Novaya Gazeta, the venerable investigative Russian newspaper whose reporting staff included the slain Anna Politkovskaya and at least five others who were killed or died under suspicious circumstances, announced it was shutting down.
“They killed us,” the paper’s top editors said in a Telegram post on October 30, a day after authorities began evicting the remaining staff from their Moscow editorial offices.
The paper, which had mostly suspended work in March 2022 following Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, will formally cease operations on November 9, editors said.
The closure of Novaya Gazeta was yet another “devastating blow” for remaining independent media in Russia, the United Nations said on October 30.
“Independent journalism in the country has faced mounting restrictions and pressure for many years, but these have intensified significantly since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, through increasingly restrictive legislation, tighter State controls and the harassment and persecution of journalists,” UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk said.
Founded in the early 1990s and partly funded by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Novaya Gazeta drew renown for its investigative work, eschewing a mass-market tabloid journalism model for serious long-form reporting and dirt-digging.
Politkovskaya, whose columns addressed the wars in Chechnya and the repressive government there, was one of the paper’s best known journalists. She was gunned down in her Moscow apartment building in October 2006.
The editorial offices of Novaya Gazeta, pictured in March 2022
Another reporter who investigated military corruption and the mysterious 1999 Moscow apartment building bombings, Yury Shchekochikhin, died suddenly in July 2003, several days before he was scheduled to fly to the United States. Colleagues and others have suggested he was poisoned.
Other reporters and contributors who were killed “for fulfilling their professional and civic duties” include Igor Domnikov, Stas Markelov, Anastasia Baburova, and Natalia Estemirova.
Its longtime editor, Dmitry Muratov, was a co-recipient of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to keep the newspaper publishing amid increasingly repressive media environment inside Russia.
The newspaper had struggled in the aftermath of the Ukraine invasion, after a series of warnings from a government regulator.
“After the outbreak of hostilities, we, like all other journalists, were deprived of the opportunity to report on the most important and tragic events of our time,” the editors said in their October 30 post.
“What Novaya Gazeta and its journalists have done over the last five years from inside the country is truly a feat,” said Ekaterina Fomina, a former longtime reporter with Novaya Gazeta.
“We have seen just how selflessly a person can fight, to continue to tell stories of people living within the country, people who are themselves facing repression and hardships,” she said in an interview with Current Time. “They truly acted with great selflessness — perhaps, unfortunately, even to excess. And now sadly, they are being punished for it.”
“They indeed have been killed,” she said.
For more than decade, Russian authorities have gradually squeezed independent media outlets, as well as civil society groups, rights activists, and others, using punitive “foreign agent” and “undesirable organization” laws to threaten and silence individuals.
Even the Telegram post announcing the closure included a “foreign agent” warning, something mandated by law.
In 2024, some of Novaya Gazeta’s editorial staff opened a European edition for the paper based in Paris, with support from press advocacy organization Reporters Without Borders.
“For nearly five years of war, we managed to keep working while being completely encircled by security services,” the editors said.
“Now it is over. We have found ourselves in the ‘kill zone’,” they said, a reference to parts of the front line in Ukraine where casualties are the highest.
