Without leadership, no rules written on paper will work. Even if they were followed for a very long time under good leaders, they can be instantly forgotten or twisted if new bad leaders hint that this would be desirable.
This claim is easily borne out by the history of Russian media in recent years. And especially, sadly, by the newspaper *Vedomosti*. In a sense, this is a personal tragedy for me: for the past 17 years, I began every weekday morning by reading *Vedomosti*.
Now I no longer have my daily morning newspaper, and it feels deeply unsettling.
I still do not understand how, in just six months, this could be done to what was once the unshakable foundation of Russian journalism. That was where the best journalistic standards in Russia existed. That was where the famous “Vedomosti dogma” came from. And it really worked. It was law for many years under several different editors-in-chief. If Vedomosti wrote it, that meant it was true.
Well, that was still true six months ago. And now, this is what the section “Who else will take part in the presidential election” looks like in the Vedomosti article “Zyuganov Announces His Participation in the Presidential Election.”
So the dogma itself is still there. And it is unlikely that anyone sent “stop lists” (editorial blacklists of forbidden topics or names) around the newsroom. And most of the journalists are the same people as before — people who worked for years according to the highest standards.
But the leadership changed. The moral foundation is no longer the same, and no written rules work anymore. The previous editors-in-chief — Bershidsky, Lysova, and Osetinskaya — were leaders of quality journalism. And it turns out that it was precisely their leadership that was the foundation of everything at *Vedomosti*, not the journalists’ education, not their command of Russian and English, and not the mechanics of news production.
The new leadership arrived from a place called “Dno” (“bottom” in Russian, also the name of a real railway station), and now the newspaper we all thought would be “the last to be devoured” is racing there at terrifying speed.
People are what matter most. All programs, texts, and ideas live only when good people apply them honestly. Take care of people.
Bershidsky, Lysova, and Osetinskaya, I demand that you come back (I do not know where) and do something (I do not know what). I need my morning newspaper.