"It's only business" was the mantra of the Russian government and its apologists throughout the dismembering of oligarch Vladimir Gusinskii's media empire in 2000-01. That process ended with the closing in April 2001 of the daily "Sevodnya" and the weekly news magazine "Itogi" -- although a publication under that name continues to appear on newsstands -- and the death of the popular television channel NTV, although a channel continues to broadcast under that name.

Even those who believed the whole thing was "only business" -- if there were any such people -- would have to admit that the public was poorly served by the loss of these three media outlets, which, for all their faults, demonstrated as much potential for competent, independent, and popular journalism as any in post-Soviet Russia. By attributing these losses to "market forces," the Russian government may be undermining public support for reform and bolstering antimarket sentiment over the long term: The public knows very well who won and who lost from this particular business deal.

Far more quietly, but also under the rubric of "business," the weekly newspaper "Obshchaya gazeta" suspended publication at the end of May. The newspaper, and its creator and editor in chief, Yegor Yakovlev, were among the few who passed through the entire post-Soviet era with their reputations unsullied. Yakovlev, it should be noted, dismissed the NTV business dispute as "plain banditry." "Obshchaya gazeta" was created in August 1991, bringing together the editorial teams of several newspapers that were banned during the abortive coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Throughout the Boris Yeltsin era, it maintained a reputation for principled liberal criticism, reporting aggressively on the controversial issues of Chechnya, state corruption, and privatization. During the 1996 presidential election campaign, when virtually all the country's media -- including NTV and the rest of Gusinskii's empire -- thoroughly disgraced themselves in their eagerness to support Yeltsin's re-election, Yakovlev's "Obshchaya gazeta" quixotically endorsed Yabloko leader Grigorii Yavlinskii.

True to its origins as a sort of communal response to crisis, "Obshchaya gazeta" also served over the years as a rallying point whenever journalists felt the state was encroaching on the public's right to know.

Seven special editions of the newspaper were published at critical moments, most recently on 7 April 2001 in reaction to the NTV crisis. That issue bore the logos of nearly 160 national and regional media outlets and public organizations. A special edition of "Obshchaya gazeta" was also issued in February 2000 in connection with the Russian government's detention of RFE/RL's Chechnya correspondent, Andrei Babitskii.

However, good journalism and a clean reputation are, it seems, hardly the ingredients for market success in Russia. Yakovlev is over 70 years old and can be excused for wanting to bow out. However, in his carefully worded final editorial comment for "Obshchaya gazeta," he cited economic factors for the paper's change of fortune: "The money ran out." So the respected journalist sold his newspaper to a 33-year-old businessman from St. Petersburg named Vyacheslav Leibman, a man without any publishing experience who is best known for parlaying his romantic association with the daughter of former St.

Petersburg Mayor Anatolii Sobchak into success in the oil-export business. By all accounts, Leibman is someone who knows exactly what the phrase "it's only business" means in Russia. "Kommersant-Daily" reported the selling price of the money-losing paper as $3 million.

Leibman's first step as owner -- a tactic that he apparently borrowed from the takeover scenarios played out at "Segodnya" and "Itogi" -- was to fire the newspaper's entire staff. Firing the talented editorial staff wholesale at the beginning avoids the potential embarrassment of them walking out if they find that their idea of journalism and his are not compatible. Then he suspended publication of the paper until at least the fall. Whatever, if anything, emerges from this reconstruction process will certainly bear no resemblance to Yakovlev's "Obshchaya gazeta."

Why would Leibman buy the paper and then immediately discard its only real asset, its staff? On the one hand, the point could be just to quietly close down an independent paper and remove it from the hands of a journalist who is widely respected and supported throughout Russia and around the world. Three million dollars might not seem like a lot to pay to avoid an NTV-style scandal.

On the other hand, although "Obshchaya gazeta" itself had an insignificant Moscow circulation of just over 18,000 copies, it also had a well-developed network of inserts in leading regional papers in cities around the country. That network's circulation was reportedly 127,000. Getting a tailored message from the center out to the regions has been a daunting task in Russia, at least until the Kremlin's steady process of reining in the media over the last two years made it easier.

So, an aging lion of Russian journalism gets a well-earned rest, a newspaper's fate is decided according to the rules of the Russian "market," and a cantankerous voice that kept a sharp eye on the Kremlin for the last decade falls silent.

Yakovlev is, of course, far from an ideal model of an independent journalist. He is very much a product of the Soviet system in which he was formed, and throughout his long career he subscribed unabashedly to the idea that the media's job was to educate the public and to form public opinion. Despite the 1996 presidential election fiasco, Yakovlev still maintained in early 1997 that the main task of journalists is "to prepare the people for the next presidential election" and to help them choose "correctly." Responding to these comments, analyst Laura Belin wrote in "The New Presence" that "the quality and professionalism of news coverage will suffer as long as most journalists conspire to protect the public from 'dangerous' information at crucial political junctures."

Yakovlev was one of the greatest figures of the greatest phase of Soviet and Russian journalism -- the heyday of glasnost when, for a moment, all the forces of nature and politics seemed favorably aligned. The government paid all the bills, but censorship was increasingly relaxed. The public seemed to live for each new issue of the leading papers, some of which had circulations in the millions. And at that time there were no business interests -- or, more accurately, political interests posing as business interests.

However, Yakovlev was always mindful of the looming danger inherent whenever the media are financially dependent on the state. He welcomed as progress the shift toward a market-oriented media sector, even if "Obshchaya gazeta" never made the leap. "After all, in order for a monkey to become a human being," Yakovlev quipped, "it had to fall out of the tree and break its tail."

While the image of falling out of a tree and getting hurt seems apt, it is hard to imagine that what is going on in the Russian media now -- exemplified most recently by the fate of "Obshchaya gazeta" -- is anything like evolution.