Rossiyskaya Gazeta

• 1. Introduction

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  Rossiyskaya Gazeta is a Russian newspaper published directly by the Government of Russia. That single fact sets it apart from nearly every other newspaper in the world. Most governments have press offices, official spokespeople, and state broadcasters. Russia has those too. But Rossiyskaya Gazeta is something more specific: a paper whose words carry the force of law. When Moscow needs a new federal statute to take legal effect, it must appear in these pages first. This documentary asks how a newspaper born in the final, turbulent years of the Soviet Union came to hold that constitutional function, what it means for a democracy to have a government-owned publisher of record, and why a single editorial comment in 2007 set off an international incident that echoed all the way to Warsaw.

• 2. Born in Glasnost

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  The Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic founded Rossiyskaya Gazeta in 1990, during the glasnost reforms that Mikhail Gorbachev had set in motion. The timing matters. The paper arrived just as the old Soviet information order was cracking open and just before it collapsed entirely. Within a year of the paper's founding, the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Two other newspapers that had served as official state voices, Izvestia and Sovetskaya Rossiya, were both privatized as the old system fell apart. Rossiyskaya Gazeta was not. The new Russian Federation kept it under government ownership and redesignated it as the official newspaper of the state, inheriting a function its predecessors had vacated. The paper's birth in the reform era gave it a paradoxical identity: a product of openness that would go on to serve the new Russian government as its authoritative public voice.

• 3. The Law on the Page

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  On the 14th of June 1994, the Russian Federation enacted Law N 5-FZ, which formally defined Rossiyskaya Gazeta's constitutional role. Under that law, federal constitutional laws and federal laws cannot take effect until they appear in the paper's pages. Presidential decrees follow the same requirement. A decree dated the 23rd of May 1996, No. 763, extended the publication requirement to acts of the President, the Government, and federal executive authorities. A further presidential decree dated the 13th of August 1998, No. 963, amended those rules. The practical consequence is that Rossiyskaya Gazeta is not merely a newspaper that reports on Russian law. It is the instrument through which Russian law becomes real. A statute that has passed the Duma, received presidential assent, and sits unpublished in this paper is not yet enforceable. This gives the paper a standing that no editorial line, no circulation figure, and no prestige ranking can fully capture.

• 4. The Katyn Comment

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  On the 18th of September 2007, Rossiyskaya Gazeta ran a special sheet devoted to the Polish film Katyn, directed by Andrzej Wajda. The film addressed the 1940 Katyn massacre, in which thousands of Polish officers and intellectuals were killed. A short comment by Alexander Sabov accompanied the coverage, arguing that the widely accepted account of Soviet responsibility rested on a single dubious document copy and was therefore unreliable. The reaction in Poland was immediate. The comment triggered a media frenzy, and the very next day the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza published documents bearing the signature of Lavrenty Beria, the head of Stalin's secret police, directly authorizing the killings. Beria's signature on those documents was not ambiguous. The episode illustrated how a state-owned newspaper occupies an unusual position: its editorial choices are never read simply as the views of an editor. They are read, rightly or wrongly, as reflections of official thinking, which is why a single column-length comment could ignite a bilateral diplomatic episode between Russia and Poland.

• 5. Sanctions and the Present

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  In May 2024, the European Union formally accused Rossiyskaya Gazeta of spreading propaganda and placed it on its sanctions list. The designation marked a significant escalation in how Western institutions categorized the paper, moving it from the category of state-controlled media to the category of sanctioned entity. The EU's action in 2024 reflected a broader pattern of Western governments drawing harder lines around Russian state media following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. For a paper that had spent three decades defining itself through its legal publishing function, the sanctions listing represented a new kind of identity: not the neutral recorder of statutes, but an active participant in information conflict. The paper that Lavrenty Beria's documented orders helped embarrass in 2007 now operates under the weight of international restrictions that its founders, meeting in the glasnost-era Supreme Soviet in 1990, could not have imagined.