Novaya Gazeta, Russia's best-known independent newspaper, announced on Friday that it is ceasing operations after 33 years. According to the editorial board's statement, the newsroom will shut down its servers and "turn off the lights in the home where we have lived for 30 years" on 9 November. One final issue is still planned.
"We have been killed," the statement says, blaming the Russian authorities and the security services for the closure. "The newspaper no longer exists."
Dmitry Muratov, one of the paper's five founders and its editor-in-chief for more than two decades, summed up the decision in a line quoted by Novaya Gazeta Europe: "We didn't die, they killed us — along with the Constitution." He went on to mock Article 29 of the Russian constitution, which prohibits censorship.
What led to the closure
The newsroom describes the pressure of recent months as a "coordinated campaign". According to Novaya Gazeta Europe, the decision to close was taken because the paper risked being designated an "extremist organisation" — a label that in practice exposes journalists to arrest.
Two recent episodes tightened the net. Management was told on 19 October that the paper would be evicted from its building on Potapovsky Lane in Moscow, according to the British magazine The Economist, cited by Novaya Gazeta Europe. And on 26 October, Muratov and the current editor-in-chief met the staff in the basement of a neighbouring building, fearing the newsroom itself was bugged.
Al Jazeera also reports that the home of a senior editor at the paper was searched this month, in connection with a criminal case against journalist Oleg Roldugin, who was arrested in April and charged with "unlawful access to computerised information".
Licence revoked in 2022
The squeeze began earlier. Moscow revoked Novaya Gazeta's media licence in 2022, shortly after the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the paper was added to the register of "foreign agents", an instrument the Russian government uses against critical outlets and organisations.
In March of that year, much of the staff left Russia and founded Novaya Gazeta Europe in Latvia, which continues to publish in Russian and English and is not affected by Friday's announcement. What ends on 9 November is the operation that had held out inside the country.
From 1993 to the Nobel Peace Prize
Novaya Gazeta was founded in 1993 by Sergei Kushnerev, Pavel Voshchanov, Akram Murtazaev, Dmitry Sabov and Muratov. The newsroom's first computers were bought with help from former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev.
In 2021, Muratov shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Filipino journalist Maria Ressa for their efforts to defend freedom of expression. By the count of Reporters Without Borders (RSF), six of the paper's journalists and staff have been murdered over its history — among them Anna Politkovskaya, killed in Moscow 20 years ago, whose memory Muratov was due to honour in Paris this week.
That figure is the best measure of what the paper was: an outlet that covered Chechnya, corruption and abuses by the security forces in a country where such reporting cost lives. The closure does not follow from a single court ruling, but from an accumulation of losses — licence, office, legal protection — to the point where carrying on would have meant exposing the staff to arrest.
With information from Novaya Gazeta Europe, Al Jazeera and Euronews.
