Novaya Gazeta Announces Its Closure After Losing Its Moscow Newsroom and Its Reader Donations

Novaya Gazeta, the Moscow newspaper founded in 1993, announced on Friday 30 October that it will stop publishing, saying Russia’s authorities and security services forced it to. In a statement headed “We were killed,” the editors wrote that on 9 November they will turn off the lights and servers and leave the building where they have worked for 30 years, according to the statement on the paper’s website.

What the statement does not describe is an order to close. No court and no ministry has told Novaya Gazeta to stop. The newsroom was given notice to leave its office on Potapovsky Lane, which belongs to Moscow City Hall, and in the same days lost access to the platform through which readers paid for it, Meduza reported, citing the editor-in-chief, Sergei Sokolov. Banks and payment processors, he said, declined to work with the paper.

That is the mechanism worth setting down. The decision to close was the paper’s own; the conditions that made it unavoidable were set by a landlord, a ministry registry and a set of banks, none of which needed to name the newspaper in a closure order.

How did the paper lose the right to publish?

In stages, starting in 2022. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine that February, Novaya Gazeta suspended its print and online editions following warnings from the state media regulator, Roskomnadzor, CBS News reported. In September 2022 a court stripped it of its media licence; Meduza places the hearings at Moscow’s Basmanny Court. The paper’s statement says the revocation of its registration also removed its right to earn money from its work.

The registry followed. The statement says Dmitry Muratov, the former editor who shared the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, was designated a foreign agent first, and that in September the whole editorial team was listed, more than 100 journalists and contributors. The paper’s own pages now open with the mandatory notice that the material was “produced, distributed and/or sent” by a foreign agent. The Russian label works differently from the American registration regime this publication has examined: it attaches to journalists, and it carries a disclosure banner on everything they publish.

What happened in October?

The pressure moved from paper to people and premises. Investigative reporter Oleg Roldugin was arrested in April and charged with “unlawful access to computerised information,” Al Jazeera reported. On 15 October Sokolov’s apartment was searched and he was questioned in that case. The sources differ on his status: Al Jazeera cites Reporters Without Borders as saying he was arrested that day, while Meduza describes him as a witness who was questioned and not detained. Sokolov told Meduza the staff decided on 26 October to close.

The following table is this publication’s compilation of the measures described in the statement and in reporting; the attribution of each is given as the sources give it.

Of the eight steps, one was a court ruling. By our count it took four years and two months from the licence revocation to the last day of work, and ten days from the announcement to the shutdown.

What is left of the paper?

Its staff and its archive, for now. Sokolov told Meduza the team numbers about 50 people plus freelancers, scattered across countries, and that the archive, back issues and the museum collections are being moved and will be preserved; he declined to say where. That matters more than it sounds: for a newspaper, the archive is the most durable thing it owns. “So when it becomes possible, we’ll try to bring Novaya Gazeta back,” he said.

Six of the paper’s journalists and staff have been murdered, according to Reporters Without Borders as cited by Al Jazeera; Anna Politkovskaya, shot in Moscow in 2006, is the best known. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, called the closure a “devastating blow” to independent media in Russia. The paper’s statement put it in four words: “The newspaper is gone.” The government did not have to say so.