Valery Ivanov and Alexei Sidorov were close friends.

Excerpted from “That’s How It Happened,” published in the TOGLIATTI OBSERVER

April 11, 2002

Free Sailing

After a while we (my co-writer and I) realized that none of the papers currently in print wanted our probing journalistic investigations. They cause too much headache. This is when we came up with a firm decision to create our own paper. A paper that would not have its main aim in soliciting advertisements or promoting the opinions of the authorities and financial tycoons, but rather a normal and objective analysis of any event occurring in our city, without prudishly bypassing hard facts. We turned to a few papers with a proposal to create a joint publication that would specialize in journalistic investigations. Our attempt with THE FREEDOM SQUARE was the closest to success. We went as far as registering a joint paper with it under the grand title of THE FOURTH POWER. However, at the last moment THE FREEDOM SQUARE changed its mind for reasons known to it alone and the project never materialized.

When we realized that collaboration with other newspapers would unfortunately not work for us, we turned our attention to local businessmen. At the time we thought time we thought there must be nice businessmen right next door who spend their nights dreaming of investing their excess money in independent press. And indeed, soon we found people who wanted to fund our newspaper. In fact there were quite a few. However, all of them, as if they had discussed the issue between themselves, only agreed to invest in the publication on one condition. The paper must represent the opinion of those who pay, and not the readers’ point of view. In one word, we had to dance to their music. For some reason we didn’t quite feel like dancing to someone else’s music, so our prospective relationship with business investors fell through time after time. Our search continued for over a year only to bring us to a final conclusion that there was no Savva Morozov in our city. [Translator’s note: Savva Morozov – Russia’s symbol of a selfless patron of arts.]

During this period we made a living conducting private investigations. For some time I was an editor for the PRESENT newspaper, then I worked for some Moscow and regional newspapers, including KOMSOMOLSKAYA PRAVDA. But none of this was what we had dreamed of doing.

We Have to Earn Our Own Money

Eventually, after much wandering we arrived at a firm decision: if nobody gives us the money to set up the paper, we have to earn the necessary funds ourselves. Besides, the many long hours spent in the company of businessmen strengthened our belief that buying and selling for profit is not as complicated as some people think. If others could do it, we could do it, too. So in the beginning of 1996 we set up our own company and went into business. The profits were set aside to create the newspaper.

At the same time we set up an information agency called “Bureau of Investigation and Analysis,” whose main objective was to investigate deep-down processes in the life of the city and collect information for our future newspaper.

By that time we were getting more and more interested in finding out who really ran our city, where the budget money went (or how it was stolen), what relationships existed inside the government, and what the city was losing because of that. Back then we already began to understand that organized crime was linked to the top layers of government.