Kremlin Helps Media Moguls Expand

Aram Gabrelyanov’s journalists are paid well, and are expected to use their wages to butter up and buy sources. Ivan Sekretarev


The grainy photograph is the first to show NSA intelligence leaker Edward Snowden in his new life in Russia after leaving the Moscow airport.

The force behind the scoop? A father and son team who like to see themselves as Russia's Murdochs.

With a well-oiled system of paying for scoops, the Gabrelyanovs have been able to crawl into every crevice of Russian life from showbusiness to the security services. Their website Lifenews, which published the photo confirmed authentic by Snowden's lawyer, is part of an expanding empire that has come to dominate Russia's media landscape in the decades since the elder Gabrelyanov started off as a provincial tabloid publisher.

A key reason for their recent success: obsequious loyalty to the Kremlin. The father, Aram Gabrelyanov, refers to President Vladimir Putin as the "father of the nation," a fealty that was rewarded when one of Putin's oldest friends spent $80 million to become a key shareholder in the Gabrelyanovs' holding company, News Media, providing it with a flood of cash for investment.


But it is not just the Kremlin that values the Gabrelyanovs.

The public feeds on their coverage, too, because they are among the few people in Russian media still able to break news — even if it is with a strong establishment slant — enabling them to generate the clicks and the buzz that sterile state media can no longer muster.

Aram Gabrelyanov, who resembles a miniaturized, fleshier version of James Gandolfini, can usually be found barking orders across the sleek newsroom to his army of young journalists. Born to an Armenian builder father, Gabrelyanov has a warm, southern sense of humor, and it is hard for him to go five minutes without whipping out an anecdote.



Today, News Media Holding earns 1.5 billion rubles ($47 million) per year. In addition to Life, they own Izvestia, once the official newspaper of the Soviet government, as well as another tabloid and three websites. The younger son and heir to the empire, 24-year-old Ashot, runs and also a new television station. There is no substantive division between the holding's publications, which freely feed one another information and scoops that are then retailored for each audience. The elder son, 26-year-old Artyom, directs their comic book line, with a host of Russified superheroes that includes an Orthodox priest.


Aram Gabrelyanov defends the agent system as the key to his empire's success: "We categorically will not retreat from this system, it is our business."




For many of their scoops, the Gabrelyanovs' publications have been widely believed to have relied on tips from Russia's security apparatus, and many of those officials frequently make a flattering appearance on the pages of his papers.



Vasily Gatov, an analyst at Novosti Medialab, said state media have lost their capacity to cover major events. "They think too long about whether we should cover this or not," said Gatov. " [Gabrelyanov] does not wait; he trusts his feelings and his judgment."

Aram Gabrelyanov tries to portray News Media as an outsider organization and insists that it has few high-up contacts and does not need them. "You cannot recruit the president of the U.S.," he said, "but you can probably recruit his cleaning lady."


It was in the mid-2000s, as Putin was consolidating his power, that Gabrelyanov jumped on the political bandwagon and established one simple rule in his company: Do not mess with Putin. "We do what we can to make him a symbol that unites the country," he said.

The loyalty was rewarded when, in 2008, Putin's old friend Yury Kovalchuk — dubbed "the Kremlin's banker" — bought just under half the company for $80 million. The resulting cash flow allowed the Gabrelyanovs to expand their empire, by opening the Lifenews website and a host of other outlets in the same year.

Gabrelyanov insists he has won the clout to be an independent voice.


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