For more than 30 years, Novaya Gazeta operated under constant pressure. Its journalists were threatened, attacked, and murdered; the newspaper was stripped of its media registration, and Russia’s Justice Ministry designated it a “foreign agent.” In October 2026, Novaya Gazeta was ordered to vacate its office in central Moscow and lost the ability to collect donations. Shortly afterward, its editors announced that the newspaper was shutting down.

Meduza is collecting reactions to Novaya Gazeta’s closure.

Arina Borodina

journalist

This is all unbearably painful, and there aren’t enough words for it — all we can do is sympathize and offer support however we can. Novaya Gazeta represents several epochs of our time.

Galina Yuzefovich

literary critic

This morning calls for all of us to cry. I’ve spent several days writing about the markers that tell you how high the floodwaters have risen. Now another one — not just a marker, but a milestone, a big bright lighthouse — has been swept away by a murky wave. Thank you, dear colleagues. Thank you for everything. There was never anyone better than you, there’s no one better now, and there’s no guarantee there ever will be.

Katerina Gordeeva

journalist

This is a statement, not a request for help, since there’s hardly anything that can be done. The Russian authorities have killed Novaya Gazeta, a newspaper with a brilliant history, a newspaper that raised a whole generation of the country’s best journalists — and for some of them, the profession cost them their lives.

A newspaper that stood upright right to the very end — I think that’s exactly the problem.

It’s very hard to explain to anyone who never worked in the Novaya Gazeta newsroom why this place matters so much to Russian journalism, why so many journalists — even those who never worked there — considered it home. Here are three episodes where the newsroom appears. Watch them. This will never happen again.

Elena Kostyuchenko

Dmitry Muratov

Elena Milashina

Vera Chelishcheva

head of Novaya Gazeta’s court news desk

Now for the sad part. A symbolic coincidence of dates, for me personally: exactly 20 years ago, on November 1, 2006, I was hired onto Novaya Gazeta’s staff. And on November 9, 2026, my newspaper will no longer exist. It was stripped of its life. Stripped by a junta that treats the country as its own fiefdom.

Kirill Martynov

editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta Europe and former head of the politics desk at Novaya Gazeta

Today Novaya Gazeta announced its closure. A 33-year history has come to an end. For me, Novaya Gazeta was an experience of living through freedom together in an unfree country. The less freedom remained in Russia, the more we sought it out at home, at 3 Potapovsky Lane. My first piece for Novaya Gazeta was published in March 2014. It was about Ukrainian cadets in Sevastopol who sang their anthem at the entrance to the naval academy as their home was collapsing around them. My last piece ran in the paper on February 25, 2022, in both Russian and Ukrainian. I didn’t know what to call it, so I titled it “Come and See.”

Novaya Gazeta Europe issued a statement today: “We are confident that the values of the newspaper founded by Mikhail Gorbachev will still be of use to the homeland. For now, its readers remain the keepers of those values. Take care of yourselves, because one day, everything will be ‘Novaya’ all over again.”

Sergey Babinets

head of Crew Against Torture, a Russian human rights organization

They are killing Novaya Gazeta. But they will never be able to kill freedom of speech!

OVD-Info

Russian independent human rights monitor

For us, Novaya Gazeta’s journalists have been and remain examples of incredible courage and self-sacrifice in the name of democratic values. The authorities destroyed Novaya Gazeta because they could not tolerate people inside Russia who kept writing about what mattered even amid censorship and repression.

We know that Igor Domnikov, Yuri Shchekochikhin, Anna Politkovskaya, Stas Markelov, Anastasia Baburova, Natalya Estemirova, and other journalists who suffered for their work remain forever in history as examples of resilience for us and for future journalists. We know that the stories they told and the results of their investigations cannot be hidden by censorship or by beatings that leave people half-dead. We know that their unwavering commitment to their principles has inspired entire generations of Russians to remain themselves in difficult times.

Thank you, Novaya, for your work! It wasn’t in vain!

Nikolay Kavkazsky

activist, former defendant in the Bolotnaya Square case

Russian authorities have designated the paper a foreign agent and are evicting it from its premises, while banks have cut off its donations. Staff members have faced numerous instances of repression… When I was jailed in the Bolotnaya Square case, the paper wrote about me. Novaya ran a report from the press conference held after my arrest: “Beria’s Shadow in the Investigative Committee.” Novaya repeatedly gave me a platform to publish. I’m very sad that this outlet’s history is coming to an end. It’s yet another defeat for civil society and a victory for Putin’s nomenklatura.

Ksenia Sobchak

journalist

The closure of Novaya Gazeta is a gut punch. I don’t want to believe it, but I’ll have to.

Novaya is a team of brave journalists and people. For many of us, they’re a point of reference. As long as they were allowed to work in Russia, there seemed to be hope for honesty and objectivity — and hope that Muratov would come up with something, would shield them, a man who commands respect not only because he’s a Nobel laureate but because he’s done a great deal to help sick children, and that’s still something our country respects and values regardless of one’s political views. But no one is all-powerful.

The newsroom writes — and in private conversations people say the same — that they didn’t shut down, they were killed. And indeed, for the sake of journalism, free speech, and our society, people from Novaya have sacrificed their lives, more than once. As I understand it, a criminal case is now looming on the horizon, along with labels like extremism and designation as undesirable. And a Russian prison is something you wouldn’t wish on every enemy, let alone your own people — especially over politics, over words.

Someday the time will come when Novaya Gazeta returns — both to the media and to its office on Chistye Prudy.

Ilya Ber

journalist

I don’t know what to say here. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that the darkest night comes right before dawn. If anything, I know there’s no bottom.

But that a newspaper renting office space in Moscow managed to hold out — and hold out with such dignity! — through 4.5 years of Russia’s criminal full-scale war against Ukraine is a feat and a miracle. Well, that miracle has ended. But I think my colleagues’ journalistic feat will continue in one form or another.

Vitaly Mansky

documentary filmmaker

Novaya Gazeta has died. Any death is a tragedy. But I think there’s an error in that formulation. It’s not Novaya Gazeta that died. What died is a country in which an independent, free media outlet opposing the war could exist. Today, such a country and such a newspaper are two mutually exclusive realities. They cannot exist in the same space, under the same jurisdiction, under the same pseudo-constitution.

So the so-called death of Novaya Gazeta — as cruel as that sounds — is merely bringing what’s happening to its logical conclusion. Strength to its contributors. Strength to Dmitry Muratov. Strength to survive and to preserve themselves individually in this nightmare.

And thank you, Novaya Gazeta, for hosting Artdocfest on its website for so many years. For the honor of being named person of the year. For putting the poster of my film Rodnye “Close Relations” on its cover just a couple of days before the full-scale war began. That will never die. And it will definitely come back someday — even if not in our lifetime…

Natalya Sindeeva

founder of TV Rain

Dear Novaya newsroom, dear Dima, and every journalist, producer, engineer, archivist!! Dear readers and viewers of Novaya Gazeta!! Russian history is impossible to imagine without you — you are the most important part of these past three decades. And I’m certain you’ll find a way to keep working for all of us after a short break. We’re waiting for you!! And the darkness will lift, I believe it!

Ilya Azar

journalist, former correspondent for Novaya Gazeta

Honestly, I don’t believe Novaya Gazeta has closed for good, and I have no doubt this is temporary. There’s just one thing I want to say: I’ve worked at many newsrooms, and I’ve heard about all the rest from colleagues, and I can say with confidence that there has never been, is not, and is unlikely ever to be a newsroom better — more humane, both toward Russians in general and toward its own staff — than Novaya Gazeta, or an editor-in-chief better (more dignified and more magnificent) than Dmitry Muratov.

Dmitry Gudkov

politician, former State Duma deputy

For me, Novaya is the people I’ve spent many years alongside. Here’s one story that matters a lot to me. In 2012, we tried to stop the “Scoundrels’ Law,” which banned Americans from adopting Russian orphans. Many of the children were seriously ill, and the law was literally killing them.

Novaya Gazeta collected more than 100,000 signatures calling for the law’s repeal at the time. I invited Dmitry Muratov to a meeting of my Duma committee — the Committee on Constitutional Legislation and State-Building — to present the petition. We wanted to bring it to a plenary session, but the committee rejected the proposal. Ilya Ponomaryov, Valery Zubov, and I then used Novaya’s petition as the basis for a bill in the State Duma to repeal this barbaric law. We understood there was no chance of it passing, but we felt obligated to do everything we could to protect children whom the authorities had turned into hostages of political revenge.

Fourteen years have passed. Today, that same government is destroying Novaya Gazeta itself. I’m proud that we were together then and remain together now. Dear friends at Novaya, thank you for your work. I’m certain this isn’t the end of the story.

Alexander Arkhangelsky

writer, literary scholar

The day after the birthday of Novaya Gazeta’s creator [Dmitry Muratov], it closed, stopping exactly at the line beyond which the threat of persecution becomes a guarantee.

Sergey Titov

editor-in-chief of the Russian Telegram news channel Ostorozhno Novosti

Note: this post contains profanity.

Everything that’s been happening for years now has long been a “shameful page in the history of Russian media” (and of the country, for that matter), but even by the standards of today’s dark twenties, this particular installment of the clusterfuck lands with a lot of pain. An outlet that led many good journalists to choose this profession in the first place, one that is essentially our national treasure and a source of pride, has finally been crushed.

None of this is surprising, and honestly, it’s a huge achievement that they held out for so many years — they kept going no matter what. But now they’re out of strength, and another source inside the country has been killed off, one that let people know what was really happening there, rather than relying only on the bulletins of our dear ruling party’s official bodies.

Ekaterina Fomina

journalist, former correspondent for Novaya Gazeta

The first photo shows my very first press card. I came to Novaya Gazeta at 18 and spent eight years at that newsroom on Potapovsky Lane. As of today, the paper no longer exists — Russian authorities finished it off. In truth, this had been planned for a long time. The slow killing went on for years, it’s just that in recent years, real journalism in Russia has become flatly impermissible.

Novaya and I are the same age: as I grew up, it documented what modern Russia was becoming, pointing to its ugly, terrifying flaws. Journalists who were killed, journalists who suffered attacks. All of it so that Russia’s history would be written even a little more honestly, and so the names of those responsible for evil would be named.

My eight years at Novaya were difficult — it was where I came of age as a journalist. It was real higher education, given that journalism school offered none. Watching something sacred to you be killed is hard and painful.

Boris Akunin

writer

A few months ago, I took part in a discussion (how tiresome these have become!) about whether Russia should still be considered an authoritarian state or has already become a totalitarian one. No, it shouldn’t, my learned opponent argued. And as proof, he pointed to the existence of Novaya Gazeta: in a totalitarian state, he said, a media outlet like that couldn’t exist.

Indeed, in recent years Novaya Gazeta had looked like a strange aberration. Now everything has fallen into place. I hope we won’t have to debate this question anymore. The paper is closed, and the question is closed. And I’ll say it again. People who, while in Russia (rather than in a safe remove), behave with courage and dignity deserve enormous respect.

Thank you to them.