Kremlin Kills Novaya Gazeta; Banks Do the Paperwork

"We have been killed," reads the statement from Novaya Gazeta's editorial team, released under the title "We were killed." On Friday the paper announced it is ceasing operations, saying Russian authorities and security services forced its journalists to stop work. On November 9, ten days from now, the team will "turn off the lights in the home where we have lived for 30 years, shut down our servers, and leave." One final issue is still set to be published.

Editor-in-chief Sergei Sokolov said it plainly in a video on YouTube: "Novaya Gazeta is ceasing to exist." The team is being evicted from its headquarters on Potapovsky Lane in Moscow. The donations platform readers used to keep the paper alive has been closed down. "We have been stripped of all our resources. Entirely," the editors said, calling it a "coordinated campaign."

How a State Shuts a Newsroom Without a Single Decree

The method deserves attention, because it's tidier than a ban. The banks that cut the paper off, the editors say, "tell us they are merely following internal corporate rules." What they don't say, according to the statement, is that those rules "are set by the FSB, the state security service, embedded in every organisation. They see the country as their personal fiefdom."

So the state doesn't need to close a newspaper by law. It leans on the landlord, the bank, the payment platform. Nobody signs an order. Everyone follows procedure.

The paper says that since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, now in its fifth year, it had been unable to report on the "most critical and tragic events of our time," with censorship applied to "virtually every sphere of civic life." Moscow classed the outlet a "foreign agent", a label used to stifle dissent, revoked its media licence in 2022 and has detained its journalists. The paper had already trimmed production inside Russia after the invasion.

The Paper's Dead; The Cases Keep Moving

Earlier this month, authorities searched Sokolov's home and took him in for questioning, citing a link to a criminal case against his colleague Oleg Roldugin. Roldugin was arrested in April and charged with "unlawful access to computerised information." Sokolov was arrested on October 15, fifteen days ago. Reporters Without Borders asked afterwards: "How far will the Kremlin's relentless campaign against Novaya Gazeta go?" The organisation noted that "six of its journalists and staff members have been murdered, its newsroom has been raided, its journalists have been prosecuted, and the publication has been designated a 'foreign agent'."

The museum of journalist Anna Politkovskaya is closing along with the newsroom. It opened in her office on 7 October 2021, on the 15th anniversary of her murder. It lasted five years.

Nobel Prizes Don't Stop Bailiffs

The paper's then editor-in-chief, Dmitry Muratov, jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for his "efforts to safeguard freedom of expression." That was five years ago. The medal protected nothing: not the building, not the bank accounts, not the staff.

Novaya Gazeta was founded in 1993 by Sergei Kushnerev, Pavel Voshchanov, Akram Murtazaev, Dmitry Sabov and Dmitry Muratov. Its first computers were bought with help from former USSR president Mikhail Gorbachev. At the end of March 2022, after Roskomnadzor warnings, it suspended work, then resumed.

What's Left Is the Network

Some of its journalists left Russia after the invasion and set up Novaya Gazeta Europe, with its main office in Latvia. Independent Russian journalists issued a statement of support, published by Meduza: "The story of the most important independent publication in modern Russia has come to an end." It added: "By all measures this was the best media outlet in the history of Russia."

The base facts leave few independent outlets standing. Censorship and arrests of regime critics have skyrocketed since February 2022, and the closure marks another escalation in the crackdown on press freedom. What survives does so in exile, in other people's countries, on other people's servers. The apparatus that closed Novaya's doors didn't have to storm the building. It just had to make sure nobody would pay the rent.