Moscow has shuttered Novaya Gazeta – we told the truth and we paid the price

Russia’s best-known independent newspaper was my home for 17 years. It’s being shut down, but the spirit of its journalism will live on

Novaya Gazeta – Russia’s most prominent independent newspaper – is being shut down. On 29 October, two things became known: Novaya was being evicted from its newsroom, and banks would stop processing readers’ donations to Novaya (its only legal income). Insiders spoke of the risk of Novaya being declared an extremist organisation – then any employee could be jailed: a journalist, an editor, an accountant, a cleaner. Closing was safer.

Novaya Gazeta is a second family to me and to many journalists now scattered around the Earth. For me it is my first family, too – my adopted sister also worked at Novaya, and it’s funny how alike we turned out.

I bought Novaya for the first time when I was 14. I opened it to an article by Anna Politkovskaya about the “cleansing” of the Chechen village of Mesker-Yurt by Russian soldiers. Thirty-six people were killed; one man was crucified. None of it made sense to me. I considered myself well informed; like everyone around me, I knew exactly what was happening in Chechnya. Our soldiers were heroically protecting civilians from terrorists.

The more I read, the more I realised that I knew nothing about my own country. I was angry at Novaya. It took away the truth I shared with everyone else. I couldn’t ignore it – the words would not be forgotten. Later, I understood that this is exactly what journalism should be: it should drag you back to reality, even when you don’t want to go. A few years later, I was working at the paper.

I came to Novaya at 17 with no connections, not knowing how to turn on a computer – and I stayed for 17 years. Novaya rarely hired established journalists – it took very young kids and nurtured them. The youngest people in the newsroom were 15, the oldest close to 80. It was one big, intergenerational school. Today, people from Novaya work at almost every independent Russian outlet.

The paper wrote about the most important things in a way that turned the words themselves into events: Beslan, the purge of gay men in Chechnya, Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, corruption, the wars in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria and Ukraine, torture, organised crime, the environment, terrorism – and the people living very different lives across our vast country.

In 1993, just a few months after Novaya Gazeta was established, Boris Yeltsin, then the president, dissolved the Supreme Soviet, our country’s parliament. The army shelled the White House in Moscow using tanks. Officially, 158 people died; unofficial estimates are higher. Novaya’s special issue carried reports from the White House, from the streets and hospitals under the headline: “As long as we divide even the dead into our own and our enemies, the war will go on.” That was the paper’s true motto.

Dmitry Muratov, one of Novaya Gazeta’s founders and editors-in-chief, liked to say: “The work only begins once the text is published.” When I wrote about a former orphanage kid wrongly convicted of murder, Novaya Gazeta found him a lawyer, and for several years we went to the hearings until he was acquitted. Novaya’s investigations became the basis of criminal cases, lives were saved (Anna Politkovskaya organised the evacuation of 89 elderly people abandoned in a nursing home in Grozny).

In the paper’s 33 years, six of its people were killed: Igor Domnikov, Yuri Shchekochikhin, Politkovskaya, Stanislav Markelov, Anastasia Baburova, Natalia Estemirova. In most cases, those who ordered the killings were never found or punished. Many Novaya journalists received threats. Many were beaten. Someone splashed a chemical in Muratov’s face; his eyes were saved.

When Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine began in February 2022, Novaya Gazeta came out in Russian and Ukrainian with a clear message on the front page: “We refuse to see the Ukrainian people as our enemies.” A month later, Novaya had to suspend publication; the authorities took away its licence and printing the paper became impossible. The website was blocked. Social networks were blocked too, for the whole country. In April of this year, the newsroom was searched and equipment was seized; at the same time, the investigative journalist Oleg Roldugin was arrested, and he is now awaiting trial. On 4 September, the Ministry of Justice declared Novaya a “foreign agent” – along with 106 of its contributors.

Many now say it was a miracle that Novaya Gazeta kept working inside Russia for four and a half years of war, when almost all independent media had moved their newsrooms abroad. This miracle was made possible by the daily choices of people I love and of those I have not met yet. They were afraid to come to the newsroom – but they came every single day. They went to the occupied territories, investigated, documented the repression, talked to people as people, without simplifying, generalising, or looking away. Many kept prison bags in their hallways – clothes and medicine packed in case of arrest. Everyone learned their lawyer’s number by heart. Everyone gave their neighbours a set of keys so – if anything happened – someone would water the plants and feed the cats.

For my colleagues, I feel gratitude and love, fear, endless admiration and endless pain. For the Russian state that set out to kill Novaya Gazeta and has now killed it, I feel nothing. The drive to know the truth (even when it hurts terribly) is built into every human heart, written into our biology; it is a condition of our survival. That is why Novaya will be eternal, even when every one of us is gone.

Elena Kostyuchenko is a Russian journalist and the author of I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country