Russian journalism, both under the tsars and since, has more often responded to state requirements than it has exemplified the freedom of the press. Moreover, not until a decade or so before the 1917 Revolution did a number of newspapers win mass readerships by lively and extensive daily reporting of domestic and foreign news.
Peter I (r. 1682 - 1725) started the first newspaper in a small format, the St. Petersburg Bulletin, and wrote for it himself to advance his reform program. Later in the eighteenth century journals appeared as outlets for literary and didactic works, but they could not escape the influence of the state. As part of her effort to enlighten Russia, Catherine II (r. 1762 - 1796) launched All Sorts of Things in 1769. This was a weekly publication modeled on English satirical journals. Nicholas Novikov, a dedicated Freemason, published his well-known Drone on the presses of the Academy of Sciences, providing outlet for pointedly critical comments about conditions in Russia, including serfdom, but he went too far, and the Empress closed down his publishing activities.
In the early, reformist years of the reign of Alexander I (1801 - 1825), a number of writers promoted constitutional ideas in periodicals controlled or subsidized by the government. Between 1804 and 1805, an education official named I. I. Martynov edited one such newspaper, Northern Messenger, and promoted Western ideas. He portrayed Great Britain as an advanced and truly free society. Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin, the tsar's unofficial historian, founded Messenger of Europe (1802 - 1820) to introduce Russian readers to European developments.
Among the reign's new monthlies, those issued by the Ministries of War, Public Education, Justice, the Interior, and the Navy continued until the 1917 Revolution. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a newspaper in French. After the Napoleonic wars, Alexander I backed a small newspaper, Messenger of Zion, its main message being that the promoters of Western European Enlightenment were plotting to subvert the Russian church and state.
The reign of Nicholas I (1825 - 1855) saw commercial successes by privately owned but progovernment periodicals. For example, the Library for Readers, founded by Alexander Filippovich Smirdin, reached a peak circulation of seven thousand subscribers in 1837. As the first of the so-called thick journals that dominated journalism for about three decades, each issue ran about three hundred pages and was divided into sections on Russian literature, foreign literature, science, art, and the like. Its size and content made it especially appealing in the countryside, where it provided a month's reading for landlord families. Works by virtually all of Russia's prominent writers appeared in serial form in such journals.
Smirdin also acquired Russia's first popular, privately owned daily newspaper, Northern Bee, which was essentially a loyalist publication that had permission to publish both foreign and domestic political information. The Bee also had the exclusive right to publish news of the Crimean War, but only by excerpting it from the Ministry of War's official newspaper, Russian War Veteran. During the war, the Bee achieved the unprecedented readership of ten thousand subscribers.
Another major development was the growing success in the 1840s of two privately owned journals, Notes of the Fatherland and The Contemporary. Each drew readers largely by publishing the literary reviews of a formidable critic, Vissarion Belinsky, who managed to express his moral outrage at human wrongs, despite the efforts of censors. However, journalism turned from a literary emphasis to a more political one during the reign of the tsar-reformer Alexander II (r. 1855 - 1881), who emancipated some 50 million serfs and effected reforms in education, local government, the judiciary, and the military, and relaxed the practice of preliminary, or pre-publication, censorship. One of his first steps in this regard was, in 1857, to permit journalists to publicize the peasant emancipation question, a topic previously forbidden. The next was allowing journalists to comment on how best to reform the courts and local government.
Journalists seized what was, on the whole, a genuine expansion of free speech about public affairs. They had as their ideal Alexander Herzen, the emigre whose banned words they read in The Bell, a Russian-language paper he produced in London and smuggled into Russia. By keeping informed on developments in Russia through correspondence and visitors, Herzen published authoritative information and liberal arguments, especially on the emancipation of the serfs, and influenced many who served under Alexander II. Meanwhile, Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky, an erudite man who read several languages, became Russia's leading political journalist through the pages of The Contemporary; and he, like Herzen, wove in relevant events from Western Europe to shape public and government opinion on reform issues. Another such journalist, Dmitry Pisarev, wrote many of his major pieces in prison, and published them in the other major radical journal within the Empire, Russian Word; however, he espoused the nihilist position of accepting nothing on faith but, rather, testing all accepted truths and practices by the critical tools of reason and science. In line with the view of a liberal censor at that time, Alexander Vasilevich Nikitenko, higher censorship officials suspended both journals for eight months in 1862 and later permanently closed them.
Through his new censorship statute of 1865, widely hailed as a reform, Alexander II unleashed a major expansion of the commercial daily press, which was concentrated in Moscow and the capital, St. Petersburg. During the last decade of the previous reign, only six new dailies (all in the special-interest category) had been allowed, but officials now approved sixty new dailies in the first decade under Alexander II, and many of these were granted permission to publish not just general news but also a political section. In 1862, private dailies received permission to sell space to advertisers, a right that allowed lower subscription fees. The new income source prompted the publisher of Son of the Fatherland to change it from a weekly to a daily, and it soon acquired twenty thousand subscribers, well over half of them in the provinces.
By Western standards, however, overall circulation levels remained modest, even as more and more newspapers became commercially successful in the 1860s. Andrei Alexandrovich Kraevsky's moderate daily, Voice, saw profits grow as readers increased to ten thousand by the close of the 1860s. Moscow Bulletin, edited by Michael Katkov, who leased it in 1863 and changed it from a weekly to a daily, doubled its circulation to twelve thousand in two years' time, in part because of its ardently nationalistic leaders, which were front-page opinion pieces modeled on French feuilletons and written by Mikhail Nikiforovich Katkov, known as the editorial "thunderer." Just as outspoken and popular were the leaders written in the capital for the daily, St. Petersburg Bulletin, by Alexei Sergeyevich Suvorin, who kept that conservative paper's circulation high. Readers preferring nationalistic and slavophile journalism critical of the government bought Ivan Aksakov's Day (1865 - 1866) and then his Moscow (1867 - 1869), its end coming when the State Council banned his daily and barred him from publishing, citing his unrelenting defiance of censorship law.
Another boon for newspapers under Alexander II was their new right, granted in the early 1860s, to buy foreign news reports received in Russia by the Russian Telegraph Agency (RTA, run by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), after such dispatches had been officially approved. In this period, too, publishers improved printing production by buying advanced equipment from Germany and elsewhere in Europe, including typesetting machines and rotary presses that that permitted press runs in the tens of thousands. Publishers also imported photographic and engraving tools that made possible the pictorial magazines and Sunday supplements.
Following the politically-motivated murder of Alexander II, his son and heir Alexander III (r. 1881-1894) gave governors full right to close publications judged to be inciting a condition of alarm in their provinces, without the approval of the courts. But there were still possibilities for critical journalists even at a time of conservative government policies. Nicholas K. Mikhailovsky, who espoused a radical populist viewpoint, published in Notes of the Fatherland until the government closed it in 1884. Most of the staff moved to Northern Messenger, which began publishing in 1885. After spending a period in exile, Mikhailovsky joined the Messenger staff and wrote later for two other populist journals, Russian Wealth and Russian Thought. He was one of the outstanding examples of the legal populist journalists and led the journalistic critique of the legal Marxists.
During the early years of Nicholas II (r. 1894 - 1917), some Russian journalists promoted anti-government political and social views in the papers printed abroad by such illegal political parties as the Social Democrats, the Socialist Revolutionaries, and the Union of Liberation. The Social Democrats, led by Vladimir Ilich Lenin, began Spark in 1902 in London, its declared purpose being to unseat the tsar and start a social revolution. Those who backed Spark in Russia had to accept Spark's editorial board as their party's leaders. When the various anti-autocracy factions cohered as legal parties in Russia following the Revolution of 1905, each published its own legal newspaper. The Mensheviks launched Ray in 1912 and Lenin's Bolsheviks started Pravda (Truth) in 1912, but the government closed the latter in 1914. (Pravda emerged again after the Revolution of 1917 as the main outlet for the views of the ruling Communist Party). Another type of journalism was that of Prince V. P. Meshchersky, editor of the St. Petersburg daily, The Citizen. Meshchersky accepted money from a secret government "reptile" fund. His publishing activities were completely venal, but both Alexander II and Nicholas II supported him because of his pro-autocracy, nationalistic views.
With mass publishing commonplace in the big cities of Russia by 1900, publishers in those centers continued to increase readerships, some with papers that primarily shocked or entertained. In the first category was Rumor of St. Petersburg; in the second, St. Petersburg Gazette, for which Anton Chekhov wrote short stories pseudonymously. The copeck newspapers of Moscow and St. Petersburg provided broad coverage at little cost for urban readers. Making a selling point of pictures and fiction, by 1870 Adolf Fyodorovich Marks lined up nine thousand paid subscriptions to meet the initial costs of his illustrated magazine, The Cornfield, which was the first of the so-called thin journals, and increased readership to 235,000 by century's turn. The government itself entered into mass production of its inexpensive newspaper for peasants, Village Messenger, and achieved a press run of 150,000.
High reporting standards set by long-time publisher Alexei Sergeyevich Suvorin, on the other hand, won a large readership for the conservative New Times, the daily he had acquired in 1876. Reputedly the one paper read by members of the Imperial family, New Times merited respect for publishing reporters such as Vasily Vasilevich Rozanov, one of the best practitioners of the cryptic news style typical in modern journalism. Imperial funding to friendly publishers like Suvorin, regardless of need, continued to 1917 through subsidies and subscription purchases. (Other recipients of lesser stature were Russian Will, Contemporary Word, Voice of Moscow, and Morning of Russia.) Another paper receiving help from the government was Russian Banner, the organ of the party of the extreme right wing in Russia after 1905, the Union of the Russian People. On the other end of the political spectrum, satirical publications targeting high officials and Tsar Nicholas II flourished in the years 1905 through 1908, though many were short-lived. One count shows 429 different titles of satirical publications during these years.
One outstanding newspaper, Russian Word of Moscow, became Russia's largest daily. Credit goes to the publisher of peasant origins, Ivan D. Sytin, who followed the journalistic road urged on him by Chekhov by founding a conservative daily in 1894 and transforming it into a liberal daily outside party or government affiliations. Sytin was no writer himself, but in 1901 he hired an excellent liberal editor, Vlas Doroshevich, who became one of Russia's most imitated journalists and a prose stylist whom Leo Tolstoy ranked as second only to Chekhov. Doroshevich gained the title king of feuilletonists by dealing with important issues in an engaging, chatty style. As editor of Word, he ordered each reporter to make sense of breaking events by writing as if he were the reader's informative and entertaining friend. At the same time he barred intrusion by the business office into the newsroom, and kept Sytin to his promise not to interfere in any editorial matters whatsoever. Through these journalistic standards, Doroshevich built Russian Word into the only million-copy daily published in Russia prior to the Revolution of 1917.
Pravda, not Russian Word, however, would be the paper that dominated the new order established by Lenin's Bolsheviks. In the early twenty-first century, the front section of the building that housed Word abuts the building of Izvestiia, another Bolshevik paper from 1917 that has, in its post-communist incarnation, become one of Russia's great newspapers. Pravda, the huge Soviet-era daily with a press-run of more than six million, was first and foremost the organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR and it perpetuated Lenin's idea that the press in a socialist society must be a collectivist propagandist, agitator, and organizer. Other newspapers during the Soviet era were bound to follow Pravda's political line, expressed in the form of long articles and the printing of speeches of high officials, and to promote the achievements of Soviet life. Regional and local papers, little distinguishable from Pravda in format, had leeway to cover local news, and specialized papers had scope to introduce somewhat different coverage, as well. In any event, the agitational purpose of Soviet papers meant that Western concepts of independent reporting and confidentiality of sources had no place in journalism in the USSR.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the new Constitution of the Russian Federation, approved by popular referendum on December 12, 1993, recognized freedom of thought and speech, forbade censorship, and guaranteed "the right to freely seek, obtain, transmit, produce, and disseminate information by any legal method." The Constitution prohibited the creation of a state ideology that could limit the functioning of the mass media. Within months, in June of 1994, the Congress of Russian Journalists insisted that journalists resist pressure on the reporting of news from any source.
Russian journalists, working to these high standards, have sometimes paid a price for their commitment to objective reporting. Journalist Anna Politkovskaya, for writing critical dispatches from Chechnya for the small, biweekly newspaper New Gazette, was detained for a period by the FSB, the federal security service, and received numerous threats to her personal security. When Gregory Pasco, the naval officer turned journalist, exposed nuclear waste dumping in the Pacific Ocean by the Russian fleet, a court convicted him of treason. Other Russian journalists who engaged in forthright reporting have been killed under mysterious circumstances.
Major Russian newspapers have not managed to establish their own financial independence, because they are owned by wealthy banks and resource companies closely connected to the federal government. Most newspapers outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg (from 95 to 97% of them, according to the Glasnost Foundation) are owned or controlled by governments at the provincial or regional level. One of their tasks is to assist in the reelection of local officials. Overall, only a handful of newspapers in Russia are independent journalistic voices in the early twenty-first century. On the other hand, controls on journalism in Russia are no longer monolithic, as in the Soviet era, and citizens of the Russian Federation had access to varied sources of news reports in the print and electronic media. The Internet newspaper lenta.ru, for instance, offers coverage comparable to a Western paper.
Bibliography
Ambler, Effie. (1972). Russian Journalism and Politics: The Career of Aleksei S. Suvorin, 1861 - 1881. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
McReynolds, Louise. (1991). The News under Russia's Old Regime: The Development of a Mass Circulation Press. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Norton, Barbara T., and Gheith, Jehanne M., eds. (2001). An Improper Profession: Women, Gender, and Journalism in Late Imperial Russia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ruud, Charles A. (1982). Fighting Words: Imperial Censorship and the Russian Press, 1804 - 1906. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
—CHARLES A. RUUD
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