As Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia’s best-known independent newspapers, is forced to close after 33 years, three former staffers look back on its legacy

Novaya Gazeta has announced that it is closing. For more than 30 years, it covered Russia’s biggest events and told stories about Russians that readers couldn’t find anywhere else. Many outstanding journalists worked at Novaya. Some were killed for telling the truth. Meduza asked former Novaya Gazeta journalists Ekaterina Glikman, Elena Kostyuchenko, and Nadya Yurova to reflect on three decades of work by one of the country’s most important independent publications, which they were all part of.Warning: This article contains profanity.Ekaterina GlikmanSpecial correspondent and deputy editorial director at Novaya Gazeta from 2002 to 2022. Now deputy editor in chief of Novaya Gazeta EuropeMy last years of high school coincided with Novaya Gazeta’s best years. I couldn’t get enough of it. Maybe that’s just my impression, but 1997 and 1998 were brilliant years. Above all, because of its star lineup of journalists. Novaya Gazeta was always a paper built around individual writers: Everyone had a very distinctive style, and the articles were fairly opinionated.That’s not how people write now — everything has to be uniform, polished, and objective. There’s probably something to that; times have changed. But I miss that journalism, where the writer’s voice came through. You could start reading an article halfway through, without looking at the byline, and know who wrote it. Every writer was recognizable. I loved them all.For my very first university internship, in 1998, I ran straight to Novaya — without arranging anything beforehand. I wanted to be like all those journalists, starting with [investigations editor Yuri] Shchekochikhin. I’m not sure Novaya deliberately recruited young people, but there were lots of kids like me.I remember Novaya’s old website — it was terribly dated. There were two buttons in the menu linking to memorial pages: “Politkovskaya” and “Shchekochikhin.” For years afterward, I’d click on them to read their articles, until the old website was replaced. Shchekochikhin’s memorial site had an archive of his articles, people’s memories of him, and his prose.For the first anniversary of his death, we put together a book of memories — a white cover with his signature on it. It was later reissued and expanded. We asked everyone who knew and loved him to write a short chapter. Those chapters were then posted on the memorial site.Unfortunately, I don’t have any of it with me: I couldn’t take anything with me when the war began, and I can’t travel to Russia anymore. I’d like to reread it now — but I have neither the book nor the website. My whole library is still in Russia.I joined Novaya in 2002, working in Yuri Shchekochikhin’s investigations department. Before that, I’d worked at the newspaper Segodnya, which was shut down [in 2001]. Salaries at Novaya were terribly low. You couldn’t survive on them. I really wanted to work there, but once you were no longer a student and had to pay rent, it was impossible. I’d stand at the newsstand at the journalism school, looking at the national newspapers — and I didn’t want to work for any of them. There was nowhere to go except Novaya. I had to resign myself to living in poverty but doing what I loved.I think Shchekochikhin initially screened out most of my story ideas [for my safety]. Of course, that made me absolutely furious. But given how young I was then [Glikman was under 30 at the time], it’s understandable. My favorite kind of work was investigative reporting in the field: from Kuzbass, for example, about miners who’d died, or from Kamchatka, about a man wrongly sentenced to life in prison.From 2004 to 2006, the last two years of Politkovskaya’s life, I was deputy to editorial director Sergei Sokolov. He handed some of his work over to me. That meant Politkovskaya’s articles, Chechnya — all the hardest stuff.Novaya had like-minded colleagues at other outlets who reported on realities that made ordinary people uncomfortable. But some outlets were shut down, like Segodnya, and many others willingly turned to sensationalism to rake in cash. Novaya had to pick up the slack for everyone. There were so many stories that nobody but us would write that we could barely cram them into our poor little newspaper.Everyone disliked us for that — except our loyal readers, who refused to give up access to information. Mainstream readers saw us as a fringe newspaper obsessed with misery. They preferred the sensationalist press, where they could find entertainment and gossip and hide from unpleasant information.Of course, there are people now who read using a VPN. There aren’t that many of them, but it’s still worth it: This group will play an important role when change comes. But we’ve lost the mass audience. And that audience has lost more than objective information — it’s lost an understanding of the world.To me, the scariest thing about propaganda isn’t the lies; it’s what gets left out. They don’t actually lie that much. Mostly, they leave things out. And we may even underestimate the effect. When refugees from the Belgorod region fled the shelling for neighboring regions, people there mistook them for Ukrainian refugees — they simply didn’t know the Belgorod region was being shelled.Novaya was a very influential newspaper. Ministers were removed after our stories came out — remember what happened to [Yevgeny] Adamov. All the top officials read our investigations.If you look through the print editions, you can barely find an issue without a piece by Politkovskaya. Because if someone had been abducted in Chechnya, the story had to be published as quickly as possible: If the person hadn’t been killed yet, there was a pretty good chance that publishing it in Novaya Gazeta could save them.Here’s another example. It was 2003, the year Shchekochikhin was murdered. One of the investigations he did let me pursue was about the fishing mafia in the Far East (in fact, it wasn’t a mafia at all — it was the state). We planned a major series of investigations and published only a brief preview, not even the first installment. And after that tiny introduction, I was immediately invited to see the fisheries minister at the State Fisheries Committee, as it was called then. If we had no influence, why would the minister bother inviting a journalist in for a conversation?On the other hand, many journalists felt disappointed, frustrated, and depressed. You write story after story about outrageous injustices, and nothing changes. Years go by, and suddenly you catch yourself describing the same situation you wrote about two years ago: a different region, a different official’s name, the same schemes. Sometimes even the region is the same — there was one governor, and now there’s another. A lot of people hit a wall with their work; some quit.Journalism is an alarm that starts flashing and screeching when there’s smoke. Without it, one disaster follows another, until there’s no way out.It’s very natural not to want to worry about other people’s problems. Why spoil a lovely moment by reading that a missile hit an apartment building in Ukraine today? Looking away isn’t a Russian trait — it’s a perfectly healthy reaction people have all over the world.Real journalism gets in the way of that comfortable life. A thorn in your side. An irritant. But without it, we won’t have the very comfort we love so much.Now I find myself wondering: Could we really do all that? When everything has been wiped out, censorship is total, and journalism and free speech have been destroyed, you keep thinking: Wow, back then we could actually write things, go places, talk to people.Federal troops are killing people in one of the country’s regions [Chechnya]. Abducting civilians, carrying out “mop-up operations.” And Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya goes to those villages to talk to the residents, and we publish it: who was abducted, who was killed, who was tortured, how they were tortured, where the body was found, and what condition it was in. In 2026, it’s hard to imagine that was ever possible.Yes, journalists in Russia are threatened, beaten — even killed. But until 2022, we were publishing stories from inside the country about war crimes committed by our own country’s army.Around the world, journalism is increasingly done at a desk rather than out in the field. But I hope reporting in the field survives. It’s the heart of real journalism — nothing can replace it. But the skills are disappearing, and there’s no one to learn from.Because of the war and emigration, I suddenly found myself one of the few people in the [Novaya Gazeta Europe] newsroom who’d known Politkovskaya personally. All your life in Moscow, you were one of the younger ones, surrounded by so many people whose memories went back further — and suddenly people like me were the oldest.I remember Shchekochikhin; I remember Politkovskaya. When she was killed, I was on the team putting that issue together. I was in the thick of so many events — I just never thought that was valuable. And then you suddenly realize you’re carrying all these memories, and you need to tell people how it happened.Elena KostyuchenkoCorrespondent at Novaya Gazeta from 2005 to 2022I remember exactly how I first found out about Novaya Gazeta.I was 14, waiting to see the dentist, and I was really scared. It was going to be a long wait. There were some fashion magazines lying around, but I couldn’t look at them — I actually felt sick. I went outside. There was a newsstand nearby, and I decided to buy something. I noticed a newspaper I’d never seen before, because, as I later learned, Novaya Gazeta sold out very quickly.I bought it, sat down on a bench in a little park, and opened it to an article. It was Anna Politkovskaya’s piece about a “mop-up operation” in the village of Mesker-Yurt, where Russian soldiers had killed 36 people, if I’m remembering correctly. And one of the local residents had been crucified. I was deeply shaken — I don’t even really remember the dentist’s appointment, because in my head I was still back there.Afterward, I went to the library and asked for back issues of Novaya Gazeta. I sat there and read them all, one after another. And the more I read, the worse I felt, because I realized I knew absolutely nothing about my country, even though I’d thought I was a pretty well-informed girl, that I’d read a lot and seen a lot. And here were people writing things that didn’t fit my picture of the world at all — a picture that included, for example, “our boys,” “our valiant troops” in Chechnya protecting local people from terrorists.After Politkovskaya’s articles, I didn’t believe that anymore. At first I was angry at Novaya Gazeta and at Politkovskaya personally. The way she writes, you can’t ignore it anymore, can’t push it out of your head — it stays with you.Then I realized that this was what journalism was actually about. It has to bring people back to reality, even when they really don’t want to come back. That was when I decided I wanted to work at Novaya Gazeta and started thinking about how to get there.I lived in Yaroslavl, and my family was dirt-poor. I needed to move to Moscow. The best idea I could come up with was to get into a university with a dorm. The only university I knew in Moscow was Moscow State University, so I applied there, and they accepted me. I’m still very grateful to Moscow State — it’s a wonderful place to grow up.And here’s how I got into Novaya Gazeta. Russian media outlets usually hired people who’d made a name for themselves, who had experience and qualifications. Novaya Gazeta took us in when we were practically babies and helped us grow into journalists. My plan was to stand outside the newsroom door — like, “Take me on for anything, I’ll mop floors, make coffee, whatever you want.”But I got lucky. I was writing poetry then, and I was shortlisted for a poetry competition whose judges included Oleg Khlebnikov, who worked on the paper’s culture desk. Oleg noticed me, this girl staring at him, found out from his colleagues that I was studying journalism, and came over: “Your writing’s quite good! You probably have an internship coming up. Would you like to do it at Novaya Gazeta?”The first person I saw when I came to the newsroom was Politkovskaya. I didn’t recognize her, because Novaya Gazeta was in black and white then. So Oleg and I are walking along, and this incredibly beautiful woman comes flying down the hallway toward us. I ask Oleg, “Who’s that?” And he says, “Oh, that’s Politkovskaya.”Oleg worked out pretty quickly that I wasn’t especially interested in writing about culture and sent me to the reporting team. That decision shaped my whole life. Nugzar Mikeladze — one of Novaya’s founders — taught an incredible number of reporters everything we know. Not just about journalism, but about being human.When I joined Novaya Gazeta, I didn’t even know how to turn on a computer! And Nugzar sent me straight out into the field — to Khodorkovsky’s trial. Naturally, I had no idea who Khodorkovsky was or where the trial would be.To me, one of the most important stories Novaya Gazeta covered was the shelling of parliament in 1993. That was a turning point: I think that was when Russia chose an undemocratic path. Putin won the election in part because people didn’t believe in democracy. Unlike many other supposedly “democratic” publications, Novaya Gazeta — which had only just been founded — didn’t support the shelling.I also think everything Politkovskaya did was extremely important. Take her reporting on the Nord-Ost hostage crisis. That piece is special to me because it never lost sight of the human beings involved. Despite what was happening, Politkovskaya saw the terrorists as people.That’s probably the most important thing she taught me and a whole generation of journalists — there’s no virtue in dehumanizing people. Even with an assault rifle pointed at them, journalists have a duty to see the person behind the gun. Such a simple rule. And such a difficult one.Another hugely important story Novaya Gazeta covered, and a turning point for Russia, was Beslan. Lena Milashina flew there in place of Politkovskaya, who had been poisoned on the plane. Milashina was the first journalist to report that there weren’t 354 hostages, as the authorities were saying, but more than a thousand.Novaya Gazeta investigated Beslan like no other newsroom. It found grenade launchers on the roof of a building near the school. It carried out a huge investigation whose findings were confirmed by the European Court of Human Rights. I’m talking about the fact that the assault wasn’t intended to save the hostages. I think that was when Putin stopped playing at democracy. Because why bother? You can literally blast a school full of hostages, children, with flamethrowers, tanks, and small arms on live television, and nothing will happen to you.Novaya Gazeta published many other important stories — about the extermination of gay men in Chechnya, about events in the Donbas.Why is it important to preserve this whole archive? On the wall of the journalism school in New York where I studied [after Moscow State], it said that journalism is the “rough draft of history.” Journalism is a way to understand what happened, what people thought, what the journalists themselves thought, what perspective they brought to it all.The shorter the pieces and the smaller the events that prompted them, the more important it is to preserve them. Major events and investigations that make a lot of waves will be archived. But the small details of everyday life probably won’t be.Novaya Gazeta’s archive is a chronicle of our fuckups as well as Putin’s. At Novaya Gazeta, we also wrote about how lots of small, individual choices lead to catastrophic consequences. I wouldn’t want my pieces “Internat” (“The Institution”), “Trassa” (“The Highway”), or any part of “Nam zdes zhit” (“We Have to Live Here”), about Kushchevka, to disappear.Novaya Gazeta was founded by a group of journalists — and that same group owned it. We had no owner other than the staff. That meant we could elect the editor in chief, the editorial committee, and the editorial board. You listened to your bosses because you’d voted for them. And if you’d made the wrong choice, you could change it two years later. That made for much healthier relationships among the staff and a healthier approach to work in general. There was no authority you obeyed just because it was authority.It was my home, my family, and the most important thing in my life.Nadya YurovaPodcast producer at Novaya Gazeta from 2020 to 2022. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, she moved to Latvia and continued working at Novaya Gazeta Europe as a YouTube and podcast hostI never particularly dreamed of becoming a journalist. After high school, I applied to drama school, but I hadn’t really dreamed of an acting career either. I spent two years at the Shchepkin drama school in Moscow and left — it was awful, and I decided I’d had enough.The only option left that wouldn’t mean retaking entrance exams was journalism. I enrolled at the Higher School of Economics.In my second or third year, I hosted a student talk show [“V tochku!” (“Right on Target!”)]. It was cool, a pretty big production. But in 2018, [Putin’s press secretary Dmitry] Peskov came on the show, and there was a scandal. They started censoring us and telling us who to invite and who not to invite. I really, really didn’t like that, and I started getting disillusioned.I needed to earn money, so I started working at a coffee shop while I studied. Around the same time, I met Kirill Martynov — he taught us a course called “Media in the Post-Truth Era.”Martynov noticed me because I worked really hard and always spoke up in his classes. At that point, I had pretty much no idea what my career was going to look like.When COVID started, before the strictest restrictions came in, I was working at a small cafe that was part of a chain. Everyone wanted to support small businesses then, and Martynov came to my coffee shop. I remember taking off my apron, stepping outside for a smoke, and he goes, “Nadezhda, would you like to work at Novaya Gazeta?”I had that feeling again that none of this was real, but I didn’t let it show and said with a straight face, “Well, maybe. Doing what?” He said, “What are you interested in?” I said I loved podcasts. He said, “We’re looking for someone for podcasts, actually. Come meet everyone.”I’d been ready to give up and stay a barista for the rest of my life. Novaya Gazeta came out of nowhere. I’d grown up reading Politkovskaya; this was everything I could have dreamed of, but I had this feeling that it wasn’t real — like, “Is this possible?”I suggested starting with the most straightforward thing — a news podcast. A Novaya Gazeta writer would write a piece, we’d invite them into the studio, and we’d talk about the article. I did the interviews.During COVID, we recorded from home. I didn’t have a microphone, so I spoke into my iPhone’s voice recorder under a blanket. Interviewing someone for 30 minutes under a blanket is a bit tricky, but it was worth it.It felt like fate handed me those first podcast episodes. The very first was with Elena Milashina, the second with Lena Kostyuchenko. It was freaking amazing: Here I was, a young employee who didn’t understand a thing, suddenly getting to know people across the whole newspaper.A lot of young people joined the paper around the same time I did. We started doing YouTube, podcasts, TikTok — it was madness, and the best time of my career. This was the great Novaya Gazeta, with all these towering figures looking so serious. And we were just a bunch of goofballs and screwups. We sat on the floor during editorial meetings and rode skateboards down the newsroom hallways. They let us do all of it.[Dmitry] Muratov told me that, in a way, we’d breathed new life into the newspaper.Then February 24 came. During the first weeks of the war, we were in the newsroom around the clock, putting on daily livestreams with a team of four. We were shouting as loud as we could.At the end of March 2022, Novaya Gazeta suspended publication. That was a huge blow. It felt like that was it — I no longer had the work that had kept me afloat.Before I joined the paper, of course, I knew nobody could have written about Chechnya the way Novaya did. Nobody else had that enormous legacy handed down by Politkovskaya and Milashina. The newspaper had always been built around its writers’ individual voices. But only gradually did I come to understand just how great a newspaper I worked for.Lena Kostyuchenko looks like a beautiful, delicate little flower, but then she goes and spends two weeks living in a residential institution for people with psychiatric and neurological disabilities. Right after Lena returned from the institution, she came onto my podcast [to talk about her piece “The Institution”]. It was as if you could still smell the horror on her — it chilled you to the bone. She was one of the first to say publicly that these institutions are a Gulag — and, in a way, to articulate that idea for the public. I remember not being able to believe I was part of all this.There’s one project I’m very proud of. I’d dreamed of making a narrative podcast, and Kostyuchenko went to Taimyr to investigate the fuel spill in Norilsk. Around the same time, she also went on assignment to visit the Nganasans, an indigenous people of northern Russia.When the oil spill happened, it polluted the river where they fished, and the fish disappeared. Lena went to talk to them, partly just to understand how they lived. I gave her a recorder to take along and asked her to record everything that happened to her. Lena brought me dozens of hours of material. That [the podcast “Poka ne vypal sneg” (“Before the Snow Falls”)] was the most interesting work I’ve ever done in my life.That was also when I realized just how expendable people are to the authorities. This [what’s happening to the Nganasans] mirrors what’s happening across the country, including in the war.I think that as long as I keep telling people what’s happening in Russia, as long as I keep the idea [of Novaya Gazeta] alive, it won’t be so easy to erase us and shut us up. In the newsroom, people are always talking about [Novaya Gazeta’s] legacy, remembering the journalists who were murdered.From beginning to end, Novaya Gazeta was a thorn in the authorities’ side. In a country where nothing is allowed, there was one newspaper that caused them trouble — so much trouble that people were killed over it.Novaya Gazeta is a memory, a record, and a chronicle of the Russian authorities’ fuckups.On November 5, RIMA and Kronika will open the Novaya Gazeta archive. All 3,373 issues of the Moscow edition from 1993 to 2022, special editions, and much more will be freely available. Some of this material was previously inaccessible. It includes, for example, articles the newspaper was forced to remove on orders from the Prosecutor General’s Office and the media regulator Roskomnadzor. Among them are Elena Kostyuchenko’s reporting from occupied Kherson and the full versions of four issues from February to March 2022 whose contents are hidden on the newspaper’s website. For the first time, Novaya’s entire print archive will be available in one place. Researchers will also be able to request datasets containing the archive’s metadata from RIMA.At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.If you find any errors in this translation, please contact us at [email protected].To read Meduza’s exclusive content in English, please subscribe to our newsletter.Interviews conducted by Ksenia Mironova and the RIMA team