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Six journalists from Muratov’s newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, have been murdered, including the crusading reporter Anna Politkovskaya, executed at her Moscow apartment building in 2006 with a pistol shot to the head. It was them to whom Muratov dedicated his Nobel.

Novaya Gazeta’s publishing license has been rescinded. The paper’s website is blocked in Russia, though it can be accessed online by Russian readers using VPNs. And in September, Muratov was designated as Russia’s 665th “foreign agent,” in effect branded as a traitor along with more than 100 other Russian journalists. He stepped down last year as Novaya Gazeta’s chief editor, a position he had held for most of the 30 years since he helped found the paper.

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Nonetheless, Muratov remains in Moscow, where he is the most prominent dissident who has managed to escape sudden death or imprisonment.

He is loath to discuss his personal safety. But he remains outspoken, as I found while interviewing him this month in Switzerland. He was attending the International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights in Geneva, where he appeared at the preview of a documentary, “Of Caravan and the Dogs,” in which he features prominently. (Another documentary about him, “The Price of Truth,” was issued last year.)

Muratov insisted that Russia’s deepening darkness will give way, eventually, to a new day. “Putin’s generation will get older, even as they search for the secret of immortality, like all rulers who think things will collapse without them,” he told me. “They will go, and this new younger generation is great — it is free, it is empathetic, it is professional and creative.”

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Yet Muratov can have no illusions that the Nobel shields him from Putin’s predations. Last month, a Russian court imposed a 2½-year prison sentence on Oleg Orlov, the 70-year-old co-chair of the Russian human rights group Memorial, which won the Nobel Peace Prize a year after Muratov did. Muratov testified at Orlov’s trial, having failed to persuade him to drop his appeal and leave the country.

“I told him not to give them a chance of victory, that he was needed in freedom,” Muratov told me. “I said I didn’t want him to be a victim. And he said, ‘I’m not a victim, I’m just going to jail.’”

In the final months before charismatic Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny died in an Arctic detention camp in February, he organized an online survey asking who might lead the resistance to Putin’s regime. The results from nearly 50,000 respondents, released in November by Navalny’s team, show Muratov among the most popular options.

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Muratov admired Navalny’s creative political theatrics in mocking the regime and exposing its extravagant corruption, and testified for Navalny in his prison trial last year. But he has never aspired to a role like Navalny’s — he remains a journalist, not a provocateur, and has made no attempt to organize a political opposition.

But by denouncing the war in Ukraine as a futile bloodbath, by insisting that most Russians want it to end, by shining a light on the swelling roster of the regime’s victims beaten, persecuted or jailed, Muratov’s message registers with other Russians dismayed or disgusted by the regime’s immorality. It is a reminder that they are not alone, even as the state tightens its vise on what can be publicly expressed.

That message is psychologically important in Russian society, where politics is too dangerous for open discussion. It might not topple tyranny, but it can have the subversive effect of piercing the miasma of official propaganda, which, along with Putin’s make-believe “reelection,” aims to convince Russians that support for the regime is all but universal.

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“Propaganda means to convince people........

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