meduza

A crash course in all things Meduza

Source: Meduza

So, you’d like to know a bit more about Meduza. Before we lose your attention, here’s the main takeaway: Meduza is the world’s largest independent Russian-language news outlet. We’ve been around since 2014, and you can find our content on various platforms, primarily the website you’re reading now.

From the start, Meduza’s founders based our newsroom outside Russia, presciently anticipating that the country would soon become inhospitable to even the most basic forms of critical reporting. We quickly earned a reputation as a trustworthy, engaging source of information and built a thriving advertising business. However, the Kremlin destroyed this revenue stream in April 2021 when the Justice Ministry designated Meduza as a “foreign agent” — a punitive label the Russian authorities have since slapped on hundreds of journalists, activists, NGOs, and media outlets. 

In January 2023, the Kremlin escalated its persecution of Meduza by blacklisting us as an “undesirable organization,” thereby outlawing our newsroom entirely. Today, we are unable to sell advertisements or collect donations in our core market, and so we rely exclusively on recurring donations from the rest of the world to continue bringing independent news coverage to millions inside Russia. (We still reach an audience of millions in Russia thanks to a range of technical solutions that circumvent censorship.)

Since you’re reading us now in English, check out this list of Meduza’s English-language cross-platform media projects, including our social media accounts, newsletters, and podcast.