Kommersant
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Front page on 27 December 2010
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| Type | Daily newspaper |
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| Owner(s) | Alisher Usmanov |
| Founded | 1909, 1989 |
| Language | Russian |
| Headquarters | Moscow |
| Circulation | 120,000-130,000 (July 2013) |
| Website | www |
Kommersant (Russian: Коммерса́нтъ, IPA: [kəmʲɪrˈsant], The Businessman, often shortened to Ъ) is a nationally distributed daily newspaper published in Russia mostly devoted to politics and business. It is a leading liberal business broadsheet. The TNS Media and NRS Russia certified July 2013 circulation of the daily was 120,000-130,000.
The newspaper was initially published in 1909, and it was closed down following the Bolshevik seizure of power and the introduction of censorship in 1917.
In 1989, 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 letter that is silent at the end of a word in modern Russian, and was thus largely abolished by the post-revolution Russian spelling reform. This is played up in the Kommersant logo, which features a script hard sign at the end of somewhat more formal font.
In 1997, autos-to-Aeroflot mogul Boris Berezovsky – a member of the former President Boris Yeltsin's 'family' – bought the Kommersant publishing house, which included Kommersant-daily, two serious weekly magazines (the political Kommersant-vlast (literally 'Power') and the financial Kommersant-dengi ('Money') – as well as entertainment magazines Domovoi and Avtopilot and Molotok, a teen magazine, which later incurred the authorities' wrath.
Berezovsky sacked Kommersant's director-general, Andrei Vassiliev, and editor-in-chief, Alexander Stukalin, on 14 July 2005 in a move widely seen as preparation for the 2008 Russian presidential elections.
In January 2005, Kommersant 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, published upside down, on the front page. The headline of the article was "Full Plaintiff" (полный истец) which has little meaning, but rhymes with a Russian swear word, meaning "complete disaster" (полный пиздец). The English version of the article was headed "Alfa-d Up".
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