Dear readers!

You have in your hands the latest issue of our newspaper, which has been published under the Vremya Novostei brand for more than ten years. It is almost entirely devoted to the outgoing zero years of the 21st century and consists of materials published in our newspaper in 2000-2010. We tried to select those that, in our opinion, allow us to remember important and characteristic events and problems.

Although this issue is considered the last, we and, I hope, you are not going to say goodbye to each other. Already from the beginning of February of the coming year, our editorial office and the publishing house “Vremya” have begun publishing the daily newspaper “Moscow News” (we are implementing the project in collaboration with RIA Novosti).

In the new newspaper you will meet both the previous authors, whom you are already accustomed to, and new ones, whom we are going to attract. We want to give you more information than was possible before, and make it easier to obtain through information technologies that we have not had before. However, today they complain not so much about a lack of information, but about a “deficit of meaning,” a lack of ideas, vague comments, unclear positions, and a lack of digestible explanations. We will strive to ensure that the new “Moscow News” fills this gap as much as possible, offering our own view of events and their background and without avoiding the author’s intonation.

It is clear that, while restoring the MN brand, famous and dear to me, my colleagues and many readers, we cannot avoid comparisons, comparisons, memories and expectations. Despite the fact that everyone is aware of the difference between the global information market today and the system of the party-Soviet press in one individual country, which one individual newspaper then managed to overcome. The privilege of being the sole source of truthful information and free thought is, hopefully, a thing of the past forever. And for the privilege of being a popular, high-quality and modern publication, attractive to thinking people who care about their country, we have to fight.

Vladimir GUREVICH, editor-in-chief of Vremya Novostei