Novaya Gazeta's 1993 scoop: "You can buy an atomic bomb in Russia"

In late October, Novaya Gazeta announced it was closing after 33 years. It was Russia's oldest independent newspaper, and it documented the country's key moments: the 1993 shelling of the White House (the parliament building in Moscow), the Chechen wars, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Yevgeny Prigozhin's mutiny.

Now Meduza and RIMA, an archive of independent media, have republished one of the paper's first legendary texts in full. It appeared in 1993 under the headline "In Russia you can buy an atomic bomb as private property."

A related interview looks back at the same era. In the 1990s, Novaya Gazeta journalist Kirill Belyaninov tried to buy a nuclear warhead, and almost succeeded. He talks about a time when investigations like that were possible.

The paper was founded in 1993. In March 2022 it suspended its work in Russia after warnings from Roskomnadzor (the state media regulator) over its coverage of the war in Ukraine.