The Lights Go Out at Novaya Gazeta: How Putin's Russia Finally Silenced Its Bravest Newspaper

For more than three decades, Novaya Gazeta told Russians what their government did not want them to know. This week, the lights went out.

The newspaper, long regarded as Russia's last openly critical major outlet, published its final issue in Moscow and its staff walked out of the office on Potapovsky Lane that had been its home for 29 years, Euronews and Reuters reported. Before they left, staff took down the portraits of their murdered colleagues that had hung on the newsroom walls, Euronews reported.

The paper had announced on Oct. 30 that it was closing, with a statement that read simply, "They have killed us," according to the Associated Press.

Novaya Gazeta was not shut by a single decree. By its own account, it was squeezed until it could no longer breathe.

The paper said security services and censors forced it to stop operating after it was evicted from its office, its reader donation system was shut down, its printing was blocked and its media registration was revoked, Euronews reported. Reuters reported that banks stopped processing donations, which had become the paper's main source of income. The paper laid the blame on the FSB security service, the Justice Ministry and the Prosecutor General's office, according to the AP.

The pressure had been building for years. The Committee to Protect Journalists reported that the paper's printing presses were seized in November 2023, and that one of its journalists, Oleg Roldugin, has been under house arrest since June on charges stemming from a raid on the newsroom earlier this year. In September, authorities labeled the paper a "foreign agent," and in October police searched the home of editor Sergei Sokolov and questioned him, Newsweek reported.

Those steps followed a pattern Russia has used against its critics. Weeks after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the paper suspended publication under pressure from the state media regulator, and its license was later stripped, according to CPJ and the AP. CPJ counts roughly 550 journalists and outlets that Moscow has branded foreign agents and at least 27 outlets declared "undesirable," a designation that makes cooperating with them a crime.

No newspaper in modern Russia paid a higher price for telling the truth.

CPJ lists the Novaya Gazeta journalists who were killed: Igor Domnikov in 2000, Yury Shchekochikhin in 2003, Anna Politkovskaya in 2006, and Anastasiya Baburova and Natalya Estemirova in 2009. Politkovskaya, who reported relentlessly on the war in Chechnya, was shot dead in Moscow in 2006. Five men were convicted in 2014, but who ordered her killing has never been established, the AP reported.

CPJ says more than 60 journalists have been killed for their work in Russia since 1992, and that most of those cases remain unpunished.

The paper's editor for many years, Dmitry Muratov, was himself attacked with paint on a train in April 2022, according to the AP, and stepped down as editor in 2023 after he was labeled a foreign agent.

Novaya Gazeta was founded in 1993, in the hopeful years after the Soviet collapse, partly with money from Mikhail Gorbachev's 1990 Nobel Peace Prize, the AP reported. Before 2022, it printed three times a week with more than 100,000 copies an edition, Newsweek reported.

Muratov shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021. In June 2022, he auctioned his medal for $103.5 million, a record for a Nobel medal, with the proceeds going to UNICEF to help Ukrainian children displaced by the war, CBS News reported. The previous record for a Nobel medal sale was $4.76 million.

That act said everything about the newspaper's spirit. Its journalists were Russians who loved their country enough to tell it the truth, and who would not look away from the suffering their own government was causing.

The way Novaya Gazeta died says something about how it lived. In its final years the paper survived largely on donations from its own readers, and when the banks stopped processing those payments, its main source of income disappeared, Reuters reported. That means the people who kept it alive were not foreign governments or wealthy patrons. They were Russians who wanted to know the truth and were willing to pay for it out of their own pockets.

With the Moscow newsroom closed and its websites blocked inside the country, those readers are left with a media landscape dominated by the state. The independent journalists who remain now work almost entirely from abroad, where the Kremlin brands them foreign agents or worse, according to CPJ. For a nation as vast as Russia, the loss is not just one newspaper. It is one of the last places where Russians could read their own country's story told honestly in their own language.

Former staffer Elena Racheva, who worked at the paper for 16 years, called the closure "absolutely devastating," Newsweek reported. The European Parliament and the British Foreign Office both condemned the shutdown, according to Newsweek.

CPJ called it "a dark day for independent media everywhere". Muratov told Reuters that Russia now holds about 4,000 political prisoners, and another veteran journalist told the agency that not even a nuclear blast could have destroyed the paper's spirit.

It is easy for Americans to treat a story like this as something far away. It is not.

The First Amendment was written by men who had seen what happens when the government decides which printers may print and which voices may speak. It protects the press not because reporters are always right, but because no government can be trusted to decide what citizens are allowed to read. Russia shows what the alternative looks like: not a single dramatic act of censorship, but a slow strangling through registrations, bank accounts, landlords and "foreign agent" labels until the presses fall silent.

For Christians, the lesson runs deeper still. Scripture tells us that the truth sets people free, and the men and women of Novaya Gazeta lived and died for that conviction. Their wall of portraits is a reminder that truth-telling is often costly, and that the freedoms Americans enjoy were bought and kept at a price. The best way to honor that sacrifice is to guard those freedoms at home, to support honest reporting wherever it is found and to remember the names of those who paid for the truth with their lives.

Sokolov has said the paper will return at the first signs of change in Russia, Euronews reported. Reuters said it is unclear whether Novaya Gazeta will come back in another form. The paper's archive is being preserved online, and Russian journalists working in exile, including those behind the separate Novaya Gazeta Europe, which Moscow has outlawed as "undesirable," continue to publish from abroad.

Inside Russia, though, the last major newsroom that dared to say no has gone dark. The question now is whether the world remembers the people who kept its lights on for so long.