For all the openness of the Soviet print media, factual information was the privilege of the powerful. Telephone directories were classified. To get a telephone number for a government office, an embassy, or a co-operative, one had to have connections in the right places. Vladimir realized this was a golden opportunity. He advertised his services in finding people work in private co-operatives and helping with starting a business. ‘The next day we had 235 responses. We sat down that morning, looking at each other in panic, and asked “Well, now, how the hell are we going to help these people get work?” We had no idea.’4 Thus was born a co-operative called Fakt. Getting hold of information about co-operatives was not as difficult as it seemed. As Vladimir soon discovered, it was not just he who needed that information – most cooperatives looking for clients and for staff wanted to have it. All he had to do was to make his own presence known. Fakt operated like the Yellow Pages.
People flocked to his office which had been set up in an accordion store, and paid him 1 rouble for getting information on anything from a co-operative restaurant to plumbing, or ten times that much for offering their own services to co-operatives that were on Fakt’s database. Fakt also sold manuals, along with a set of documents, for starting a business – at 30 roubles apiece – and published a bulletin about co-operatives and black market prices, a prototype of a future newspaper.
The idea to start a newspaper, Vladimir Yakovlev said, was forged in a conversation with Artem Tarasov, the first Soviet legal millionaire whose business was to import computers and repair second-hand Japanese electronics. Tarasov, who headed the co-operative movement, argued that it needed its own print organ and urged Vladimir to create one. Vladimir saw the co-operatives for what they were – not some marginal experiment in private business, but a way of legitimizing one of people’s basic instincts: making money. His talent was to recognize the future Russian businessmen as a social force.
Vladimir’s plans were more ambitious than anything that Tarasov had suggested. He wanted to create the first truly Western-style newspaper like the New York Times which he saw at home. It would come out both in Russian and in English and the information would be supplied by its own news agency which he called Postfaktum.
Vladimir had an unlikely partner – Gleb Pavlovsky, a former dissident from Odessa who was first picked up by the KGB in the mid-1970s for possession and distribution of anti-Soviet literature. In exchange for naming his contacts, he was let go. A few years later he was arrested again – this time for publication of a samizdat magazine. He agreed to co-operate with the investigation and was sent into exile instead of to a labour camp. He had a dubious reputation among Moscow dissidents as someone who was said to have closely collaborated with the KGB and testified against fellow dissidents. Pavlovsky was put in charge of the Postfaktum news agency. Vladimir became the editor of Kommersant.
In 1989, censorship was still formally in place. To circumvent it, Vladimir presented Kommersant as the organ of the Association of the United Co-operatives of the USSR and persuaded Glavlit, the main censorship body, that it was not a newspaper but an advertisement, which was exempt from censorship under a new Perestroika law. ‘Why does your advertisement look like a newspaper?’ a suspicious censor queried. ‘It is an advertisement for a newspaper,’ Vladimir explained. Vladimir’s explanation was not entirely misleading. In many ways, Kommersant was an advertisement. It advertised a new capitalist life as Vladimir envisaged it at the time. Its title sounded provocative. Officially, there were no kommersanty in the Soviet Union and commerce itself was an offence punishable by prison.
Kommersant was the antithesis of Moskovskie novosti and a reaction to it. It rejected its civic pathos, its elevated language, its speaking of the Truth, capitalized and accentuated with exclamation marks, its sense of calling and duty, its political stand. ‘What we did was anti-journalism, from the point of view of my father’s circle. Theirs was journalism of opinion. Ours was journalism of facts,’ Vladimir said.5 Only a few of Kommersant’s reporters were Soviet-trained journalists. Most were intelligent young men and women who had never written a newspaper article in their life.
As a bourgeois paper, it was not supposed to be read on a newsstand, like Moskovskie novosti, by politically minded intelligentsia. It was a newspaper for serious people involved in the serious business of making money and it was supposed to be read in the comfort of one’s home, at breakfast, with a glass of orange juice (non-existent at the time) and a cup of coffee on the table. The irony was that having established itself as a paper of the new times, Kommersant was as concerned with the question of the past as the print media run by Yegor’s generation, which it rejected. Searching for the key historic junctions at which Russia took a ‘wrong’ turn, Yegor had rewound the tape to 1968 and then further back to the times of Lenin’s New Economic Policy. The only difference was that while Yegor was trying to reach back to the origins of the Bolshevik Revolution, his son was rewinding the tape even further back – to the notional (and much idealized) era before the First World War, when Russia had a fast-growing entrepreneurial class. While Yegor had borrowed the title of Zhurnalist from the 1920s, Vladimir borrowed the title of Kommersant from the early 1900s.
The paper started with a manifesto printed in its test issue:
Today’s Soviet businessmen are people without a past. They are people without the weightiest argument in their favour – historical experience. Isn’t this the root cause of many present troubles? A rootless tree is so tempting for a lumberjack… Kommersant was published in Moscow between 1909 and 1917. It was a newspaper for business people, and many of its stories are still fit to print today, after a little editing. So we decided against launching a completely new newspaper… We also decided to stick to the old title and even kept the pre-revolutionary ‘hard’ accent at the end [КоммерсантЪ].6 Since the use of this letter is a matter of principle for the Editorial Board, we will keep it… We do have a past after all.7
The pre-revolutionary Kommersant had hardly been a newspaper of note. Started as a trade sheet, it quickly ran out of money and was bought by a paper manufacturer and publisher of pornographic pamphlets. Having predicted, on the eve of the revolution, that the Bolsheviks would never succeed, Kommersant, along with other newspapers, had been promptly shut down when the Bolsheviks came to power.
But the fact that a newspaper with that title and a pre-revolutionary hard sign Ъ on the end had existed in the past was more important than what kind of paper it really was at the time. Vladimir Yakovlev was not reviving an old newspaper, he was reinventing the past and historical experience – supplying Russian capitalism with the biography it lacked.
The masthead of the newspaper carried an important message: ‘The newspaper was established in 1909. It did not come out from 1917 until 1990 for reasons outside editorial control.’ Kommersant was defining a period – 1917–1990 – and simply extracting it from its own experience. The entire Soviet era was being disposed of as irrelevant to the readers and writers of Kommersant. If Kommersant had not come out in those years, then why should they be of any interest?