Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s last independent newspaper, will cease its operations on Monday. The closure of this remarkable and courageous paper — six of its employees lost their lives investigating corruption and exposing Russian war crimes in Chechnya in the early 2000s — offers a valuable lesson for any publication working in a climate of creeping tyranny. In short: Don’t play along.
Established in 1993 with money from Mikhail Gorbachev’s Nobel Peace Prize, the paper quickly defined itself through investigative reporting on stories that other Russian outlets wouldn’t dare touch. Its journalists documented the staggering levels of government corruption and the ruthless consolidation of economic power that characterized 1990s Russia.
The following decade, the newspaper’s on-the-ground coverage of the Second Chechen War, led by its star reporter Anna Politkovskaya, sealed its reputation as one of the few Russian publications capable of taking on the country’s new president, a ruthless ex-K.G.B. agent named Vladimir Putin. That fearless reporting resulted in Ms. Politkovskaya’s assassination on Mr. Putin’s birthday in 2006. Undeterred, Novaya Gazeta continued to investigate corruption at the highest levels of government, earning its co-founder and longtime editor in chief, Dmitri Muratov, a Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for his “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression.”
Just two and a half months later, Mr. Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In a week, the Kremlin enacted laws that made publishing anything that deviated from the official line on the war punishable by up to 15 years in prison. This forced the paper to make the terrible choice between staying in Russia, where it would be unable to rigorously report on the country’s most important story, and going into exile to cover the war from abroad, as about a dozen other independent Russian news outlets would choose to do.
Novaya Gazeta asked its subscribers what they wanted. Ninety-four percent voted for it to stay in Russia and work under military censorship. The paper quickly became a shadow of its former self: More than half of its staff members and contributors left the country for their own safety. Mr. Muratov said he didn’t want to abandon the paper’s readers at a time when they needed access to reliable information more than ever. But by choosing to stay in a place where objective reporting was illegal, Novaya Gazeta profoundly compromised its own mission.
On Feb. 25, 2022, the day after the invasion began, the paper published an edition in Russian and Ukrainian condemning Mr. Putin’s war as “madness.” After the new military censorship laws went into effect, on March 4, the paper was published with blurred images and blank spaces in articles where noncompliant facts or phrases had been removed.
That April, Mr. Muratov was almost blinded when he was attacked with a mixture of paint and acetone at a Moscow train station. The police let his assailants go, despite Novaya Gazeta conducting a detailed investigation to identify them. Instead, Russian authorities focused on stripping the newspaper of its print media license.
At the same time, with Mr. Muratov’s blessing, many of his former staff members came together in Riga, Latvia, to found Novaya Gazeta Europe, a legally separate sister outlet with editions in both Russian and English. As the editor of the English edition until earlier this year, I saw the stark contrast between the two Novayas.
From the relative safety of Riga, Novaya Gazeta Europe was free to cover topics that were off-limits to our sister paper — including Russian atrocities against Ukrainian civilians, the overwhelming death toll of Russian troops, the Kremlin’s human rights abuses at home and the country’s slide into a military dictatorship. We documented how the Russian authorities were suppressing public displays of grief for the war dead and investigated how the Kremlin had spent a decade using state media to prime the Russian public for militarization.
But the creation of a separate edition in exile also confused readers and diluted the Novaya Gazeta brand. When, in 2023, Novaya Gazeta Europe was deemed an “undesirable organization” by the Russian authorities, it became a criminal offense for anybody in Russia to cooperate with or even to read our publication. Virtually all coordination and contact between the two Novayas stopped.
After almost five years of imposing intolerable conditions on Novaya Gazeta’s remaining staff members in Russia, the Kremlin this year dealt the paper its death blow. After the entire organization was branded a “foreign agent,” banks cut the paper off from reader donations — by then its sole source of income. The paper received an eviction notice, forcing it out of the Moscow office it had called home for nearly 30 years, a space that also housed a small museum honoring Ms. Politkovskaya. “They killed us,” Novaya Gazeta wrote in an editorial published Oct. 30. “We have been stripped of all of our resources. Entirely.”
But even before its offices were raided and its printing presses were seized, before the foreign agent designation, Novaya Gazeta’s decision to remain in Russia and abide by the humiliating rules of Mr. Putin’s regime left it unable to provide its readers with independent news. After all, every other major independent Russian outlet understood when it was finally time to leave. The sole positive offered by the paper’s forced closure now is the opportunity for its extraordinary reporters to combine their talents with those of their former colleagues in exile.
Nothing short of total submission will satisfy the current occupants of the Kremlin, who, as Novaya Gazeta put it, “see the country as their personal fiefdom.” But Novaya Gazeta’s decision to compromise on its core values destroyed the historic paper long before the Kremlin killed it.
Tom Masters is a journalist specializing in Russia and the post-Soviet space. He was the editor of the English edition of Novaya Gazeta from 2023 to 2026.
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