Kommersant (Cyrillic: Коммерсантъ) (which literally translates as "The Businessman") was a commerce-oriented newspaper published in Russia from 1909 until 1917, when it was closed down following the Bolshevik seizure of power and the introduction of censorship. In 1990, with the onset of press freedom in Russia, Kommersant was re-established under the ownership of businessman and publicist Vladimir Yakovlev . To make the point that the publication had outlasted the Soviet regime, "Kommersant" is spelled in Russian with a terminal hard sign (ъ) -- a diacritical mark that was largely wiped out in a Communist attempt to reform the Russian language. This is played up in the Kommersant logo, which features a script hard sign at the end of somewhat more formal font.
In 1997, the Kommersant publishing house, which by that time included a daily newspaper (Kommersant-Daily ) as well as two weekly magazines, the political Vlast and the financial Dengi , was bought by media-mogul Boris Berezovsky. Today, Kommersant survives in Vladimir Putin's Russia as a rare independent voice among the country's muzzled mass-media. The director-general of Kommersant is Andrei Vassiliev , the editor-in-chief is Alexander Stukalin .
In January 2005 it published blank pages as a protest at a court ruling ordering it to publish a denial of a story about a crisis at Alfa Bank. The sole article in the paper was this one, publish upside down, on the front page. The headline of the article was "Full Plaintiff" which has little meaning, but rhymes with a russian swear word.
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