The Moscow Times

• 1. The First Western Daily

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  The Moscow Times published its first edition in Moscow in March 1992, working out of a room at the Radisson Slavyanskaya Hotel. It was the first Western daily newspaper ever published in Russia. Dutch publisher Derk Sauer had come to Moscow in 1989 carrying a small twice-weekly paper called the Moscow Guardian. He recruited Meg Bortin as editor in May 1992 and aimed for what he called a world-class daily. The target audience was the Americans and Europeans who had poured into Moscow after the Soviet Union's collapse. They did not speak Russian. They did have money. Sauer described the moment directly: "It was a completely different time, there was no internet and there was a huge influx of Western expats who didn't speak Russian. At the time, they were the only ones with money in Moscow, so The Moscow Times was an interesting medium for advertisers." The paper reached those readers for free, placed at hotels, cafes, embassies, and airlines. Within two years, it would find itself doing something far removed from the advertising market Sauer had described.

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• 2. Behind the Blank Spaces

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  In the fall of 1993, anti-Yeltsin forces occupied the Russian Parliament and censorship returned. Russian newspapers began appearing with large blank spaces on their front pages, marking where articles had been cut before print. The writers whose work had been suppressed came to The Moscow Times. Their articles ran in English the following day. The BBC and other foreign radio services then picked up those articles. They broadcast them back into Russia in Russian, reaching the audience the censors had tried to cut off. Former editor Meg Bortin described the episode in a New York Times op-ed. The paper, she wrote, had "played an important role by giving space to Russian commentators." A piece killed by authorities in Moscow could circle the world and return as a Russian-language broadcast. The paper had by then earned the description "a primary source of news and opinion" cited in both Russia and the West. From the mid-1990s until 2000, the office producing that journalism was located in the old headquarters of Pravda.

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• 3. A Paper Bought and Sold

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  By 2003 and 2004, The Moscow Times was adding appendices covering jobs and real estate. A cultural guide to Moscow followed in 2005, along with an annual dining guide. In 2006, the paper entered an alliance with the International Herald Tribune. Until 2005, it had been owned by Independent Media, a Moscow-registered publishing house. That company also published Vedomosti and The St. Petersburg Times, along with Russian-language editions of FHM, Men's Health, and Cosmopolitan Russia. The Finnish group Sanoma then acquired Independent Media at an enterprise value of 142 million euros. Ellen Barry got her start as a foreign correspondent at The Moscow Times during these years. She later became the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times. The paper launched themoscowtimes.com in 2009. That same year it published Russia for Beginners, a guide written by foreigners drawing on life in the country. Color printing arrived in 2010. By November 2015, the paper had shifted from daily to weekly, published every Thursday with 24 pages. Sanoma had sold its stake by then to a former director of Kommersant. The last print edition appeared on the 6th of July 2017. The company now running the paper had a carefully structured ownership arrangement. Vladimir Jao, a Russian businessman who ran an airline catering company, held 51%. Svetlana Korshunova, the paper's general director, held 30%. Derk Sauer, the paper's original founder, held 19%. Russian law bars foreigners from controlling more than 20% of any Russia-based media company. Sauer told Kommersant that Jao "does not control the publication, he is a partner."

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• 4. Attacks and Departures

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  In January 2014, malicious advertisements on the paper's website redirected visitors to an exploit kit landing page. December of the same year brought a more serious blow: a distributed denial of service attack forced the paper offline for two days. A second outage, for unknown reasons, struck in February 2015. The editorial leadership was also in flux. In April 2014, longtime editor-in-chief Andrew McChesney stepped down. His replacement was Nabi Abdullaev, a former Moscow Times reporter. Abdullaev had worked through the roles of news editor, managing editor, and deputy editor-in-chief before leaving the paper in 2011. He had since led a foreign-language news service at RIA Novosti. Shortly after his appointment, Abdullaev argued in The Guardian that the west's "biased journalism...robs the west of its moral authority." In October 2014, the paper suspended online comments in response to a surge in abusive pro-Russian trolling. The paper gave two reasons. The comments were an inconvenience for readers. Under Russian law, websites also bear legal responsibility for all user-posted content, including comments. Abdullaev was removed in the autumn of 2015 and replaced by Mikhail Fishman, who had previously led Russky Newsweek. The paper's sister publication in Saint Petersburg, The St. Petersburg Times, had ceased publication in 2014. In March 2020, The Moscow Times launched a Russian-language edition online, extending its reach beyond the English-speaking audience it had always served.

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• 5. Exile and Erasure

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  Following Russia's passage of laws restricting coverage of its invasion of Ukraine in March 2022, The Moscow Times moved its main editors to Amsterdam. On the 15th of April 2022, Russia's communications regulator Roskomnadzor blocked the Russian-language website of The Moscow Times inside Russia. The authorities described the trigger as a false report: that Russian riot police officers were refusing to participate in the invasion. To keep the site reachable inside Russia, the paper began registering a range of domain names. When Roskomnadzor blocked one, a link to the next active domain went out to readers via Telegram. On the 17th of March 2023, Russia's Ministry of Justice designated The Moscow Times a foreign agent. The ministry accused the paper of spreading inaccurate information about government decisions and forming a negative image of Russia. The Moscow Times said the foreign agent legislation had been "disproportionately used." On the 10th of July 2024, Russia's Prosecutor General declared the paper an undesirable organization. Under this designation, anyone in Russia who works for The Moscow Times or agrees to be interviewed by it risks prosecution and imprisonment. On the 17th of December 2025, Roskomnadzor seized the Russian-language domain moscowtimes.ru without going to court. The editorial team moved to the subdomain ru.themoscowtimes.com and continued publishing from Amsterdam.

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