Best known in Britain as a newspaper magnate with a KGB past, the oligarch talks about his clashes with the Kremlin and Putin
It is certainly not profitable. I ask him why he likes newspapers so much. “Well, I think it’s culturally so important. This country was just destroying culture for 90 years, destroying [Boris] Pasternak, [Osip] Mandelstam and [Anna] Akhmatova and that brought a huge tragedy to the people, who are recovering from it, but it takes generations. Newspapers are a centre of public culture,” he says. “We can’t give in to extortion. Otherwise we’ll just have a repeat of the last (Soviet) era.”
