The independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta announces its closure in Russia: “Forced by the authorities, they have killed us”

The independent Russian daily Novaja Gazeta has announced it is ceasing operations after more than 33 years, following its eviction from its headquarters in central Moscow and the cessation of reader funding. “We have been killed off,” reads a statement on the newspaper’s website. “On 9 November, we will switch off the lights in our building, where we have been based for 30 years, shut down the servers and leave. The newspaper no longer exists. The Russian authorities and the Russian secret services have forced the editorial team to cease operations.” The publication, founded in 1993, had already been subject to restrictions since 2022, in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when it was stripped of its licence to operate in Russia. Part of the editorial team had already left the country, continuing to work on the Novaya Gazeta Evropa project, which was also branded an “undesirable organisation” and banned in Russia in 2023. 

In the lengthy announcement published on its website, Novaya Gazeta looks back over its history, which is intertwined with that of Russia. “Our years have been happy: full of creativity and hope, readers, friends, articles and films. At times, these years have been desperately bitter. Bitter, because it was precisely under this regime – and not during the 1990s, when organised crime was rife – that our colleagues were killed for political reasons, for having fulfilled their professional and civic duty: Igor Domnikov, Yuri Shchekochikhin, Anna Politkovskaya, Stas Markelov, Anastasia Baburova, Natalya Estemirova. At the same time as the eviction notice, they deactivated the donation system that allowed us to receive contributions from our readers. In other words, they have deprived us of any source of funding. Completely,” the newspaper reports. It claims this is a coordinated action. “The banks’ excuse, that they are acting in accordance with internal company regulations, will not convince anyone. These are external rules, established by the state’s repressive apparatus, by FSB officers (the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, ed.) who have infiltrated every organisation. They regard the country as their own property.” In early September, the Moscow-based publication was added to the register of “foreign agents”.

In 2023, the newspaper’s co-founder, Dmitry Muratov – winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize – was also designated a “foreign agent” and forced to resign from his post as editor-in-chief, handing over the role to Sergei Sokolov. On 15 October, Sokolov was detained by the police for several hours of questioning in connection with a criminal case involving a former employee of the newspaper, Oleg Roldugin, who is accused of breaches relating to the collection of personal data from Russian politicians and prominent figures.

Further problems arose in April this year. When masked security officers stormed the newspaper’s editorial office, they found around ten employees inside. When the newspaper’s lawyer arrived, he was denied access, and the editor-in-chief, Roldugin, was arrested and questioned. This time, the charges also included links to the Anti-War Committee and the unlawful use of personal data.

In addition to Muratov, another Nobel laureate, former President of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev, supported its development by using his prize money to purchase computers, printers, and all the other necessary equipment. As we explain here, it was a newspaper without a publisher, collectively owned by its staff; for a brief period, the billionaire Alexander Lebedev had acquired a minority stake, but he then moved to London and returned it. It was a project newspaper, an experiment in democratic governance which, over the years, became even more committed to human rights, whilst always finding a way to evade censorship. Among other things, in the late 1990s it succeeded in organising one of the largest campaigns to search for soldiers missing in Chechnya.

As we explain here, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in 2022 and Moscow’s censorship imposed a list of banned words on Russians when discussing the war, Novaya decided to cease publication because it was impossible to discuss the war without being able to call it by its name: the Kremlin had imposed the term ‘special military operation’, rather than ‘vojna’ (war). Novaya, however, continued to exist; it continued to publish a monthly magazine, and some of the journalists who had left Russia founded an overseas offshoot of the publication, called Novaya Gazeta Evropa.