Novaya Gazeta, the Moscow newspaper that spent more than 30 years investigating corruption, human rights abuses and abuses of power inside Russia, announced Friday that it is shutting down permanently — closing what remained of the country's independent press under Vladimir Putin.
Editor-in-chief Sergei Sokolov delivered the news in a video statement, according to CNN: "Novaya Gazeta has been killed. On November 9, we will turn off the lights in the home where we have lived for 30 years." The paper's staff learned a day earlier that they were being evicted from their newsroom on Potapovsky Lane, and CNN reported that the system allowing readers to donate to the paper was switched off at the same time, cutting its only remaining source of funding.
In a statement quoted by CBS News, Sokolov said: "The newspaper no longer exists. The Russian government, Russian special services, forced the editorial team to stop its work." The paper's staff, he said, would now end up "on the street, with no means of subsistence and under the constant threat of repression." The Washington Post reported that the closure follows mounting pressure from Russian authorities.
Novaya Gazeta did not fall in a single blow. The paper's co-founder, Dmitry Muratov, told the BBC's Steven Rosenberg that the Kremlin squeezed it to death step by step. "First, they blocked our websites and banned the paper edition. Then they revoked our media licence. One by one we were declared 'foreign agents,' and our journalists were attacked," Muratov said. "Now we can't earn any more money. The banks are refusing to accept donations from our readers."
"There are different ways to commit murder," Muratov told the BBC. "They chose to strangle us."
The paper said in its own statement, quoted by the Guardian, that Russian society is being "systematically crushed."
The outlet's credibility was paid for in blood. According to the BBC, six Novaya Gazeta colleagues were killed while "fulfilling their professional and civic duty," including Anna Politkovskaya, shot dead in the stairwell of her Moscow apartment building in October 2006 after years of reporting on the war in Chechnya. Her former office at the paper was preserved as a museum in her memory; since the eviction order, the BBC reported, most of its contents have already been removed, leaving a desk and her portrait behind. CBS News reported that Politkovskaya's convicted murderer was pardoned by Russian authorities in 2023 after joining the military to fight in Ukraine.
Novaya Gazeta was founded in 1993 with money from former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's Nobel Peace Prize. Muratov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for defending freedom of expression — and Russian authorities designated him a "foreign agent" in 2023 anyway, a label the BBC notes is routinely used to punish government critics. The paper was forced to suspend print and online operations shortly after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, CBS News reported, though a separate Novaya Gazeta Europe edition has continued publishing from outside Russia and maintains an English-language Instagram account.
For Americans, the lesson is not abstract. The same playbook — blocking funding, branding dissidents as foreign agents, revoking licenses, evicting newsrooms — is aimed at any institution that tells the truth about entrenched power. Russians were queuing at donation points to keep Novaya Gazeta alive because they knew exactly what its disappearance meant. As of November 9, the desks go dark, the Politkovskaya museum closes, and the last independent newsroom in Russia is gone.
Our Take
Patriots, look closely at what just happened in Moscow, because it is a preview of what the Left in this country has been building toward for years. Novaya Gazeta was silenced, in the BBC's words, because authorities blocked its websites, banned its print edition, revoked its media license, labeled its journalists foreign agents, and then went after the donations that kept the lights on. There was no trial that mattered and no crime worth naming — just a state that decided an independent press was a threat and strangled it.
Remember that the next time a Democrat politician or a legacy media anchor lectures you about "misinformation" and demands Big Tech deplatform conservative voices. You have spent eight years watching the same crowd cheer the silencing of their opponents: the FBI raiding homes over the color of a hat, courts and bureaucrats hunting the president's supporters, banks and payment processors cutting off Americans whose politics they despise. The enemies of freedom always pretend they are protecting democracy while they destroy it. Every regime that kills a free press starts by calling it a danger.
The Founding Fathers understood that a free press is the last line of defense for a free people, which is why the First Amendment sits first in the Bill of Rights. Putin's Russia is what America looks like if the Left ever gets the power it keeps reaching for. Do not let it happen here.
