Novaya Gazeta bows out: one fewer newspaper in the Russian trenches

According to Courrier International, the independent Russian paper "Novaya Gazeta" announced on Friday 30 October that it is closing, after more than thirty years of existence and growing repression. Its final issue is due on 9 November. In a letter to its readers, the editorial team states: "They have killed us", denouncing a regime that murders press freedom and accuses the authorities of trampling their own Constitution.

That is the picture as the French press reports it. What we do not know at this stage: the details of the decision, the fate of the journalists, any possible continuation in another form. The dispatch does not say, and we will not invent anything.

The structural question remains, and this is where our reading begins. Gramsci distinguished two ways of governing: force and consent. A solid power prefers the second, which costs less and makes less noise. The press, the school, civil society are its trenches: this is what he called the war of position. An independent newspaper holds a small fortress there, where, patiently, another common sense is forged, different from the one broadcast from above.

Yet when a state shuts the fortress rather than contesting it, it confesses something. It confesses that consent is not enough, that the official common sense needs crutches. One can read this closure as a defeat for the press, and it is one, without qualification. One can also read in it the nervousness of an order that can no longer tolerate the faintest dissonant voice, however marginal. A power sure of its hegemony is not afraid of a daily newspaper.

The old formula of the dominant ideology applies here without effort: the ideas of the ruling class tend to become the dominant ideas, because it controls the means of mental production. When that control is complete, the question "who benefits from what seems obvious to us?" becomes quite simply impossible to ask in public. This is precisely the question independent newsrooms ask, and that is why they are snuffed out.

A caveat, however, so that we do not give ourselves the best part. It would be comfortable to confine the suffocation of pluralism to Moscow, as if elsewhere common sense were only ever shaped by free debate. Here, the process is more discreet: concentration of titles among a handful of fortunes, dependence on advertising, platforms that sort what we see. No seals on the door, but rents that no longer get paid. The situations are not equivalent, and this must be said plainly: nobody here is murdered for an article. The mechanics of control over the means of cultural production, however, deserve our vigilance all the same.

For now, one newsroom is holding firm, and its readers are losing a window. Organic intellectuals of a counter-hegemony cannot be replaced in a single issue. On 9 November there will be one page fewer, and a silence that the authorities will no doubt call normality.