section_path: History/Founding
section_name: Founding
paragraph_text: Founding
  
  Derk Sauer, a Dutch publisher who came to Moscow in 1989, made plans to turn his small, twice-weekly paper called the Moscow Guardian into a world-class daily newspaper. Sauer brought in Meg Bortin as its first editor in May 1992, and the team used a room at the Radisson Slavyanskaya Hotel as its headquarters.
  
  The Moscow Times was founded in 1992 by Sauer to reach US and European expats who had moved to Moscow after the fall of communism. He said: "It was a completely different time, there was no internet and there was a huge influx of Western expats who didn't speak Russian. At the time, they were the only ones with money in Moscow, so The Moscow Times was an interesting medium for advertisers".
  
  The first edition of The Moscow Times was published in March 1992. It was the first Western daily to be published in Russia, and quickly became "a primary source of news and opinion" quoted in both Russia and the West.
  
  It "played an important role by giving space to Russian commentators". For example, in the fall of 1993, it was able to play a role in defeating the censors:
  
  when anti- Yeltsin forces occupied the Russian Parliament and censorship was revived. Russian newspapers came out with large blank spaces on their front pages where articles critical of the authorities had been suppressed. The writers of those articles came to see us. Published the next day in English in The Moscow Times, their articles were quickly picked up and beamed back in Russian by the BBC and other foreign radios, defeating the censors.
  
  From the mid-1990s until 2000, it was based in the old headquarters of Pravda. In 1997, the website moscowtimes.ru was registered.