the city of Samara.
Just before the train pulled away from Kazansky station in Moscow, the door to his carriage was flung open and a masked man threw a bucket of stinking red liquid over him, shouting the words: “This is for our boys!” The liquid – it turned out to be paint mixed with acetone – drenched Muratov in crimson and half-blinded him, but he still had the presence of mind to chase his attacker down the platform. He apprehended the masked man talking to a police officer and demanded his arrest. No action was taken.
Smartphone footage of this event from April 2022 is the opening scene of a documentary film about the life of Muratov, which will be shown on Channel 4 at 10pm on Monday night. The film is called The Price of Truth, and if you were ever in doubt about the human cost of publishing factual news in a time of war and repression, then Muratov’s career establishes it in frank detail….
After the truth-shower 