Russia’s leading business paper is being gagged

THEY ARRIVED together. The first issue of Vedomosti, Russia’s leading business newspaper, appeared in September 1999, a month after Vladimir Putin was appointed prime minister and anointed as future president. It was half pink and half white, a tribute to its foreign co-founders and shareholders: the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal.

The timing of the new venture was brave. Russia was reeling from its financial crisis of 1998 and heading into a brutal war in Chechnya. But the economy started to grow, private businesses sprang up and Vedomosti was there to write about them. Its journalists and editors, most of them in their 20s, embodied the aspiration to integrate with the world and prove that business in Russia need not be the exclusive domain of the mafia and oligarchs.

“Our journalists know…that honest competition and honest success are no rarity in Russian business,” Vedomosti said in its first editorial. It took to the principles of its Anglo-Saxon shareholders with the zeal of the convert. Its code of conduct stated that “A journalist must treat all events, firms and people with equal scepticism. Nobody is entitled to special treatment—least of all the shareholders, advertisers and the...