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.”
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 in a statement.
They said their landlord was ending their lease after 29 years on Potapovsky Lane in central Moscow. (The space also houses a small museum honoring Anna Politkovskaya, the Novaya Gazeta journalist killed on President Vladimir V. Putin’s birthday in 2006.) In addition, the bank that had helped Novaya Gazeta collect payments from readers — many of whom valued the newspaper’s defiant criticism of Mr. Putin’s war in Ukraine — had disabled its donation system, they said.
The journalists made it clear that they held the Russian government responsible. “This is a coordinated operation,” they wrote in the statement.
“No one will be convinced by the banks’ justification that they are acting on internal corporate rules,” they said. “These are external rules, established by the repressive state apparatus, by F.S.B. officers who have infiltrated every organization,” they continued, referring to the successor agency of the K.G.B., which has taken on a wider role since the Ukraine war began. “They consider the country their property.”
“This isn’t just our personal story,” the journalists said. “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 Ukraine war, 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 did avoid 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 publishing Novaya Gazeta Europa.
Mr. Muratov and the others stayed, knowing that there were still readers in Russia 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.
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.
Mr. Muratov, 65, has said that he stayed in Russia because he believed the press was the last democratic institution left in the country.
“The media has taken the function of the Parliament,” he told me in an interview early this year in his Moscow office, using the politics of the war as an illustration. “Eighty percent of Russians favor a cease-fire,” he said, citing polls. “But in a Parliament of 450 deputies, not a single one represents that position. So it is expressed today by the media.”
The statement on Friday reflected another point that Mr. Muratov made, during an interview with me last month. 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 custody since the Ukraine war started, according to a report by the banned human rights group Memorial.
“Human rights and freedoms have been eliminated in the country, and their protection has been equated with a crime,” the journalists wrote. “But treason is when a state betrays its own Constitution. And this treason is an ongoing crime, currently unfolding before the eyes of the entire world. The murder of Novaya Gazeta is further proof of this.”
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