Novaya Gazeta

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Novaya Gazeta (Russian: Новая Газета) is a Russian newspaper. A semi-weekly covering political and social issues, it is published in Moscow, Russian regions and some foreign countries. The general circulation is now near 550,000 copies. In addition, it has a colour monthly supplement with a 75,000-copy circulation.

Novaya Gazeta is known for being critical of Russian government policy. Anna Politkovskaya wrote for Novaya Gazeta until her assassination on October 7, 2006. The journalist told in an essay that the editors received

"visitors every day in our editorial office who have nowhere else to bring their troubles, because the Kremlin finds their stories off-message, so that the only place they can be aired is in our newspaper, Novaya Gazeta."

(Politkovskaya 2006)

Yury Shchekochikhin, a renowned journalist and deputy in the State Duma, had also worked for the newspaper as an investigative journalist and had been a deputy Editor-in-Chief of it until he died after a mysterious and severe allergy on July 3, 2003. Some of his most important contributions published in Novaya Gazeta were related to the investigation of the now infamous Three Whales Corruption Scandal.

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and State Duma Deputy Alexander Lebedev own 49% of the newspaper and the paper's staff controls the remaining 51% of shares. Gorbachev has long been a friend of the paper. He used the money from the Nobel Prize which he won in 1990 to help set up Novaya Gazeta in 1993 and purchase its first computers.(MosNews 2006)

On November 26, 2001, Novaya Gazeta published an article by Oleg Lurie claiming that the management of the International Industrial Bank headed by Sergey Pugachyov had been involved in money laundering in the Bank of New York (full text of the article in Russian: [1]). Pugachyov's bank brought a libel suit against the newspaper citing financial losses, as a number of its customers had allegedly changed the terms of their accounts in a loss-making way because of the publication. On February 28, 2002, the bank won the case in Moscow's Basmanny municipal court and was awarded 15 million rubles (about $500,000) in lost revenue, an unprecedented sum for Russian newspapers that might undermine the very existence of Novaya Gazeta, especially as on February 22 Novaya Gazeta had been ordered by the same Basmanny court to pay about $1 million for a corruption allegation against the Krasnodar Krai's top judge. In April the decision on the International Industrial Bank case was reconfirmed by a court. However, in an article of May 27, 2002 (full text in Rusian: [2]), Yulia Latynina, a journalist of Novaya Gazeta, revealed that the bank's three customers named in the lawsuit were its subsidiaries or otherwise controlled by its board of directors, and claimed that Novaya Gazeta had requested to open a criminal fraud investigation into the activities of the bank. As a result, in June 2002 the International Industrial Bank renounced its claim to the compensation. [3][4]

[edit] References

Politkovskaya, Anna (15 October, 2006), "I am a pariah", The Washington Post: B01 [link accessed 16 October 2006]
MosNews (7 June, 2006), "Gorbachev Buys Into Kremlin’s Most Vocal Critic", MosNews [link accessed 16 October 2006]