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“We’re going to make a new magazine. Absolutely new. Ours. A Russian magazine,” a publisher declares to employees in a glass-walled conference room. The staff, reeling from the news that their American counterparts pulled their local license, nod along listlessly. The editor, now incensed by their pliability, scolds them. “You don’t give a shit,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what name the magazine publishes under, it doesn’t matter what you write about, as long as everything stays the same—an advance on the fifteenth, payment on the first.” He rises. “I don’t intend to publish this crap,” he says, and storms out. The door rattles behind him. No one mentions the invasion of Ukraine.
That scene comes from The First Issue, a 2024 TV show scripted by Sergei Minaev, the former editor in chief of Esquire Russia. It is not strictly true to life, and yet it reflects the wartime mood of Russian glossies—many of which had been, until troops moved, in February of 2022, local versions of American magazines published by Hearst and Condé Nast. A week into the war, Russia introduced censorship laws barring people from criticizing the country’s aggression—the penalty came with a sentence of up to fifteen years in prison—and independent media were banned. Even so much as calling the invasion a “war” instead of a “special military operation” became a crime. Journalists fled en masse; international outlets—including the BBC, Euronews, and France 24—were inaccessible. By early March, Roger Lynch, the CEO of Condé Nast, announced that the company would pause its local editions and shut down operations in the country. “It is paramount that we are able to produce our content without risk to our staff’s security and safety,” he wrote. (I’ve been a Condé contributor.) A day later, Hearst revoked its Russian editions’ licenses.
Suddenly, cultural lights were extinguished—decades after they had appeared, amid “an incredible thirst and wish for an openness to the world, a wish to integrate in the international community,” Victoria Bukharkina, the former commercial director of the Russian editions of Architectural Digest and Allure, told me. In the early nineties, a Dutch businessman named Derk Sauer had established Independent Media in Russia, with a plan to publish a licensed version of Cosmopolitan; eventually, the firm expanded to other magazines from Hearst and elsewhere. (Sauer also started the Moscow Times, and now co-owns its exiled version in Amsterdam.) Condé Nast set up its Russian division in the late nineties. When Vogue started publishing in the country, in 1998, billboards proclaimed, “In Russia. At Long Last.” Condé Nast Russia, which remained wholly owned by its American parent, was headquartered in Moscow, in a giant prerevolutionary cold storage facility for fur. Just before the invasion, the staff had been preparing to move into a new space. When the division shut down, the staff kept coming in to their old office, unsure of what to do. “Maybe in this fur fridge lived some unknown monsters or spirits,” Bukharkina mused.
Weeks went by. A few staffers bailed, or emigrated. Those able to look away, at least in print, from the horrors their country was inflicting across the border threw around ideas for new publications that would re-create a glossy mirage. For most, this wasn’t a matter of producing propaganda, but carrying on in the only way they knew how. “We’re meeting with investors,” Ksenia Solovieva, Vogue’s final editor in chief, told an interviewer that June. “We really want it to be a professional person who doesn’t need this for their political interests.” Those conversations rarely went anywhere, however. The only project to keep part of a team intact was Way of Living, a quarterly published by veterans of Architectural Digest.
Independent Media titles, by contrast, were sustained and renamed: Cosmopolitan became The Voice; Harper’s Bazaar, The Symbol; Men’s Health, Men Today; Popular Mechanics, TechInsider; Good Housekeeping, New Housekeeping. Some magazines stopped publishing in print; others reduced their frequency. The company had changed hands a few times over the years; in 2016, it landed with Inventure Partners Fund, a consortium of Russian investors, which—according to Kommersant, a Russian business newspaper—owned 80 percent, while Hearst held on to 20. After the war began, and Hearst pulled out, the RBC Group, a Russian media consortium, reported that Hearst transferred all shares to its Russian partners. (Representatives of Independent Media did not respond to requests for comment.) As international advertisers withdrew, Independent Media secured advertorial contracts from the government. A few other glossies—Robb Report, which is published in America by Penske, and Grazia, an edition of the Italian women’s magazine—kept their names, and continued publishing much as before.
As the invasion proceeded, the staff of Minaev’s Esquire—which Independent Media rebranded as Rules of Life—discussed how they would rethink coverage under the Kremlin’s new rules. “We understood that there are things we can say and things we can’t,” Varvara Barkalova, the culture editor, told me. They agreed not to cover the war. “Since it was understood that we were staying,” she said, “it was necessary to make the field safe for ourselves without going against our consciences.”
That represented something of a departure from Russian glossies’ recent engagement with politics: “Lifestyle magazines such as GQ, seen as a steam valve for the wealthy, got away with infinitely bolder content than the big daily newspapers,” as Michael Idov wrote in Dressed Up for a Riot, a memoir of his editorship of Russian GQ from 2012 to 2014. “I remember the times when in glossy magazines they did criticize power,” Dmitrii Petrosiants, GQ’s final site editor, told me, “but now it’s hard to imagine.” Still, Rules of Life couldn’t completely ignore reality. “To make it seem like nothing was happening in the world was impossible,” Barkalova said. “We needed new rubrics, new things to focus on.” The team started cranking out articles on mental health, with a feature called “Ask a Psychologist,” addressing, among other topics, “what is PTSD and how to deal with it.” A piece on how to cope with anxiety began, “Events are happening now that concern everyone. These events have changed the entire reality. We are being tossed about by the wind of great history. This is frightening.”
Minaev, for his part, left the magazine in pursuit of another opportunity. (He did not respond to requests for comment.) Over the years, he’d developed a following on YouTube of more than three million, which provided him a platform. In July 2023, he handed the editorship of Rules of Life to his protégé, then lured away many of his former Esquire colleagues. While The First Issue aired, he debuted Readings, a magazine highlighting historical parallels with the present. Minaev claims that it sold thirty thousand copies in preorders alone. There was also a fashion collaboration, for which Minaev modeled. The content was escapist fare, typical of today’s Russian magazines: its theme was the history of “the show”—everything from gladiator fights to Taylor Swift concerts to The First Issue, whose star appeared on the cover—as in, the show must go on.
When Russian editions of American glossies closed, or underwent renovations, the magazine industry was left to constitute itself in a changed country. In some cases, that has involved trading on Kremlin connections. According to reporting by Meduza, the investigative outlet, Kristina Potupchik—a former spokesperson for the Kremlin youth movement Nashi, who founded a glossy called Moskvichka in 2023—coordinates her work with the Presidential Administration of Russia. Darina Alekseeva, the editor in chief of Moskvichka, has insisted that the magazine takes no direct government investment. But the coverage—a recent issue featured the Cosmoscow art fair, whose primary sponsor was the majority state-owned Sberbank, and the BRICS+ Fashion Summit, organized with government support in Moscow—is largely indistinguishable from state advertorials. “Moskvichka,” said Aleksandra Kiseleva—a Harper’s Bazaar editor, who has since left the country—“is total cringe.” (Alekseeva canceled scheduled interviews for this article and never responded to written questions. Potupchik told Meduza, “Why did you decide that I should coordinate something with the presidential administration? A very strange question.” When I asked about the assertion, she replied, “I know Meduza coordinates its work with USAID. Would they like to add anything to that?”)
Moskvichka might be privately funded, but another glossy, The Opinion of the Editors May Not Match, is published by a subsidiary of Gazprom, the state-owned energy company. Upon its launch, this past December, Aleko Nadiryan, a celebrity stylist turned editor in chief, cast the prewar era as a restrictive dark age for Russian glossies, and claimed that his magazine was part of a renaissance. Some of the photography is fun, but the magazine largely contains fashion spreads, frothy how-tos, and cultural hot takes (including, for instance, that avocado toast is out). (Nadiryan did not respond to requests for comment.)
Print magazines not looking to the government directly for patronage have increasingly found advertisers among the country’s real estate firms. MR Group, one of the biggest, hired Igor Garanin, GQ’s final editor in chief, as its creative director. In 2024, they released Arch—a quarterly lifestyle publication that includes coverage of architectural trends.
For out-of-work fashion editors, an obvious fallback has been social media influencing—though there is fierce competition from preexisting Telegrams such as Anti-Gloss, a society gossip channel, and Mur, the fashion-focused eponymous channel of a former news reporter, Madonna Mur. Some ex-Condé staffers went to work for Mur; others made smaller-scale plays. “Everybody started Telegrams. I even helped some with advice, and now I see those people making forty thousand dollars a month” on sponsorships and advertising, Evgeny Zabolotnyy, a former Vogue society editor, said. “I didn’t start one and really regret it.”
In some cases, the scrappiness of these Telegrams has fostered recklessness: In October 2022, Arian Romanovsky, the former editor in chief of Russia’s Tatler, launched Lights Out, a gossip channel, with financial support from Ksenia Sobchak. Sobchak’s father had been close to Vladimir Putin, but her relationship with the Kremlin has been somewhat more complicated, as their political and media interests have occasionally conflicted. Before long, Romanovsky and two colleagues were detained by the Main Directorate of Internal Affairs of the City of Moscow on charges of extorting the CEO of Rostec, the state-owned defense conglomerate; they allegedly deleted a post in exchange for the company agreeing to pay about eight thousand dollars. (In court, the men denied any wrongdoing.) In February 2024, all three were found guilty of extortion by the Khamovnichesky District Court of Moscow and sentenced to spend years in a maximum-security penal colony. (“This is not just injustice. This is much more,” Sobchack wrote on her Telegram. “Why are you ruining people’s lives?”)
The glossy scene has not entirely darkened. Elena Dudina, a former GQ fashion director, has been involved in building new magazines—creative work that she hadn’t done since the start of her career, decades ago. Even so, “it’s quite challenging, surprising, and maybe a little bit disappointing,” she said, to be revisiting that stage of her career. She remains in touch with old Condé Nast colleagues—more than three hundred are part of an active Telegram chat, CN Family—though it’s unlikely they would all be willing to return to their former jobs with the company. Dudina is open to the possibility, however remote. “In Russia, hope is everything,” she said. “We are still hoping that everybody will come back in a few minutes.”
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