On 9 November, Novaya Gazeta will leave its historic headquarters in Moscow and shut down its servers

“They have killed us.” With these words, Dmitri Muratov, winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, announced the end of Novaya Gazeta, the independent newspaper that for over thirty years has reported on Russia whilst challenging those in power. On 9 November, the editorial team will shut down the servers and vacate the historic Moscow offices on Potapovsky Lane. Founded in 1993, partly thanks to the support of Mikhail Gorbachev, Novaya Gazeta had survived the Putin regime’s gradual slide into authoritarianism. It had continued to expose corruption, human rights abuses and the wars in Chechnya. It had paid a very high price: six journalists murdered, including Anna Politkovskaya, who was killed exactly twenty years ago, in October 2006. Following the invasion of Ukraine, the crackdown had intensified: censorship, raids, arrests, the revocation of its licence, and finally the blocking of reader donations on the grounds that it was a ‘foreign agent’. All that remained was samizdat, the clandestine self-publishing of the Soviet era, with a print run of fewer than a thousand copies a month. Many journalists chose exile, founding Novaya Gazeta Europe, which continues the work of the original editorial team from abroad. Others remained in Russia, including Muratov, refusing to abandon that increasingly constricted space for dissent. Together with Aleksey Venediktov, the long-standing editor of Echo Moskvy radio and another voice from the perestroika era, Muratov continues to fight for the release of political prisoners. A testament to civil resistance that the regime, for the time being, has an interest in not erasing. Pending a possible reopening elsewhere and in a different form, Novaya Gazeta is closing its doors. Another piece of the Russia that might have been is fading away – a Russia that the regime has chosen no longer to tolerate.