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Kommersant
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kommersant (Cyrillic: Коммерса́нтъ) (which literally translates as "The Businessman") is a commerce-oriented newspaper published in Russia. As of 2005, the circulation was 131,000.
The newspaper was initially published in 1909, and it was closed down following the Bolshevik seizure of power and the introduction of censorship in 1919.
In 1990, with the onset of press freedom in Russia, Kommersant was re-established under the ownership of businessman and publicist Vladimir Yakovlev.
To make the point that the publication had outlasted the Soviet regime, "Kommersant" is spelled in Russian with a terminal hard sign (ъ) -- a diacritical mark that was abolished by the post-revolution Russian spelling reform. This is played up in the Kommersant logo, which features a script hard sign at the end of somewhat more formal font.
In 1997, the Kommersant publishing house, including a daily newspaper (Kommersant-Daily) and two weekly magazines (the political Vlast (literally Power) and the financial Dengi (Money)), was bought by media-mogul Boris Berezovsky.
The director-general of Kommersant had been Andrei Vassiliev, the editor-in-chief - Alexander Stukalin, until Berezovsky announced their replacement on 14 July 2005, in a move widely seen as preparation for the 2008 Russian presidential elections.
In January 2005 it published blank pages as a protest at a court ruling ordering it to publish a denial of a story about a crisis at Alfa Bank. The sole article in the paper was this one, publish upside down, on the front page. The headline of the article was "Full Plaintiff" which has little meaning, but rhymes with a Russian swear word, meaning "complete disaster".
In August 2006, Badri Patarkatsishvili, close ally of Boris Berezovsky, sold his 100% share of the Kommersant editorial house to Alisher Usmanov[1], the head of a Gazprom subsidiary who is thought to have close ties with the Kremlin. Usmanov was also rumored to have offered to buy Gazeta.ru.
Today, still with a critical stance on the government, Kommersant remains somewhat of a rarity in Vladimir Putin's Russia. In March 2007 Rosokhrankultura warned the newspaper that it shouldn't mention National Bolshevik Party in its articles, as the party had been denied official registration. [2]