Novaya Gazeta Goes Dark: Russia Shuts One More Window on Itself

According to Libération, the French daily, the Russian paper "Novaya Gazeta" announced on Friday 30 October that it is closing, under pressure from the authorities, after more than thirty years in existence. The French daily runs a headline that snaps like a death certificate: "They killed us." What the dispatch does not say, at this stage, is the detail of the legal or administrative mechanisms used, nor what will become of the newsroom and its archives. We will not invent them.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

One can mourn a newspaper and still refuse the complacent eulogy. For the disappearance of an independent title is not an accident of the road: it is the result of a power that can no longer tolerate a single voice escaping its control. The newsroom's words, as Libération reports them, say enough about the brutality of it. This is not a commercial bankruptcy but an administered killing, carried out with the seriousness of a chancellery.

Of course, some will want to stick to the indignation of the moment. Communiqués, solidarity evenings, solemn declarations from Western governments that, meanwhile, know very well how to manage their own money-power over their own media. That theatre costs little. It leaves the heart of the problem untouched: a free press does not survive on the goodwill of princes, the generosity of a patron, or the protection of a parliament. It survives when a society seizes it as something that belongs to it.

This is where the tradition of revolutionary democracy from below becomes a concrete tool. Rosa Luxemburg wrote that socialism without political liberty is not socialism; press freedom is not a bourgeois ornament to be discarded after victory, it is the air workers need to learn, debate, make mistakes and correct themselves. When power shuts down newspapers, it does not merely gag journalists: it deprives ordinary people of the means to think of themselves as a collective force.

What, then, is to be done? The Gazette's notes recall an old debate: is spontaneous anger enough, or is lasting organisation needed? Faced with a state that locks everything down, the question is not theoretical. A outlet that depends on a single licence, a single office, a single bank account is a target. A medium rooted in readers, collectives, multiple distribution networks and self-managed support funds is harder to suffocate. We do not know what is still possible in Russia today, and it would be indecent to lecture from afar people who risk far more than we do.

But the lesson applies here too: an autonomous voice is protected only by those who read it and keep it alive. A newspaper dies of repression; it survives through the stubbornness of those who refuse to read anything but the truth they are forbidden.