On Kommersant’s anniversary days, OLEG KASHIN flips through Kommersant’s files over the past twenty years and remembers what the newspaper wrote about during these years. Twenty years - twenty stories. Ordinary stories from those that did not appear on the front page at all. It’s all the more unusual to re-read them now.

1994 became a truly post-Soviet year for Russia: in January, the State Duma began its work, elected in accordance with the new Constitution adopted at the end of 1993, which, in turn, owed its appearance to the Moscow events of September-October of the same year. New life, new power, new rules. And new relations with neighboring states. The first presidents are being elected in the former Soviet republics, and Kommersant is closely following what is happening.

Guest from Minsk

Kommersant calls such news items rotten, that is, we are talking about a deliberately uninteresting topic that, in principle, can be ignored, and if you write about it, then some small note or even a so-called statement. Since time immemorial, Vedomosti in Kommersant have been called small notes without a subtitle - often correspondence from trainees or simply reworked messages from news agencies. Once upon a time, even the column in which this news was published was called “Vedomosti”.

When in 1999 Kommersant had a competitor in the form of the new business newspaper Vedomosti, the name of the column itself sounded new, and if Vedomosti had called a similar column Kommersant, no one would probably have been surprised . Only in 2006, the column received a new name “Context,” but Kommersant journalists, when communicating with each other, planning an issue, or simply reading the newspaper, most often, out of old memory, continue to call mini-notes statements.

That rotten news story could well have become a news item or not even made it onto the pages of Kommersant. Judge for yourself: the chairman of the disbanded anti-corruption commission of the Belarusian parliament came from Belarus to Moscow to visit the Duma faction of the LDPR, a marginal politician who, although he is participating in the presidential elections in Belarus scheduled for June 23, has no chance compared to the electoral favorite campaign - by Prime Minister Vyacheslav Kebich, a pro-Russian “strong business executive”.

As you might guess, the name of the marginal politician from Minsk is Alexander Lukashenko. The authors of the article in Kommersant do not try to hide their ironic attitude towards the guest: “At the morning meeting of the State Duma, he made a corresponding statement “on behalf of the parliamentary majority and all citizens of the Republic of Belarus” (however, it was signed by only 35 deputies). As it turned out at the press conference, he is not at all a supporter of the political independence of his homeland - “what kind of independence can we talk about when 85% of Belarusians are poor.” In addition, there is no democracy in Belarus and “it doesn’t even smell like it.” There are, as it turns out, nationalists posing as democrats.”

Probably, a more telling example of second-rate news that tomorrow will turn into front-page news simply cannot be found. There is just over a month left before the Belarusian elections, and this is enough time for the seemingly hapless Belarusian outcast to overtake the favorite and sensationally win the elections. On June 23, Lukashenko will enter the second round together with Kebich, in which he will win a sensational victory with 80 percent of the votes. “New defendants have emerged in the case of the Economic Union” - the headline of the Kommersant article about this victory betrays some confusion, but this is hardly something to be ashamed of. A rotten news story can always grow into a big sensation.

20 stories from Kommersant. 1994