‘They killed us’: Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta announces its closure after decades of repression
Novaya Gazeta, the best-known independent news outlet still operating inside Russia, has announced that it is closing. The day before, it became known that the editorial staff was being evicted from its office in Potapovsky Lane in central Moscow, where journalists had worked for 29 years. As a result, the Anna Politkovskaya museum, located in her former office, will also close. After the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian authorities blocked the outlet’s websites and stripped the newspaper of its registration, and in September 2026 designated Novaya a foreign agent. According to The Economist, the newspaper’s editorial staff held a meeting on October 26 at which the decision was made to close the outlet. On the morning of October 30, Novaya officially announced that it was ceasing operations. Meduza is publishing a translation of the Novaya Gazeta editorial staff’s statement.
They killed us.
On November 9, we will turn off the lights in the home where we have lived for 30 years, shut down our servers, and leave. The newspaper no longer exists. Russian authorities and Russian security services forced the editorial staff to stop working.
More than 30 years of living alongside the country and its citizens will end for us out on the street, without means of subsistence, under the constant threat of repression.
Our years were happy: filled with creativity and hope, readers, friends, texts, films. At times, those years were desperately bitter.
Bitter, because it was during the rule of this regime — not during the lawless 1990s — that our colleagues were killed for political reasons, for carrying out their professional and civic duty: Igor Domnikov, Yuri Shchekochikhin, Anna Politkovskaya, Stas Markelov, Anastasia Baburova, and Natalia Estemirova.
At the same time as the eviction notice, our donation system, which allowed us to receive contributions from our readers, was shut off. In other words, we were stripped of funds. Entirely.
This is a coordinated action. The banks’ excuses — that they are simply following internal corporate rules — will convince no one. The state’s repressive apparatus, officers of Russia’s Federal Security Service who have embedded themselves inside every organization, set these rules instead. They consider the country their own property.
After military action began, Russian authorities stripped us, like all other journalists, of the ability to talk about the most important and tragic events of our time. They passed laws that brought censorship back into the country, and that censorship then spread to nearly every sphere of human life.
Authorities blocked all of our online resources. The state seized our printing house, and security service officers and censors entrenched elsewhere refused to let us publish the newspaper. Many of our staff were forced to leave the country.
The state then stripped us of our media registration, taking away our right to earn a living through our own work.
We did not die — we were killed along with the Constitution
NO.Media from Russia
Attackers assaulted editor-in-chief and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dmitry Muratov, who nearly lost his eyesight as a result. No criminal case was opened, even though the perpetrators are known.
Then Russian authorities began designating our journalists as foreign agents, starting with the editor-in-chief.
Then Russian authorities brought administrative cases against the editorial leadership.
In Chechnya, our columnist Elena Milashina was abducted and beaten half to death.
Our executive editor Oleg Roldugin was taken hostage, accused of having worked as a journalist. His trial is coming soon.
Authorities searched Novaya Gazeta’s editorial office for hours and also searched the editor-in-chief’s apartment.
In September of this year, Russian authorities designated the entire editorial staff as foreign agents, placing more than 100 journalists and contributors on the registry.
For nearly five years of the war, we managed to keep working, surrounded on all sides by the security services.
And now, that’s it. We have ended up in a “kill zone.”
This is not just our private story. It is the story of a country and a society being finished off the same way.
The FSB, the Justice Ministry, the prosecutor’s office, and others who have privatized the state and usurped power are doing this. This is not Soviet resentment. Behind that label, a military dictatorship has nearly been built.
They say they are defending the constitutional order. No, this is an anti-constitutional order. The Constitution has been raped, beaten, and thrown into prison for an enormous term with its mouth taped shut, just like thousands of the country’s citizens who simply followed its articles, and tens of thousands of other citizens who were forced to become refugees, leaving their homes and heading into the unknown.
Stop saying that this isn’t Stalin’s 1937, and that the repression has some sort of “digital character.” This is state repression. And people, not numbers, are dying in cells. Period.
Human life has lost its meaning and been devalued.
The word “Constitution” provokes sarcasm and laughter. From everyone. Even from judges. Especially from judges. No one believes that it is the country’s basic law, the one the president swore an oath on. Notice that official propaganda has long since stopped calling the president the guarantor of the Constitution.
Human rights and freedoms have been eliminated in the country, and defending them has been equated with a crime. Elections and elected bodies of government have been de facto eliminated. Public institutions have been eliminated. Freedom of conscience and human dignity have been trampled. Private life has been turned inside out by dirty hands.
Doesn’t Article 29 of the Constitution — “censorship is prohibited” — sound like mockery today? The courts have been destroyed along with law and justice. Having convictions is now treason.
But treason is when the state betrays its own Constitution. This treason is an ongoing crime, unfolding right now before the eyes of the world.
The killing of Novaya Gazeta is further proof of that.
All these years, we wrote about exactly this, for as long as we could. That is exactly why we were killed.
Thank you to everyone who heard us.
The Editorial Staff
P.S.
The final issue will be published.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
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