The Moscow News

In addition to his daily editing duties, Meyerson managed to write about a dozen articles featuring courageous American tourists who had come to the USSR as bridges for peace.

Thanks to some key help from several of his co-workers, and the support of Gerasimov and several American sponsors, in 1988 Meyerson was able to found the first branch of Toastmasters International ever in a communist country, which marked the first time that courses in public speaking were allowed at the Moscow State University, which was Mikhail Gorbachev's alma mater.

[citation needed] When Gennad Gerasimov left The Moscow News in 1986 to become the official press spokesman for Gorbachev, he was replaced by Yegor Yakovlev.

A small team of top Daily Mirror executive journalists was set up in Pushkin square and worked with Yakovlev creating a redesign and waiting for news of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in order to relaunch the newspaper with the headline “Coming home!” The newspaper began to break one taboo after another during the era of Gorbachev's reforms known as glasnost (openness) and perestroika (rebuilding)[2] and sales soared, often selling out within 15 minutes of publication.

When Revel Barker, Mirror managing editor, addressed the Moscow News journalists on the concept of a free press, they accused him of “bringing about the downfall of the Soviet Socialist system”.

During that time some communists were so infuriated at the paper's shocking revelations and criticism that they started referring to The Moscow News as "yellow press."

Around 1989 there was a suspicious late night fire in a prestigious restaurant on the ground floor of the same building housing The Moscow News headquarters.

Due to considerable water and structural damage to the English-language section of the paper, the staff had to relocate several blocks away to a much newer building on Kalininsky Prospekt.

[6] Under President Vladimir Putin, and suffering from declining sales, Moscow News was bought by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one of Russia's oligarchs and owner of Yukos.

[7] The Moscow News has had numerous other owners: Ogonyok, International Book, and the All-Union Society of Cultural Ties with Foreign Countries among others have had a stake in the historic newspaper at one time or another.

[14] Editor Natalia Antonova wrote in a March 14 farewell signed article: "If you write about Russia with any kind of nuance, you may confuse and anger many people.