The newspaper survived three decades, six murders, death threats, an acid attack on its co-founder, raids and interrogations by the security services, wartime censorship and the seizure of its printing press. Its journalists fought on, finding loopholes in Russia’s increasingly oppressive laws.
But on Friday morning, journalists at Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s leading independent news outlet, reported news that they had done all they could to prevent: “They killed us,” they said in a statement.
Novaya Gazeta, whose co-founder Dmitri A. Muratov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for defending press freedom in Russia, will shut down on Nov. 9 after publishing one last edition, the journalists said. Mr. Muratov said in an interview on Friday that the government was responsible.
“First they jailed an employee, then declared the newspaper a foreign agent, and then designated another 100 people as individuals affiliated with a foreign agent,” said Mr. Muratov, 65, referring to the Russian authorities. “Then they raided the editor in chief’s home, and we still kept working.”
“Then they kicked us out of our building and took away our means of existence,” he continued. “We no longer have a home or money. It wasn’t us suspending operations; it was the deliberate destruction of Novaya Gazeta as that segment of society advocating for peace against repression and hating dictatorship.”
The outlet is losing its lease after 29 years on Potapovsky Lane in central Moscow, the journalists said in their statement. (The space also houses a small museum honoring Anna Politkovskaya, the Novaya Gazeta journalist who was murdered on President Vladimir V. Putin’s birthday in 2006.)
In addition, Mr. Muratov said, the banks that helped Novaya Gazeta collect payments from readers — “our sole source of income” — have abruptly stopped doing so. They said their rules had changed, but Mr. Muratov blamed the F.S.B., the successor agency of the K.G.B., which has taken on a wider role since the Ukraine war began.
“This isn’t just our personal story,” the journalists said in their statement. “It’s the story of a country and a society that are being finished off in exactly the same way.”
Novaya Gazeta was founded in 1993, not long after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Among its first supporters was the last Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who donated some of the money he had received with his 1990 Nobel Peace Prize to pay for its first computers. Mr. Muratov became editor in chief in 1995.
Despite the repression that was constant in Russia long before the war in Ukraine, Novaya Gazeta journalists covered all major developments in the country, sending correspondents to war zones and investigating corruption, political machinations and mercenary groups, like the one led by the warlord Yevgeny V. Prigozhin.
It was the first Russian newspaper to reveal that Russian soldiers, not just local insurgents, were fighting in the breakaway Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, in 2014. It avoided crossing some red lines, such as reporting about Mr. Putin’s family.
The Nobel committee awarded the 2021 Peace Prize to Mr. Muratov and the Philippine journalist Maria Ressa “for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.”
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Novaya Gazeta was outspoken in its opposition to the war, publishing an edition in both Russian and Ukrainian with a front page that read, “Russia. Bombs. Ukraine.” It condemned the raft of new censorship laws that were swiftly imposed, publishing blank pages under the title “No Words.”
About 60 percent of the paper’s journalists decamped to other countries and started Novaya Gazeta Europa, an all-digital news outlet that is expected to keep publishing, though it is blocked in Russia.
“For me, ‘Novaya’ was an experience of collectively inhabiting freedom in an unfree country,” Novaya Gazeta Europa’s editor in chief, Kirill Martynov, said in a social media post on Friday. “The less freedom remained in Russia, the more we sought it at home, on Potapovsky Lane, 3.”
Mr. Muratov and the other Novaya Gazeta journalists stayed in Russia, knowing there were still readers hungry for their work. The government soon designated Mr. Muratov a “foreign agent,” effectively labeling him an enemy of the state. That complicated even simple transactions for him, like taking a taxi, and it forced him to step down as editor in chief.
In 2022, paint laced with acetone was thrown in his face, causing chemical burns to his eyes. American officials said Russian intelligence was behind the attack. Last month, the entire Novaya Gazeta staff was added to the government’s list of so-called foreign agents.
Novaya Gazeta had been forced to stop printing newspapers in March 2022, when the government canceled its “mass media” license. But it continued to publish online, and it published news magazines with smaller circulations.
The chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, said on Friday that the panel was “deeply concerned by the forced closure of Novaya Gazeta” and that it called on Russia to end its “repression of independent media, journalists and civil society.”
The Novaya Gazeta staff’s statement reflected a point that Mr. Muratov made last month, in another interview with me. He compared Russia’s present with the Stalinist “Great Terror” of the late 1930s, when hundreds of thousands of people deemed state enemies were killed and even more were sent to forced labor camps.
“Stop saying this isn’t Stalin’s 1937, and that the repressions are somehow ‘digital.’ These are state repressions. And it’s people, not numbers, who are dying in cells,” the journalists said in their statement, referring to the 69 Russian and Ukrainian political prisoners who have died in Russian custody since the Ukraine war started, according to a report by the banned human rights group Memorial.
“Destroying Novaya Gazeta is part of establishing a dictatorship,” Mr. Muratov said on Friday. “Before this, people were deprived of the opportunity to vote for the only antiwar party, Yabloko. People wanted to choose a different future safely through elections, but the party was removed.
“We continued to express the interests of tens of millions of people who do not want to die for unclear goals,” he said. “Now, in building the regime of personal power, they finished off Novaya Gazeta.”
Henrik Pryser Libell contributed reporting from Oslo.
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