Defiant in defeat, Russia’s bravest newspaper closes its doors

Valerie Hopkins

November 11, 2026 — 6:31pm

Moscow — Outside a five-story office building on Potapovsky Lane in Moscow, a group of journalists took down a metal plaque and installed a plastic one in its place: Novaya Gazeta Lived Here. White carnations, the flower that Russians associate with mourning, were placed on top of it.

Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s most daring independent newspaper for decades, closed its doors Monday, the latest blow to Russians who value freedom of expression and human rights.

Its forced closure is emblematic of the Kremlin’s erasure of opinions, ideas and people that do not conform to its views. That process has been under way for years, but it has dramatically accelerated since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Novaya Gazeta’s journalists were packing up their offices when I visited Monday. Its co-founder Dmitri A. Muratov, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for defending press freedom, was giving away personal items to colleagues and well-wishers.

He handed his emerald banker’s lamp to one of the paper’s last recruits, a video journalist. He kept for himself a fire evacuation floor plan, on which he asked staff members to sign their names where their offices had been.

The office once occupied by Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist and Kremlin critic who was gunned down on President Vladimir Putin’s birthday in 2006, had already been cleared out. Her computer, eyeglasses and notebooks, left in place for 20 years after her murder, are now in storage.

While the occasion was sombre, the journalists were not despondent. In many ways, it was a miracle that the newspaper had survived for as long as it had.

After its start in 1993, less than two years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Novaya Gazeta chronicled Russia’s chaotic 1990s, its consumerist 2000s, its increasingly repressive 2010s and Putin’s near-total consolidation of power in the 2020s.

It carried on even as six of its journalists were killed and others violently attacked. It kept publishing after its website was blocked, its media license revoked, its printing press seized and one of its journalists detained.

But it could not, at least in its current form, outlast Russia’s war in Ukraine. The double death blows came last month, when its landlord refused to renew the lease and the banks that had processed reader donations, the paper’s sole form of income, said they would stop doing so. None of the journalists consider this a coincidence.

“No one is in shock here,” one of the paper’s journalists, Tatiana Britskaya, said as she walked the halls amid the boxes and plastic wrap. “The process of silencing us started many years ago.”

The journalists had tried to adapt to Russia’s wartime reality. They did not report about what was happening on the frontlines because censorship laws passed in March 2022 had made it a crime to use anything but government sources for such reports.

Internally, they debated whether it made sense to keep operating under those conditions, and the newsroom had been divided about it, said Britskaya, 43. But she said their readers overwhelmingly wanted them to continue, even if they had to abide by the new laws.

“They said, ‘Continue, because many of us are post-Soviet people, and our entire lives were spent reading between the lines. What matters to us is that you stay with us,’” Britskaya said.

The paper published front pages with the word “war” blurred out. But its journalists wrote unflinchingly about lives that were taken or forever damaged by the conflict. With philanthropy and activism at the core of its mission, Novaya Gazeta also encouraged readers to help those in need of assistance and organised fundraisers of its own. The paper made its anti-war position eminently clear, withstanding the pressure until it became insurmountable.

At noon on Monday, the journalists gathered for their final editorial meeting, as dozens of reporters — mostly foreigners — filmed the scene. The editor-in-chief, Sergei Sokolov, listed the articles and columns that would run in the final issue.

‘We definitely will return because Novaya Gazeta is not a newspaper, not a website — it is an idea.’

Novaya Gazeta’s editor-in-chief, Sergey Sokolov

There was an investigation into an orphan rescued from an abusive psychiatric hospital, who was subsequently drafted and killed in the war. An article about teenagers who had fallen prey to scammers. A report on representatives from the anti-war Yabloko party taking office in the parliament of Nizhny Novgorod, the only region of Russia that allowed the party to field candidates.

After announcing that Novaya Gazeta’s website and social media channels would stop being updated with new content at midnight, Sokolov recalled the words of exiled Orthodox priest Andrei Kordochkin, a columnist for the paper who was stripped of his Moscow congregation because of his anti-war position. Despondency, Kordochkin had said, is the seventh sin.

Slowly, the journalists took down portraits of their six slain colleagues that had watched over every editorial meeting: Igor Domnikov, Yuri Shchekochikhin, Stanislav Markelov, Anastasia Baburova, Natalia Estemirova and Politkovskaya.

“We are not saying goodbye,” Sokolov said. “We definitely will return, because Novaya Gazeta is not a newspaper, not a website — it is an idea, a way of life for those who work here. And it is impossible to kill and impossible to close. We will live. I am sure that society, caught in this terrible time, will finally stir.”

The journalists went outside for a final photo as Eto Vsyo (That Is All), a popular rock ballad, played on a sound system. The song, a hit in 1994 for Russian rock band DDT, is about loss and mourning, but also about the triumph of love. Its lead singer, Yuri Shevchuk, recorded a new acoustic version in honour of Novaya Gazeta after it announced that it would close.

Shevchuk is Russia’s Bruce Springsteen. After declaring that he opposed the war, he was interrogated, charged with “discrediting the Russian armed forces” and effectively blacklisted from performing in Russia. Now he only tours abroad, like all of Russia’s anti-war singers. The Kremlin has instead promoted nationalist artists who sing about the country’s greatness.

Muratov used the media coverage of the paper’s closure to call for distinguishing Russian authorities from the people of Russia.

“This is not a war of Russia with Ukraine — it is a war of the Kremlin with Ukraine,” he said. “The people in our country who stand for peace were not given the opportunity to read what they want — we see this today — or to vote for the anti-war party, Yabloko, that they would have liked to vote for.”

He called for freedom for Russia’s thousands of political prisoners and for humanitarian evacuations for Ukrainians trapped by the war. “This madness, this slaughter must be stopped,” he said. In contemporary Russia, those are dangerous words.

Among those who came to bid farewell was Yan Rachinsky, the former head of Memorial, the Russian rights group that shared the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize. Memorial, which was created to preserve the memory of those persecuted by the Soviet regime, was officially labelled “extremist” in April, making it a criminal offence to be affiliated with the group.

A small museum that was operated by Memorial, with rotating exhibits about life in the Soviet gulag, is now closed. Since Memorial was labelled an extremist group, memorials to victims of the gulag in public squares across Russia have been dismantled.

Russian authorities have also gone after nonconformist communities. “Promoting” LGBTQ+ relationships or a “child-free” lifestyle has been illegal for years. Police in Moscow recently carried out raids in the neighbourhood of Kitai Gorod, a popular gathering place for counterculture youth.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov called the closure of Novaya Gazeta a “normal process of turnover”.

“Of course, every year some media outlets close, and new ones take their place,” he said Monday during a call with reporters.

But Novaya’s journalists, and many of its readers, know this was not a matter of economics.

“When voices like these disappear from public life, it starts to feel like there are fewer and fewer people who think differently, like you’re alone in what you believe,” said a 21-year-old reader, Danila, a recent university graduate with a degree in computer programming. He asked that his last name not be published, to avoid trouble with authorities.

“The less you hear people expressing views different from the official narrative,” he said, “the harder it gets to speak up yourself.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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