Novaya Gazeta shuts down: when the state decides what counts as "normal"

According to Le Monde, the independent Russian newspaper "Novaya Gazeta" has announced its closure. Its former editor-in-chief, Dmitry Muratov, co-laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize, told AFP that the closure was part of "the gigantic military campaign" waged by the Kremlin. The Le Monde headline picks up a punchy line: "They killed us". The precise circumstances of the announcement, its timing and the measures that preceded it do not appear in the dispatch we have; we will not invent them.

That leaves the question of structure, which is ours. What follows is a reading, not an established fact.

Gramsci distinguished two ways of governing: force and consent. A solid power prefers the second, and brings out the first only when the second crumbles. From this angle, an independent newspaper is less an abstract "counter-power" than a trench: one of those places, alongside the school, the Church or the press, where what passes for common sense is contested. As long as "Novaya Gazeta" existed, it remained possible to say out loud that the official order was not self-evident. One paper does not topple a hegemony, but it reminds us of its reverse side: a version of the world presented as the only imaginable one needs the others to stay silent.

Here we find the old Marxist observation: the dominant ideas are those of the class, or group, that also controls the means of mental production. In this case the mechanism is almost restfully frank. No need for subtle algorithmic tuning: you starve it, you constrain it, you switch it off. Ideology, let us recall, is not necessarily a lie; it is a partial image of the world sold as universal. When it no longer suffices to persuade, it leans on the "security" section.

But let us not drape ourselves in comfortable virtue. The Western press tends to narrate such closures as a clash between pure light and thick night, which is reassuring: the reporter plays the sensible adult, and the reader the dutifully outraged spectator. Vocabulary is itself a battlefield. It would be more useful to ask which intellectuals, which professions, which newsrooms can still exist, and who pays for them to hold on. Editorial independence has always had a material base, and that base is being withdrawn here through state coercion, and elsewhere through capital concentration. The methods differ; the basic lesson about ownership of the means of cultural production remains.

What we do not yet know: what the journalists of the newsroom will do with their work, and in what form. A counter-hegemony is rarely built inside authorised newsrooms; it is also forged in exile, in networks and through patience. That is a reason not to bury too quickly what a closure statement claims to end.