Novaya Gazeta whose editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov

Novaya Gazeta, whose editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov received the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, is one of the few remaining independent media outlets in Russia whose work has cost the lives of several journalists. Muratov, who was part of the group of journalists who founded Novaya Gazeta in 1993 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, said after announcing the prestigious prize that it actually belongs to all daily newspaper journalists. Since the early 2000s, six Novaya Gazeta journalists and staff members have been killed while working. Their black-and-white portraits now hang together in the newspapers’ newsrooms. “This is Novaya Gazeta,” Muratov, 59, told the Russian news agency TASS, explaining that the award is given to those who died defending the right to free speech. In an interview with AFP in March, Muratov said the paper’s journalists knew that their work could put their lives in danger, but unlike other Kremlin critics, they were not going to flee the country. Muratov and the other founders of Novaya Gazeta were inspired by the freedoms restored after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Nobel Prize was awarded one day after the 15th anniversary of the murder of Novaya Gazeta’s most famous journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot dead on Oct. 7, 2006. Together they founded Novaya Gazeta, of which Muratov had been editor-in-chief several times since 1995. Especially in that year, Novaya Gazeta was a bastion of openness in the gray media landscape. Novaya Gazeta and its journalists had long been targets of intimidation and violence. Despite its high price, the paper refused to shy away from complex investigations and was one of the publications that sifted through leaked documents in the Panama Papers scandal, which exposed the offshore wealth of Russian officials. One of its main early supporters was former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who donated part of “his” 1990 Nobel Peace Prize to buy the first computers for the new publications, one of which is still in the office. In 2018, a mourning wreath and a severed sheep’s head were delivered to the newspaper’s office, along with a bill to one of its reporters who had reported on the shadowy mercenary group Wagner operating in the Middle East and Africa. This newspaper is dangerous to people’s lives, Muratov said. In another high-profile incident in 2009, human rights activist Natalia Estemirova, a friend of Politkovskaya’s, was kidnapped in Chechnya and then found dead in neighboring Ingushetia. Critics of the Kremlin claim that the authorities are waging a campaign against independent and critical voices, many of whom are branded as foreign agents while others are forced to close their doors.