The Kremlin closes the last free newspaper in Russia. The Economist. Novaya Gazeta closes after being added to the list of enemies of the state. A large modernist building right in the center of Moscow, a former printing house, with a modest sign: "Novaya Gazeta". Journalists pack books, things, memories. The rustle of cardboard and the noise of packing tape. The boxes are stacked in a system under a sign with the name of the street: "Politkovskaya Square", named after Anna Politkovskaya, a famous journalist of this newspaper who died 20 years ago.
A young worker sits next to others who are taking a break, just to be a little longer with their colleagues. A cart with photographs rolls down the hall. "It's like my whole life flew past me," says the accountant in the newspaper. A desperate photographer captures the last days of Russia's last liberal media outlet. Dmitry Muratov, the publisher of Novaya Gazeta and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was on his way to Paris on October 19 to pay his respects to Politkovskaya when he learned that the newspaper was being evacuated from the building it had occupied for three decades. The publication's financial channels will be blocked due to the fact that it has been declared a "foreign agent". The next day he learned that the editor-in-chief Sergey Sokolov had been arrested and interrogated. On October 26, Muratov and Sokolov gathered the remaining newspaper employees in the basement of a nearby building and told them to leave their phones outside. The day before someone broke into the newspaper's offices, so it wasn't safe to talk there. This was a sign of escalation, Muratov explained. They can be declared an extremist organization and arrested as its "participants". The team agreed it was time to close the paper, which was founded in 1993, the year Russia adopted the post-Soviet constitution. "We didn't die, they killed us - along with the constitution," says Muratov. "One can only laugh at Article 29 of the Constitution: "Censorship is prohibited". The closure of the independent newspaper against the war hardly came as a surprise.