Moscow — Nezavisimaya Gazeta burst into the bland Russian media scene in 1990, brightening the still drab street kiosks with a very untraditional band of pink and red that ran through the big black letters boldly declaring its name and motto in two words: Independent Newspaper.
That was then, and this is now. After several years of going stale as bright reporters dropped away in search of a serious salary, the brainchild of editor-in-chief Vitaly Tretyakov crumbled late in May for lack of funds, a victim of the freedoms it helped bring to Russia.
Mourned by journalists both Russian and foreign, who equated the tragic arc of Nezavisimaya with the troubled span of perestroika, the disappearance of the daily went unnoticed by Russians up to their necks in bare breasts and UFOs offered as an antidote to the troublesome truth.
In the space of two years, 200,000 people canceled their subscriptions, most finding that the challenges of the new Russia deprived them of the money and the time to read what was happening in their country, while others were lured away by a conquering host of colorful publications covered with flesh.
The demise of Nezavisimaya reflects how the air of a free press has rarefied in the five years since the heady days of its inception as the first nationwide independent newspaper.
Nezavisimaya came to being with the purpose of telling the truth, only to see that commodity increasingly less sought after by the two kinds of people that make newspapers work: writers and readers.
In the Soviet era, Russians used to open their mailboxes to a flood of newspapers each telling them virtually the same thing. With skyrocketing subscription costs, many people have cut down their list to one daily or stopped their subscriptions completely.
"I just cannot afford it anymore," said Margarita Sumbatova, who used to subscribe to the Nezavisimaya and three other dailies but now gets none. "I just pick up the free advertising newspapers, and watch television."
But despite plummeting subscriptions, most major newspapers have managed to stay afloat, and their editorial pages agreed on the reason for the downfall of their colleague Tretyakov: he was too independent.
"He was like an overly finicky girl who finds fault with all her suitors," former Tretyakov deputy Igor Zakharov said of the editor. "After a while, the suitors stopped coming."
As state subsidies shrink and paper and printing prices soar, newspapers have struggled to stay afloat, turning to advertising for quick cash but grabbing for more substantial and longer-lasting support from two very different lifesavers: the state and the increasingly power-hungry private sector.
"Most newspapers have had to find a sponsor because they cannot rely entirely on advertising," said a media analyst at a Western advertising agency in Moscow. Parliament has passed a bill limiting ad space in newspapers and on television, and both media have suffered sharp cuts in advertising sales since a host of dubious investment funds and banks went bust last year.
The Anti-Monopoly Committee, a state agency established in 1993 to slap limitations on the onslaught of advertising in Russia, has crusaded against widespread hidden advertising.
Used to spitting out the state line and praising the leadership for a steady paycheck, journalists deprived of the monthly income are often more than willing to pitch a product if the price is right.
But the committee is fighting a losing battle against the often not-so-hidden advertising in newspapers, coming in the form of regular newspaper articles but full of fawning praise for a single product or service.
As individual journalists succumb to the lure of quick cash, newspapers are turning to a mix of sponsorships, advertising and sensationalism in hopes of attracting readers as they shuffle along the street or through the subway station.
The formerly sober, statistic-filled weekly Argumenty i Fakty (Arguments and Facts) has mixed UFO sightings and psychic phenomena into its once-dry pages and often announces its arrival with a few bared female limbs on the cover.
And the irreverent Moscow daily Moskovsky Komsomolets, once the organ of the Soviet youth group called Komsomol and now the only Russian daily newspaper that comes out on Sunday, mixes a grisly front-page crime blotter with daily ad hominum lambasting of government ministers and Kremlin officials.
But such avid opposition to the state can come at a price - a lesson the staff of Moskovsky Komsomolets says it learned the hard way when a suitcase bomb exploded in its office last October, killing a 27- year-old journalist named Dmitry Kholodov.
Kholodov had written several articles charging high level military officials with corruption. The newspaper's editor-in-chief Pavel Gusev and others accused the Defense Ministry of plotting his death.
Amid the dollar-driven drivel and the bare limbs that dominate newsstands, the muscular arm of the state is still reaching in to keep control of the press many believed would have slipped from its grasp as the Soviet Union crumbled.
The Russian government, President Boris Yeltsin's Kremlin and the Defense Ministry each run newspapers that are slavishly loyal, but the lingering hand of the State is still more visible on television, where it is struggling with some success to keep control despite decreased subsidies.
The state-run Russian television network has remained close to Yeltsin since its reports during the 1991 failed coup which helped the Russian leader build an image as an independence-minded reformer and seize power from a waning Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.
The state also showed its sleight of hand in maintaining a firm grip on the former Ostankino channel, the main Soviet network that still reaches the most households in Russia and is broadcast to several former Soviet satellite nations.
Yeltsin, last December, gave a 49 percent share of the network to a group of banks and other firms, including the state-run Itar Tass news agency, renamed it Russian Public Television, and appointed television talk show host star Vladislav Listyev ad managing director.
Listyev was shot dead in the entranceway of his apartment building in March, and the motive in his unsolved killing is widely believed to be a behind- the-scene battle for the lucrative advertising contracts on the network.
Listyev was replaced by a bureaucrat with reported ties to one of the main sponsors of Russian Public Television, a powerful banker named Oleg Boiko who strongly supports the Yeltsin government and who created a stir when he called for presidential elections, scheduled for next year, to be postponed.
Parliament has called for a reversal of Yeltsin's sudden and in effect secret transfer of shares in the channel to the select group of banks, saying the move portrayed as a privatization of Ostankino in effect gave the state even more power over the channel.
"It seems less independent than it was before the change," a Western advertising executive in Moscow said of Russian Public Television. "If you don't have advertising, it raises the question of who is supporting you."
Lawmakers and other critics say the banks that were given a piece of the pie are paying to support the station in hopes that its biased news programs will help pro-government candidates win a majority in December's Parliament elections and keep tunneling profitable businesses their way.
If Sergei Pozdnyakov is any indication, the purported plan just might work. Pozdnyakov lives in the Moscow region just 37 miles from the Kremlin, but he stopped getting newspapers in 1993 and the old television he cannot afford to repair gets only one channel — Russian Public Television.
