Russian newspapers celebrated on Monday the career of pioneering editor Yegor Yakovlev before and after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, following his death from heart failure.
Yakovlev, a journalist and author of several books, died in a Moscow hospital on Sunday, aged 76.
“This is the end of a legend, the end of a man without whom Russian journalism would be different,” said Igor Yakovenko, general secretary of the Russian Union of Journalists, quoted by the Kommersant daily.
In 1986, Yakovlev became editor of the weekly Moskovskie Novosti, a key newspaper during the perestroika years that he succeeded in steering away from the control of Soviet censors.
Yakovlev, an archivist by training, then founded Obshchaya Gazeta, a leading liberal newspaper noted for its critical coverage of the wars in Chechnya, in 1993.
Media-rights campaigners said the newspaper folded in 2002 because of pressure from the authorities.
The editor-in-chief at Moscow Echo radio station, Aleksei Venediktov, a journalist who has clashed repeatedly with the government since the election of President Vladimir Putin in 2000, praised Yakovlev as “a model of calm and confidence” in the Kommersant daily.
Yakovlev was a role model for journalists writing about government, instructing them “to write critical articles and not give in”, Venediktov said. — AFP