Kremlin pressure silences one of Russia’s last independent newspapers

Russian investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta was winding up its operations on Monday and preparing to quit its central Moscow office after holding its final editorial meeting, bowing to what it said was a campaign of state pressure that had made it impossible to carry on reporting.

The paper, founded by the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev with money from his 1990 Nobel Peace Prize, had kept going until now despite a sharp tightening of censorship after Russia launched its full-scale war in Ukraine in 2022.

But it announced late last month that it would have to close after it was designated a “foreign agent” and banks stopped processing reader donations on which it relied for its financial survival. Its offices and the home of its editor were searched, and another senior journalist is under house arrest awaiting trial.

“The most awful thing is that we who lead editorial teams cannot protect our journalists,” former editor in chief Dmitry Muratov told an audience in London last month.

Muratov shared the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, dedicating it to six slain colleagues, including investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who wrote about Russia’s wars in the restive Chechnya region.

The Kremlin – which accuses foreign intelligence services of trying to stir discontent in Russian society – has said previously that some censorship is necessary at a time when Russia is locked in what it calls an existential struggle with the West over Ukraine and some hardliner war bloggers have accused Novaya Gazeta of systematically promoting an anti-Russian narrative, an allegation it has repeatedly dismissed as false.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov played down the outlet’s closure on Monday, saying it was part of what he called “a standard rotational process” in which some media closed only to have their places taken by newcomers in what he said was a fiercely competitive media environment.

A long article on Novaya Gazeta’s website described its journalists’ operation to pack up and vacate their premises. It quoted a senior journalist, Irina Vorobyova, as saying its spirit would survive like a “good virus” – “Not even a nuclear explosion could destroy it. It will continue in everyone who was part of it.”