'Novaya Gazeta' dies, tyranny wins

Novaya Gazeta [The new newspaper] appeared in 1993. The person who provided the money was the now former president Mikhail Gorbachev: he invested in the company the million dollars he had received, in 1990, with the Nobel Peace Prize. The Soviet Union had disappeared. Millions of Russians were going hungry because of the perestroika, the economic reform promoted by Gorbachev himself.

Despite everything, it still seemed possible that Russia would become a democracy. It was a mirage. The liberalization promoted by Gorbachev and taken to the extreme by Boris Yeltsin, the president and strongman who emerged from the attempted military coup in 1991, caused chaos in the industry and gave birth to a caste of immensely rich oligarchs who monopolized the privatized companies. It was the decade in which the United States and the European Union, through banks and speculators, actively contributed to the looting.

Corruption flooded Russian society, from top to bottom. And there was Novaya Gazeta, with a small newsroom of journalists trained in the Soviet era, and, therefore, with serious professional shortcomings, but with the will to report on the disasters that afflicted the largest country on the planet.

Serious mistakes were made, even when the newsroom already had experience. In 2004, the newspaper accused Sergei Kiriyenko (current administrator of the occupied territories in Ukraine) of stealing almost 5 billion dollars during his five months in office as prime minister in 1998. The accusation was based on a letter attributed to American parliamentarians that turned out to be false.

The Kremlin did not lash out at Novaya Gazeta. Vladimir Putin hated the newspaper, which during that year published chronicles by its reporter Anna Politkovskaya about the atrocities committed in Chechnya by the Russian army. He preferred, however, to avoid for the moment the closing of Novaya Gazeta through multimillion-dollar compensations: the existence of this free media allowed him to argue that there was freedom in Russia.

Putin and his henchmen focused on Politkovskaya: a group of soldiers subjected her to a mock execution, shortly after she was poisoned and finally she was shot to death in 2006.

The organizer of the crime, recruited and paid by unknowns (we can imagine the name of the main unknown), was the policeman Sergei Khadjikurbanov, aided by Chechen mercenaries. All were sentenced to prison. Khadjikurbanov received a presidential pardon in 2023, as a reward for having served six months with the Russian army in Ukraine.

Politkovskaya was not the only journalist from Novaya Gazeta who paid with her life for her criticism of Putin and the Russian oligarchy. Five of her colleagues were also murdered. The newspaper kept the flag of free information flying (its editor, Dmitry Muratov, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021) until 2022, when Russia's covert war against Ukraine became a formal invasion.

The contents of Novaya Gazeta began to be systematically censored. The government revoked its publishing license. Its digital edition was blocked so it could not be read inside Russia. On March 28, 2022, one month after the start of the invasion, Muratov announced the suspension of its two Russian editions, the digital and the print, “until the end of the special military operation”. "We cannot report on the most critical and tragic events of our time", lamented an editorial article.

That “special military operation” that was expected to be quick and overwhelming was a failure. Ukraine resisted. The war would not end in the foreseeable future.

On May 6, 2022, the print and digital editions of Novaya Gazeta Europe were launched from Latvia to escape censorship and prison sentences for discrediting the Russian army. In 2023, the Prosecutor General's Office of Russia labeled the newspaper an “undesirable organization”.

This year, 2026, the persecution has become unbearable. In April, the police searched its offices. In September, the Ministry of Justice included the newspaper on the list of “foreign agents” and prohibited it from operating with banks, which prevented it from receiving donations. In October, the headquarters of Novaya Gazeta was shut down. One of its editors, Oleg Rolduguin, is under arrest and awaiting trial for “criminal use of personal data”; he could receive a sentence of up to ten years in prison.

Impossible to continue. Novaya Gazetawill close definitively this November 9, 2026. It will maintain its European edition, but its journalists will not be able to work inside Russia. Like El Faro from El Salvador, it will become a newspaper in exile.