莫斯科市中心一栋大型现代主义建筑，原是一家印刷厂，挂着一块不起眼的铭牌：新报。记者们正在收拾书籍、物品和回忆。纸板的沙沙声和打包胶带的刺耳声。新闻编辑室里堆满了箱子，上方是一块路牌：“波利特科夫斯卡娅广场”，以该报著名记者安娜·波利特科夫斯卡娅命名，她于20年前的本月遇害。
A large modernist building in the heart of Moscow, a former printing press, with a modest nameplate: Novaya Gazeta. Journalists packing up books, belongings, memories. The rustle of cardboard and screech of packing tape. Boxes piled in the newsroom, under a street sign: “Politkovskaya Square”, named after Anna Politkovskaya, a renowned reporter for the newspaper, killed 20 years ago this month.
一名年轻员工在休息的同事旁边坐下，只为和同事们多待一会儿。一辆手推车沿着走廊滚过，上面载着照片冲印件。“感觉我的一生都过去了，”该报的会计说。一位神情沮丧的女摄像师记录着俄罗斯最后一家自由派媒体的最后日子。
A young staff member sits down next to others taking a break, just to spend a little more time with colleagues. A trolley rolls down the corridor, carrying photographic prints. “It’s as if my whole life has gone by,” says the newspaper’s accountant. A crestfallen camerawoman records the final days of the last liberal media outlet in Russia.
《新报》出版人、诺贝尔和平奖得主德米特里·穆拉托夫（见图）于10月19日前往巴黎，准备纪念波利特科夫斯卡娅遇害，途中得知该报将被逐出它已使用了三十年的这栋大楼。由于被贴上“外国代理人”的标签，其资金渠道将被封锁。第二天他又得知，主编谢尔盖·索科洛夫已被拘留并接受讯问。
Dmitry Muratov (pictured), Novaya Gazeta’s publisher and a Nobel peace-prize laureate, was on his way to Paris on October 19th to commemorate Politkovskaya’s murder when he learned the paper was being evicted from the building it had occupied for three decades. Its financial channels would be blocked, thanks to being branded a “foreign agent”. Next day he learned that Sergei Sokolov, the editor-in-chief, had been detained and questioned.
10月26日，穆拉托夫和索科洛夫把报社剩下的员工召集到隔壁大楼的地下室，让他们把手机留在外面。前一晚有人闯入了报社办公室，因此在那里谈话并不安全。穆拉托夫解释说，这是局势升级的一个迹象。他们可能被宣布为极端组织，其“成员”可能被逮捕。员工们一致认为，是时候关闭这家创办于1993年的报纸了——那一年俄罗斯通过了后苏联时代的宪法。
On October 26th Mr Muratov and Mr Sokolov gathered the paper’s remaining staff in the basement of the building next door, telling them to leave their phones outside. The previous night someone had broken into the newspaper’s offices, so it was unsafe to talk there. It was a sign of escalation, Mr Muratov explained. They might be declared an extremist organisation and their “members” arrested. The staff agreed it was time to close down the newspaper launched in 1993, the year Russia adopted its post-Soviet constitution.
“我们没有死，是他们杀了我们——连同宪法一起杀了，”穆拉托夫说。“你只能对宪法第29条一笑置之：‘禁止审查。’”在一个由军国主义独裁统治的国家，一家反战的独立报纸被关闭并不令人意外。令人震惊的是，在弗拉基米尔·普京发动对乌克兰的全面入侵、使俄罗斯与西方隔绝之后，它竟然还能坚持近五年。它的执照已被吊销，网站已被封锁，但它仍在继续报道，想出越来越巧妙的方法接触读者。
“We haven’t died, they’ve killed us—along with the constitution,” says Mr Muratov. “You can only laugh at Article 29 of the constitution: ‘Censorship is prohibited’.”The closure of an independent anti-war newspaper in a country run by a militaristic dictatorship was hardly a surprise. What was astonishing was that it managed to carry on for nearly five years after Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine and isolated Russia from the West. Its licence had been revoked and its website blocked, but it continued reporting, finding ever more ingenious ways to reach readers.
自20世纪90年代末的车臣战争（那场战争巩固了普京对权力的掌控）以来，《新报》的记者们一直在揭露国家对本国人民的暴力。该报已有六名记者遇害，其中包括波利特科夫斯卡娅。“我对普京怀恨在心，”她在2004年写道，“因为他的玩世不恭……因为无休止的战争……因为谎言。”她警告说，俄罗斯正走向法西斯主义。
Novaya Gazeta's journalists had been exposing the state’s violence against its own people since the war in Chechnya in the late 1990s, which secured Mr Putin’s grip on power. Six of its journalists had been killed, including Politkovskaya. “I have it in for Putin,” she wrote in 2004, “because of his cynicism...because of endless war…because of lies.”Russia was heading towards fascism, she warned.
2006年10月7日，普京生日当天，她在进入自己所住公寓楼时遭枪杀。穆拉托夫说，战争迟早会随之而来：“当人被当作尘土对待、机构被摧毁时，暴力不可避免地会溢出我们的边界。”正是《新报》揭露了2014年在顿巴斯作战的是俄罗斯正规军，而非失控的分裂分子。该报率先报道，瓦格纳雇佣军组织由叶夫根尼·普里戈任控制，后者后来领导了一场针对普京的兵变，并在不久后死于一场飞机失事。2018年，普里戈任曾向该报办公室寄去葬礼花圈和被割下的公羊头。
On October 7th 2006, Mr Putin’s birthday, she was gunned down entering her apartment block. War was bound to follow sooner or later, says Mr Muratov: “When people are treated like dust and institutions are destroyed, violence inevitably spills beyond our borders.”It was Novaya Gazeta that revealed that the regular Russian army, not rogue separatists, were fighting in Donbas in 2014. The paper was first to report that the Wagner mercenary group was controlled by Evgeny Prigozhin, who later led a mutiny against Mr Putin and died soon after in a plane crash. In 2018 Prighozhin had funeral wreaths and severed rams’ heads sent to the newspaper’s offices.
普京下令入侵乌克兰的第二天，《新报》以俄语和乌克兰语两种语言出版，头条为“俄罗斯。炸弹。乌克兰。”几天后，在克里姆林宫将“战争”一词定为犯罪并实施事实上的军事审查之后，该报推出了一期头版头条为“无话可说”的报纸，其后是空白纸张。当分销商停止将其送到报摊时，读者来到其新闻编辑室，买光了全部印量。
The day after Mr Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, Novaya Gazeta came out in both Russian and Ukrainian with the headline “Russia. Bombs. Ukraine.”Days later, after the Kremlin criminalised the word “war” and imposed de facto military censorship, the newspaper put out an edition with the headline “No Words” on the front page, followed by blank sheets of paper. When distributors stopped delivering it to newsstands, readers came to its newsroom and bought up the entire run.
入侵发生后，该报三分之二的编辑人员迁往拉脱维亚，创办了《新报欧洲版》。穆拉托夫和大约30名其他人决定留在莫斯科。由于无法报道乌克兰战争，他们转而报道战争在俄罗斯造成的后果：政治犯、经济恶化、心理创伤和审查制度。一些年轻记者加入了进来。“给我一份工作吧，”一位年轻女性在申请时说道，“任何题材，任何事情——我只需要一个能让我大声说出我反对这场战争的地方。”
After the invasion, two-thirds of the newspaper’s editorial staff moved to Latvia and launched Novaya Gazeta Europe. Mr Muratov and about 30 others decided to stay in Moscow. Unable to cover the war in Ukraine, they reported on its consequences in Russia: political prisoners, economic deterioration, psychological trauma and censorship. Some young journalists joined up. “Give me a job,” said one young woman when she applied. “Any subject, anything—I just need a place where I can say out loud that I’m against it.”
这份报纸为那些反对战争但不想离开俄罗斯的人提供了慰藉与尊严。普通莫斯科人去那里，是为了不感到孤单。“那是一个让你觉得自己仿佛身处正常世界的地方，一个罪犯不会被当作英雄歌颂的世界，”一名记者说。但就在普京升级对乌克兰城市的攻击之际，他也在摧毁俄罗斯国内仅存的少数自由公共空间。
The newspaper provided comfort and dignity to those who opposed the war but did not want to leave Russia. Ordinary Muscovites went there in order not to feel alone. “It was a place where you could feel as though you were in a normal world, one where criminals are not hailed as heroes,” one reporter says. But even as Mr Putin escalates his attacks on Ukrainian cities, he is demolishing the few remaining free public spaces inside Russia.
《新报》“曾是我们的城市”，穆拉托夫说。“他们摧毁了这座城市，我们要离开了。但我们不会离开我们的工作。”他将把报纸的许多物品赠予它的读者，或者他称之为“同谋者”的人们。10月29日，即斯大林镇压受害者纪念日当天，记者们开始宣读一长串当前政治犯的名单。一块来自索洛韦茨基岛的石头——那里是最早的古拉格集中营所在地之一——被安放在“安娜的花园”中，那是大楼前的一片绿地，他们为纪念波利特科夫斯卡娅而栽种。
Novaya Gazeta “was our city”, says Mr Muratov. “They’ve destroyed this city, and we’re leaving. But we are not leaving our work.”He will donate many of the newspaper’s artefacts to its readers, or “accomplices”, as he calls them. On October 29th, the day of remembrance of the victims of Stalinist repression, the journalists began reading out a long list of current political prisoners. A stone from Solovetsky island, the site of one of the first gulag camps, has been placed in “Anna’s garden”, a patch of green in front of the building which they have planted in Politkovskaya’s memory.