Novaya Gazeta, Russia's best-known independent newspaper, announces it will close under Kremlin pressure
Novaya Gazeta, one of the last critical media outlets still working from inside Russia, has announced that it will close permanently next month. The newspaper, whose former editor Dmitry Muratov won the 2021 Nobel peace prize, says it has been stripped of its newsroom, its donation platforms and its legal right to publish. "This is the story of a country and a society that are being systematically crushed," editor-in-chief Sergei Sokolov wrote.
Founded in the 1990s and for years partly funded by the late Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Novaya Gazeta built its name on long investigations into corruption, rights abuses and the wars in Chechnya. Six of its journalists have been killed, among them Anna Politkovskaya, shot in the stairwell of her Moscow apartment block in 2006. After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 the paper refused to follow the new censorship rules, left blank spaces instead, stopped its print edition and lost its licence; its website was blocked in Russia. A core team stayed in Moscow and kept publishing magazines with print runs of 999 copies, below the threshold that requires a licence.
Staff say the pressure became intolerable this year. In April journalist Oleg Roldugin was arrested and charged with unlawful access to computer information; he is under house arrest awaiting trial, and Sokolov's home was searched in the case last month. The landlord has ordered the newsroom out of its long-time central Moscow offices, which also house a memorial museum to Politkovskaya, by 9 November, and all of the paper's donation platforms have been shut down, leaving it without income. Novaya Gazeta Europe, set up by journalists who left Russia, is a legally separate outlet. Press chief Nadezhda Prusenkova said the journalists would probably try to find a way to keep working.