Award the Nobel Peace Prize to Vladimir Kara-Murza

In 1991, the award was given to Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Years later, she supported ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims. The committee also awarded the award to Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat in 1994, even though he rejected the peace brokered by his own negotiators at Camp David in 2000 and supported terrorism until his death in 2004.

The committee explicitly stated that it awarded the prize to Yemeni Al Islah party activist Tawakkol Karman in 2011 because it wanted to normalize the Muslim Brotherhood. Karman certainly defended the human rights of her fellow Islamists, but remained silent when the Islamists turned their guns on Christians or Jews. Three years later, it was Malala Yousafzai who won the prize. She too promoted moral inversion by aligning herself with Hamas propaganda, but remained largely silent on the group that carried out the October 7 massacre. Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed used his 2019 prize to shield himself as he launched a genocide against Tigrayans.

Part of the reason for the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s spectacular failure is that, unlike its Swedish counterparts, it bases its awards on aspiration rather than overall career achievement.

But when the committee awards the Nobel Peace Prize to individuals who have proven themselves, the results can be spectacular, especially when the laureate continues to suffer at the hands of autocrats who would silence him. Such was the case in 1983, when Lech Walesa, a Polish labor leader, received the prize. He was unable to receive it in person for fear that the Polish communist government would prevent him from returning to his country. It was a small sacrifice by a man whose actions set off a cascade of suffering that ultimately freed hundreds of millions of people languishing behind the Iron Curtain.

The committee had awarded the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize to the Dalai Lama in the same spirit. The Chinese Communist Party could have bought off the greedy and taken over the week. But four months after the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Nobel Peace Prize confirmed that no amount of lipstick could change the reality of a regime that had killed tens of millions in its brazen pursuit of power.

Norwegians waste many prizes on hollow or fashionable virtue signaling, but when awarded to dissidents fighting dictatorships, the Nobel Peace Prize can be kryptonite to totalitarians.

That is why the Norwegian Nobel Committee should award its prize this year to Russian journalist and political activist Vladimir Kara-Murza. No one can doubt Kara-Murza’s courage, and he has already done more in just over four decades than most people do in a lifetime. Russian President Vladimir Putin had him poisoned twice, from which Kara-Murza miraculously recovered. Putin had Kara-Murza’s mentor, Boris Nemtsov, assassinated before.

Kara-Murza could have easily retreated to London or his modest townhouse outside Washington, but his goal was never simply to defend Russian freedom, but to conquer it. That is why, in the context of Putin’s purges and the invasion of Ukraine, Kara-Murza returned to Russia. For lawyer Alexei Navalny, it proved fatal. Kara-Murza survived, thanks in large part to Biden’s multi-country prisoner swap.

The long arm of Putin’s transnational repression does not stop at Russia’s borders. Putin knows that if he represents the past and a KGB-style vision of Russia, Kara-Murza represents the future, a future in which Russians thrive in freedom and democracy. Putin will stop at nothing to kill that vision. Awarding Kara-Murza the Nobel Peace Prize could both allow his vision to penetrate Russia’s propaganda bubble from Kaliningrad to the Kamchatka Peninsula and give perhaps the most audacious dissident on the planet a modicum of security by ensuring that the consequences of his assassination escalate exponentially.

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More than two and a half years ago, Putin launched a war of annihilation against Ukraine. He led Russia to its doom. A Nobel Peace Prize for Kara-Murza might just save Russia.

Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner Beltway Confidential Blog. He is director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.