Tamara Velikodneva is an archivist at RIMA, the archive of Russian independent media built by Kronika.
On 30 October Novaya Gazeta announced its closure, ending its 33-year history of outstanding independent journalism. According to the editors, the Russian authorities and security services forced the newsroom to stop working under the threat of an “extremist organisation” designation, which could have led to the arrest of its journalists. Its record, from the first issue in April 1993 to the last, is now preserved in RIMA and open to anyone.
Novaya Gazeta was founded in 1993 and was owned by its journalists. Its reporters covered the defining events of Russia’s recent history: wars and terrorist attacks, social life and everyday injustice, corruption at the top of the Russian state and the first weeks of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In 2021 its editor-in-chief, Dmitry Muratov, shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Maria Ressa “for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace”. Over three decades the newsroom faced repeated threats, and six of its journalists and contributors were killed. Its website was blocked, its registration as a media outlet was annulled, its offices were searched, and it was labelled a “foreign agent”. Despite all this, Novaya Gazeta kept working in Russia. Until last week.
Article view and page scan in the RIMA interface.
The recent news that Novaya Gazeta is being evicted from the office where its editorial team worked for 30 years, and which houses a memorial to journalists murdered for their work, including Anna Politkovskaya, underscores how the newspaper’s physical legacy has now effectively disappeared, while its digital legacy remains at risk of being lost as well.
What the archive holds
This week we released the Novaya Gazeta archive on RIMA, about half a million items across print, web and video.
Collection Page on RIMA website.
Novaya Gazeta started as a printed newspaper, so the core of our collection is its printed issues. We preserved all 3,333 issues of the Moscow edition, from 1 April 1993 to a one-off issue on 23 December 2022; 1,106 issues of the St Petersburg edition, from 2013 to 2022; and the 62 issues produced in 2023 and 2024, most of them weekly PDFs for readers to print at home. In total, 4,501 issues have been divided into individual articles, each linked to its page scan.
Alongside them sit the main website; English-language and regional websites; memorial websites for Yuri Shchekochikhin, Igor Domnikov and Anna Politkovskaya; sixteen special-project websites; and two YouTube channels.
How the archive came together
Work on the archive began after Novaya Gazeta’s website was blocked at the end of 2022. We started by preserving web articles on RIMA. In 2024 the newsroom gave us digitised copies of its print editions, but only in early 2026 could we begin recognising the text, reassembling the articles and preparing them for search.
In parallel, we gathered the websites connected to Novaya Gazeta that were not yet in our collection: the memorial sites, an English-language version abandoned several years ago, dozens of subdomains, and the websites of regional offices that had already closed.
As the work went on, the archive grew, and so did the importance of our work. Last week it grew in a way we had never wished for. We would much rather Novaya Gazeta were still publishing. But here we are.
How we preserved it
Born-digital and digitised materials take different routes into RIMA.
For websites, we crawl, scrape and parse every article we can find, download each page and extract its headline, author, date and text. If a website has already disappeared, we rebuild it from web-archive captures and place it alongside the live ones.
For print, we turn the scanned printed newspapers and magazines into structured, searchable digital archives by cutting pages, reading the text with OCR, and reassembling individual articles with their metadata. The result is a collection of materials on rima.media. Every article and every video is a separate, searchable item. The archive is open for everyone, the collection is searchable, and researchers can request a dataset with articles they need.
Why it matters
Novaya Gazeta was among the largest and most important independent media Russia has had, but its fate is far from unique. In recent years dozens of independent newsrooms across the country have been closed, blocked or forced abroad. Each leaves behind a legacy that captured Russia’s history as it unfolded, and that can quietly disappear once no one has the resources to maintain it.
That is why these stories need to be told, and why this journalism must be preserved and kept open to readers and researchers. Together, it forms a record of contemporary Russia.
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