'They Strangled Us': Russia's Novaya Gazeta Shuts Under Pressure From Authorities

At the Moscow offices of Novaya Gazeta, cardboard boxes and plastic bags sit in every corridor. The staff are packing up everything they own. The paper has been told to leave the building it has occupied for thirty years, and it says it has also been cut off from the donations that kept it going.

For three decades Novaya Gazeta was Russia's most prominent independent newspaper, known for investigative reporting that was fiercely critical of those in power. Its co-founder, Dmitry Muratov, says the state did not kill the paper in one blow. "There are different ways to commit murder," he told the BBC. "They chose to strangle us."

Muratov lists the steps. First the authorities blocked the paper's websites and banned its print edition. Then they revoked its media licence. One by one, its journalists were declared "foreign agents", and some were attacked. The last stage, he says, was financial: banks now refuse to accept donations from readers, so the paper can no longer earn money. "Political repressions" in Russia, he says, "have reached us." Muratov won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for efforts to safeguard freedom of expression. Russia designated him a foreign agent in 2023 anyway, a label often used to punish critics of the government.

The paper built its name on reporting about corruption, human rights violations and abuses of power by officials and bureaucrats, all dangerous subjects in Russia. It says six of its colleagues were killed for fulfilling their professional and civic duty. One of them was Anna Politkovskaya, who wrote extensively about the wars in Chechnya and was shot dead in the stairwell of her apartment block twenty years ago this month.

Her office was preserved after her killing and became a museum in her memory. Since the eviction order, most of the objects have been taken out. What remains is her desk, with a portrait of her lying on top.

In a statement announcing the closure, the paper did not soften its language. "They've killed us," it begins. "The newspaper is no more." It says Russian authorities and security services forced it to stop work, calls the closure "a coordinated act" and blames the "repressive state apparatus". It also says rights and freedoms have been eliminated in the country, that the courts have been destroyed along with the law, and that having personal convictions is now treated as state treason.

Pressure on independent Russian journalism has grown since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Soon after the start of what the Kremlin calls a "special military operation", new laws were adopted to punish dissent and silence criticism of the war and of those in power.

Earlier this year police searched the paper's editorial office. Veteran investigative journalist Oleg Roldugin was arrested and charged with "unlawful access to computerised information". In connection with that case, current editor-in-chief Sergei Sokolov was recently taken in for police questioning and his home was searched.

The paper had kept going in reduced form, with loyal readers using VPNs to get around the website blocks. The loss of its licence and the other restrictions proved a major blow.

Asked about the future, Muratov said he does not know what will happen next. He described a "terrible catastrophe" and said dictatorships use chaos to rule and strengthen personal power. What he does know, he said, is that the paper will do everything to stay true to its values, starting with the human right to life, and that human rights override the rights of states.