Russkiy Kurier

» see ruscur.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Igor Golembiovsky is one of the significant names in post-Soviet Russian journalism, the editor who ran Izvestia through the collapse and then left to found Novye Izvestia when the ownership turned. In 2003 the same thing happened again: the board chairman, Oleg Mitvol, removed him after Novye Izvestia published material on the cult of personality forming around Vladimir Putin. The newsroom went with him. The pilot issue of Russkiy Kurier came out on 22 April 2003, and regular publication started in May.

It was a proper newspaper rather than a protest sheet. Twenty-four pages, daily except Sundays at first and later weekly on Mondays, with correspondents posted across Russia and into the CIS, including Minsk. It carried investigations alongside the culture pages, and it printed the television listings for ten channels, which is what a paper does when it expects to be bought at a kiosk by people who are not buying it for the politics. Vladimir Kara-Murza senior and Otto Latsis were among the regular bylines.

The publisher was Izdatelsky Dom Kh.G.S., whose general director was Igor Yakovenko, at the time the secretary of the Russian Union of Journalists, with Yakov Soskin of the Media-Pressa holding as principal owner. That is a serious set of backers, and it lasted under two years.

~ the record ~

~ the first ending ~

On 31 March 2005 the whole staff was fired, Golembiovsky included, and publication stopped that April. Yakovenko's explanation was blunt and worth quoting for its shape: the paper had failed as a commercial project and was deeply unprofitable, because advertisers were reluctant to work with it on account of its opposition line. He proposed replacing it with what he described as a newspaper of national interests, built around a national idea.

The mechanism there deserves attention, because it involves no ban and no raid. The commercial case for an opposition daily in Moscow in 2005 simply did not exist, since the buyers of advertising had already worked out which papers were safe, and the owners chose to stop paying for the gap.

~ the second life ~

The title did not stay dead. Russkiy Kurier came back, ran on for years with Sergei Frolov editing at one point, and in 2013 it dropped print entirely and became a website at ruscur.ru. The Wikipedia categories still file it under both 2013 and 2017, which is the usual bookkeeping problem for a paper that dies as an object and keeps going as a URL.

The online version had an audience and steadily lost the energy to serve it. The paper's Twitter account stopped on 30 May 2015 and was never touched again, and the site's own archive thins out over the following two years. The last pages the Internet Archive holds run from 27 November to 2 December 2017. After that, nothing.

~ what is left ~

ruscur.ru does not resolve today. For a while it redirected to something calling itself Russkiy Kurier Business News, which is the standard fate of a registered media title with residual search traffic: the name has value separate from the people who earned it, and it gets sold that way.

Golembiovsky died in 2009, four years after the firing and eight before the website went quiet. The gap between those two dates is the part I find hard to file. A newspaper founded as an act of principle by a named editor kept publishing for over a decade after that editor was removed from it, and then for eight more years after he was buried, and what finally stopped it was arithmetic.

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