The Nobel Peace Prize auctioned by Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov to raise money for Ukrainian refugee children sold in New York on Monday night for $ 103.5 million, a record-breaking figure.
A spokesman for Heritage Auctions, which organized the sale, could not confirm the buyer's identity but said the winning bid had been made by proxy. The $ 103.5 million sale was 100 million Swiss francs, hinting that the buyer is not from the US.
"I hoped there would be a lot of solidarity, but I did not expect that much," Muratov said in an interview.
Previously, the highest paid for a Nobel Prize was when James Watson, whose discovery of the structure of DNA awarded him the Nobel Prize in 1962, sold the medal for $ 4.76 million. Three years later, the family of Francis Crick who won the award along with Watson received $ 2.27 million.
Muratov, awarded the gold medal in October 2021, helped found the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta and was its editor-in-chief when it closed in March following threats from Vladimir Putin's government.
For three decades, under Muratov's leadership, the newspaper had defied tremendous threats as it covered government and business corruption, Kremlin politics, and armed conflict. Several Novaya Gazeta journalists, including Yuri Shchekochikhin, Anna Politkovskaya and Anastasia Baburova, have been killed since 2000 as a result of their investigations.
