Novaya Gazeta silenced: in Russia, the battle for common sense

According to Le Monde, press freedom in Russia is living "its swan song" with the closure of Novaya Gazeta. For more than thirty years, the paper led by Dmitry Muratov, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, investigated corruption, abuses of power and violations of human rights. The daily speaks of a "coordinated operation" by the FSB, the successor to the KGB's domestic security arm, which allegedly led to the "assassination" of the title, a symbol of independent journalism in Moscow. The file available is thin: we do not know the precise modalities of this operation, its official grounds, or what will become of the newsroom. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First, one can note that the word "assassination", applied to a newspaper, is no mere figure of speech. It says what is lost when a title goes dark: not just articles, but a way of asking questions. In Gramsci's grammar, power does not hold by coercion alone. It holds when its vision of the world becomes common sense, when the existing order seems normal, even inevitable. The media, schools and churches are the trenches of this "war of position". An investigative paper that had been in place for three decades was one of these trenches: a place where one could argue that corruption is not destiny and that state violence deserves a name.

The closure of such a title is therefore nothing like an administrative detail. It shifts the boundary of what it is reasonable to say. When the dissonant voice disappears, it is not debate that stops, it is the scenery that changes: what was still contestable becomes simply out of frame. The dominant ideas, Marxist tradition reminds us, are those of whoever controls the means of intellectual production. Here, control passes through the security services rather than the market, but the effect is comparable: a narrative imposes itself for lack of a rival.

Let us be careful, however, and without triumphalism. We would have little grace in drawing from this affair a lesson of self-satisfaction for our own countries, where the concentration of the press in the hands of a few fortunes produces, without any FSB, its own silences. The contrast is real, and it must not serve to reassure us: brute constraint and economic docility are two ways, unequally brutal, of bounding common sense.

The most concrete Gramscian question remains: what becomes of the intellectuals who kept this paper alive? A cultural counter-power is built through institutions, networks and loyal readers. Institutions can be shut down; habits of reading and doubt, less easily. Le Monde does not say, in the material available to us, what will survive of this newsroom. Yet that is where the next chapter will be decided: whether independent investigation finds other trenches, or whether silence slowly becomes the new obvious.