Nobel laureate from Russia says he would have chosen a unique Russian.

Dmitri A. Muratov, the Russian newspaper editor awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, mentioned he would have given the glory to a unique Russian: Aleksei A. Navalny.

Mr. Navalny, the opposition chief jailed since January, had been seen as a favourite to win the prize. On Friday, a few of Mr. Navalny’s supporters reacted with anger to the Nobel announcement, as a result of they see Mr. Muratov as a determine open to compromise with the Kremlin relatively than one who stays in principled opposition.

“If I had been on the Nobel Peace Prize committee, I might have voted for the individual whom the bookmakers guess on,” Mr. Muratov mentioned in a information convention exterior his newspaper’s Moscow headquarters. “I imply Aleksei Navalny.”

In an earlier interview, Mr. Muratov cited Mr. Navalny’s braveness.

The prize announcement got here amid a monthslong crackdown on the independent news media in Russia. Well-liked retailers and even particular person journalists have been declared “overseas brokers” by the federal government for allegedly receiving overseas financing, forcing them to incorporate onerous disclaimers alongside all of their content material, even on social media.

Mr. Muratov famous that accepting the Nobel’s prize cash might, in principle, open him as much as being declared a overseas agent. It was a sign of how far the Kremlin’s marketing campaign towards the unbiased information media has gone that Mr. Muratov’s remark about that state of affairs didn’t come throughout as solely a joke.

“I posed this query in the present day to the federal government officers who determined to congratulate me,” Mr. Muratov mentioned. “Will we be declared overseas brokers by receiving the Nobel Prize? I didn’t get a straight reply.”

Mr. Muratov mentioned his prize was posthumous recognition of the six journalists who had labored with Novaya Gazeta and been killed; he repeated all of their names twice. Essentially the most well-known 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 keep away from trampling on the backyard that the workers had planted in entrance of the newspaper’s workplaces in her reminiscence.

“They don’t give these Nobel Prizes posthumously,” he mentioned. “I feel they got here up with this as a method for Anya to get the prize, by different, outdated palms.”