Izvestia

• 1. Introduction

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  Izvestia has been reporting the news since February 1917, the same turbulent month that saw the first Russian Revolution sweep the tsar from power. The name itself tells you something: in Russian, izvestiya means tidings, or herald, from the verb izveshchat, meaning to inform or to notify. A newspaper named for the act of bringing news. What that newspaper actually brought its readers, and whose interests it truly served, is a story that runs from the streets of revolutionary Petrograd all the way to a Kremlin-linked gas company in the twenty-first century. How did a broadsheet born in revolution become an instrument of state control? And what happened when its editors tried to report honestly on one of the bloodiest episodes in modern Russian history?

• 2. Voice of the Soviet State

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  Pravda was the Communist Party's paper. Izvestia served a different master: the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Where Pravda spoke for the party apparatus, Izvestia expressed the official views of the Soviet government itself. The two papers divided the propaganda landscape between them, each anchored to a separate branch of the Soviet power structure. Izvestia's primary brief was foreign relations, making it the face the Soviet state chose to present to the wider world.

  The paper's identity shifted so often in its early years that tracking its name reads like a chronicle of the revolution's own lurching course. In February 1917 it launched as the publication of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. By August of that same year it had absorbed the Central Executive Committee into its masthead. By 1918 it had moved its base from Petrograd to Moscow and had briefly become a bulletin rather than a newspaper. It would not settle into a stable identity until 1923, when it became the Bulletin of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR.

  The name changes did not stop there. From 1938 to 1977 the paper carried the title Izvestia of the Soviets of Deputies of the Workers of the USSR. After 1977 it became Izvestia of the Soviets of People's Deputies of the USSR. Only in 1991, when the Soviet Union itself dissolved, did the paper finally shed every institutional qualifier and become simply Izvestia.

• 3. Beyond the Masthead

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  The Izvestia Trophy ice hockey tournament carried the newspaper's name from 1969 to 1996, a detail that shows how far the paper's brand extended into Soviet cultural life. A newspaper sponsoring a sporting competition is not unusual anywhere in the world, but for a state organ to lend its name to international ice hockey was a statement of a different kind. The tournament ran for nearly three decades before the sponsorship ended, outlasting the Soviet Union itself by five years.

  Nedelya was the weekend supplement that arrived with Izvestia, a softer companion to the main broadsheet. Supplements like Nedelya were where Soviet papers sometimes carried material that felt slightly less rigidly official, though still within the bounds of what the state permitted.

• 4. Gazprom and the Beslan Crisis

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  After the Soviet Union dissolved, Izvestia repositioned itself as a national newspaper of Russia rather than a government organ. Ownership passed to a vast holding company controlled by Vladimir Potanin, a business empire that maintained close ties to the government. That proximity to power would define the paper's next chapter.

  On the 3rd of June 2005, state-owned Gazprom purchased a controlling stake in Izvestia and folded it into the Gazprom Media holding. The acquisition followed a moment of acute editorial tension. Raf Shakirov, the editor-in-chief, was forced to resign around this period. The Committee to Protect Journalists alleged that government officials were angered by the paper's coverage of the Beslan school hostage crisis. Other accounts pointed to Potanin himself, who reportedly asked Shakirov to leave because he feared the Kremlin would be angered by the explicit photographs of the massacre that Izvestia had published. Whether the pressure came directly from the government or from an owner who anticipated government displeasure, the result was the same: the editor who had allowed that coverage was gone.

  As of 2005, Izvestia's circulation stood at 240,967. By 2007 that figure, certified by TNS Gallup Media, had risen to 371,000 copies. In 2008, Gazprom Media sold the paper to National Media Group.

• 5. Boris Yefimov's Long Watch

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  Until his death on the 1st of October 2008, the chief artist at Izvestia was Boris Yefimov, a centenarian who had spent decades as Joseph Stalin's political cartoonist. Yefimov's presence in the paper's art department was a living thread connecting the Soviet era's most authoritarian years to the twenty-first century. A man who had drawn cartoons for Stalin was still working at the same publication, in some capacity, well into the age of Gazprom ownership.

  Yefimov's career as a cartoonist under Stalin was not incidental to Izvestia's history. Political cartooning in the Soviet press was an instrument of ideological combat, and working directly for Stalin placed Yefimov at the most high-stakes end of that work. His longevity at the paper measured something about the continuities running beneath the paper's many name changes and ownership shifts.

• 6. Sanctions and the Present Day

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  In May 2024, the European Union placed Izvestia on its sanctions list, accusing the newspaper of spreading propaganda. The designation formalized what critics had long argued: that Izvestia, whatever its post-Soviet claims to independence, had remained an instrument of state messaging. The sanctions list placed it alongside other Russian media outlets the EU held responsible for information operations tied to the Russian government. A paper founded as the organ of a revolutionary soviet, in a year when Russia was remaking itself entirely, now described by Russian authorities as a national newspaper and by European authorities as a vector for disinformation.