- Paper boy - 31st October 2026
- A flee in the ear - 30th October 2026
- Radio wails - 30th October 2026
During a 43 year career as a journalist (starting in newspapers) our Editor Phil Parry, has always been lucky enough to work in a largely free environment, so is angered by news that the Kremlin is shutting down Russia’s last independent, and critical, paper.
It has always seemed fundamental to me.
During several years in newspapers (first on the South Wales Echo then on the Daily Mail and Today), important organisations as well as people were held to account.
The results would not always make for comfortable reading, and in terms in particular of the Daily Mail, what was published may not have been approved of by a liberal audience, but if you make life so difficult for these papers to operate, then watch out, because certain facts might not come out.
Yet exactly this has happened to Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia’s best-known independent media outlets, which has announced it will permanently close next month.
The newspaper, whose former Editor-in-Chief Dmitry Muratov won the Nobel peace prize in 2021, cited intolerable pressure, including being stripped of its newsroom, its donation platforms and its legal right to publish.
Mr Muratov, was on his way to Paris on October 19 to commemorate Anna Politkovskaya’s murder when he learned the paper was being evicted from the building it had occupied for three decades. Its financial channels would be blocked, thanks to being branded a “foreign agent”.
“This is not just our own story; it is the story of a country and a society that are being systematically crushed”, wrote its present Editor-in-Chief, Sergei Sokolov, on the newspaper’s website.
On October 26 Mr Muratov and Mr Sokolov gathered the paper’s remaining staff in the basement of the building next door, telling them to leave their phones outside. The previous night someone had broken into the newspaper’s offices, so it was unsafe to talk there. It was a sign of escalation, Mr Muratov explained, and they might be declared an extremist organisation with their ‘members’ arrested. The staff agreed it was time to close down the newspaper, which was launched in 1993, the year Russia adopted its post-Soviet constitution.
“We haven’t died, they’ve killed us – along with the constitution”, said Mr Muratov. “You can only laugh at Article 29 of the constitution: ‘Censorship is prohibited’”.
It was for many years partly funded by the late Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Novaya made its name through dogged, long-form reporting on corruption, rights abuses and social issues.
Over the years, six of its journalists have been assassinated, including Ms Politkovskaya, who was gunned down in the stairwell of her Moscow apartment block in 2006.
While Novaya always swam against a tide of repression, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 made independent reporting almost impossible and devastated the Russian media landscape.
Novaya was one of the last critical voices still operating from inside the country. “For nearly five years of *** we managed to keep working while being completely encircled by the security services. Now it’s over. We have found ourselves in a ‘kill zone’”, wrote Mr Sokolov. The asterixes were used in place of the word ‘war’, as under Russian law, journalists must refer to the war in Ukraine as a ‘special military operation’ or face consequences.
The newspaper’s first response to the invasion was to put out a special bilingual Russian-Ukrainian edition in the days after Vladimir Putin launched the invasion.
It described the war as “madness” on its front page. Soon after, the Kremlin implemented draconian new censorship laws, which forced media outlets to publish only the Russian official narrative about the conflict.
The newspaper published blank white spaces instead of euphemisms and false information, to provide a visible reminder of the censorship laws. By the end of March 2022, Novaya decided to stop publishing its print edition altogether, but the threats and pressure only increased. In April that year, Mr Muratov was doused with red paint while on a train, an attack that damaged his eyesight and that US officials say was carried out on the orders of Russian intelligence agencies.
In September that year, the newspaper’s official licence was taken away and soon after their website was blocked in Russia.
Novaya’s journalists, long used to operating in a hostile environment, found ways to circumvent the bans. Many left Russia, and a number of exiled former employees set up Novaya Gazeta Europe, a legally distinct outlet.
Mr Muratov and a core team stayed behind and continued to publish a series of magazines with a print run of 999 copies, taking advantage of a law that means magazines with under 1,000 copies do not require an official licence.
Novaya’s website continued running, too, although the Russian state hit the outlet with various new legal threats. “The fact Novaya kept working for this four and a half years after everything that happened was a miracle, but it was not just a miracle, it was also the daily choice of people who continued to go to work even when it was very scary”, said Elena Kostyuchenko, a former Novaya journalist who spent 17 years at the newspaper. “Today I feel very inspired by my colleagues, but also very painful and sad for them, and for all of us”.
This month, the newspaper’s landlords informed Novaya staff that they must vacate their longstanding office premises in central Moscow by November 9. The newsroom has been the hub of the newspaper for decades and houses a memorial museum to Ms Politkovskaya in the former office of the murdered journalist. On top of the eviction notice, all the outlet’s donation platforms have been shut down, leaving the paper without any source of funding.
This is very sad news. Independent journalism like I or Novaya Gazeta undertake, is important so where should we now turn for news about Russia or the war in Ukraine?
Sorry the ‘special military operation’…
The memories of Phil’s astonishing decades long award-winning career in journalism (where he has always worked in an environment of relative media freedom) as he was gripped by the rare disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order the book now!
