On November 9 the newsroom switches off for the last time. In a farewell editorial released on Friday, Novaya Gazeta, the Moscow paper that spent more than thirty years exposing corruption and abuses of power, announced that it can no longer carry on. Its verdict on who is to blame fits in three words: “They killed us.”
The closure is the end point of a long squeeze. Once Moscow sent its army into Ukraine in early 2022, new laws made “discrediting” the army a crime, and the paper stopped printing inside the country. Since then its licence has been revoked, its site blocked and its presses seized, while loyal readers kept following it through VPNs. What finally broke it was a double blow this month: an order to leave its offices and, at the same moment, the shutdown of the donation channel that let readers keep it alive.
The legal pressure has been personal, too. Investigative reporter Oleg Roldugin is confined to his home ahead of a trial on data charges that carry up to ten years in prison, and police recently searched the flat of Sergei Sokolov, who now runs the paper. According to the paper’s sister outlet in Latvia, staff took the decision on October 26 in a cellar next door, because they feared their own rooms were bugged. Staying open risked an “extremist” label and arrests.
Founded in 1993 with help from Mikhail Gorbachev’s Nobel prize money, Novaya Gazeta lost six journalists to violence, among them Anna Politkovskaya, murdered twenty years ago this month. Dmitry Muratov, who helped found it, received a share of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021; two years later the state listed him as a “foreign agent”. He noted drily that Russia’s constitution still says censorship is prohibited.
The Kremlin did not comment right away. Novaya Gazeta Europe, the Riga-based offshoot banned in Russia as “undesirable”, says it will keep publishing.
