Novaya Gazeta holds last editorial meeting and empties its Moscow office

Novaya Gazeta held its final editorial meeting on Monday and began clearing out its central Moscow office, closing a newsroom that traced its roots to the last years of the Soviet Union. The paper said a sustained campaign of state pressure had made it impossible to keep reporting.

The immediate killer was money. Banks stopped processing reader donations the outlet depended on for survival, and it announced late last month it would have to shut after being designated a

foreign agent

. Its offices and its editor's home were searched, and a senior journalist remains under house arrest awaiting trial.

Gorbachev founded the paper using money from his 1990 Nobel Peace Prize, and it hung on through the censorship crackdown that followed Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Dmitry Muratov, its former editor in chief, shared the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize and dedicated it to six murdered colleagues, among them investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya, who covered Russia's wars in Chechnya.

The most awful thing is that we who lead editorial teams cannot protect our journalists,