Moscow, December 25, 1991

Before Gorbachev’s glasnost, the newspapers were dull, mendacious, and heavily censored. The main organs of information, the Communist Party newspaper Pravda and the government newspaper Izvestia printed only what the party allowed. Pravda and Izvestia translated as “truth” and “news,” and cynics would quip that “in the Truth there is no news, and in the News there is no truth.” Today they are full of free-wheeling reportage. It is the time of the greatest press freedom in Russian history, before or since. “At the end of 1991 Russia had the most free press probably in the world,” in the opinion of Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin’s deputy prime minister. “It was free from official control. It was free from censorship. It was free from the opinion of the readers. It was free from the owners. Of course it could not survive.”² Nezavisimaya Gazeta (Independent Newspaper) is one of the most popular dailies for its investigative reporting, a great journalistic novelty for Russian readers. Kommersant (Businessman) has reappeared for the first time since the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, its name deliberately spelled in prerevolutionary style to show it has outlasted the communist era. Pravda, once the infallible mouthpiece of the Communist Party—it always had to be put on top of the pile of daily newspapers for sale—is struggling to survive and has seen its circulation drop from almost ten million to less than one million. Its youth equivalent, Komsomolskaya Pravda, previously the organ of the now-defunct Young Communist League or Komsomol, has transformed itself into a lively news sheet. Its cheeky city counterpart, Moskovsky Komsomolets, has become so irreverent that a year ago it relegated the news of Gorbachev’s Nobel Peace Prize to page three, below the fold. The other papers on Yeltsin’s desk include the more solid Izvestia, the former Soviet government newspaper, now the most reliable high-circulation Russian daily; Rossiyskaya Gazeta (Russian Gazette), the organ of the Russian parliament; Sovetskaya Rossiya (Soviet Russia), the herald of the reactionaries; and Trud (Labor), the newspaper of the Soviet trade unions, which has seen its circulation collapse from a world record twenty-one million the year before to under two million.

All the newspapers report that the Russian parliament has the previous day approved a resolution freeing up prices on January 2. Izvestia warns in a headline: “Prices for Bread, Milk, Sugar, Vodka, Medicine, Fuel, Electricity, Rents, Fares Can Rise by Three to Five Times.” Its report says: “To use a well-known expression about democracy, free prices is the worst method of relations between buyers and sellers—if you disregard all the others.”

One of Yeltsin’s decrees listed in today’s Rossiyskaya Gazeta disbands the KGB, which is in the process of being transformed into the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or FSB, the federal security agency of Russia, which will be based like its predecessor in the Lubyanka. Another orders the conversion to Russian ownership of the communist-era USSR State Bank. Izvestia reports that the chief executive, Vitaly Gerashchenko, has submitted his resignation. “It has not yet been accepted, but this is obviously only a matter of a few days, or maybe hours.” This cornerstone of the Soviet Union’s economy will in future prop up a new Russian financial system.

The newspaper also reports that Yeltsin has ordered several iconic state properties in Moscow to be transferred immediately from Soviet to Russian ownership. They are the Bolshoi Theatre, the Mali Theatre, the Tchaikovsky Conservatory, the Lenin Library, the Academy of Arts, Moscow State University, St. Petersburg State University, the State Historical Museum, the Hermitage Museum, the Pushkin Museum of Arts, the Tretyakov Gallery, the Rublyov Museum of Old Russian Culture and Arts, the Anthropological and Ethnographic Museum, the State Museum of Ethnography of the Peoples of the USSR, the State Museum of Eastern Art, and the Polytechnic Museum. Until now all these institutions were as much the property of the other Soviet republics as that of Russia. They can do little about their seizure by Russia, except to lay claim to Soviet property on their own territories. The list is topped by the most prestigious property in the whole of the Soviet Union. This is “the Kremlin and all its contents including the architectural ensemble, the Moscow Kremlin State Historical and Cultural Museum Preserve, and the Kremlin Palace of Congresses.” The symbol and heart of Soviet power for most of the century belongs to Russia now. The Soviet president is there today only on sufferance.