The Takeover of Latvia’s First Independent Paper Underscored the Perils of Post-Communist Transition
On an October morning in 2009, Pauls Raudseps, head of the op-ed section at Latvia’s leading newspaper Diena, knew it was his last day. Conflicts with the paper’s new owners had been mounting for weeks. The owners wanted significant budget cuts, cuts that Diena’s editorial team saw as a threat to the integrity of their journalism. They suspected the new owners were linked to some of the local oligarchs whose shady dealings had been exposed by the paper. In a meeting with the new owners’ representative, Raudseps and the editor-in-chief were told they were “suspended.” Both chose to resign instead.
For Raudseps it was a grim climax to what had begun two decades earlier as an exhilarating political adventure. In 1990, as the Soviet Union crumbled, he had arrived in Latvia, armed with a Harvard degree in Soviet history and a commitment to helping his parents’ homeland restore its independence. It had been a time of great hope and political ferment, and Raudseps’ bilingual skills made him invaluable for communicating the independence movement’s goals to foreign correspondents. His Western views on news would also help shape Diena (meaning The Day in Latvian), the first professional daily newspaper in the Baltics.
Based in Riga and founded by the pro-independence government in 1990, Diena set new journalism standards for post-Soviet Latvia. Opinion was separated from news, a rigorous ethics code was enforced, and Diena articles sought to hold public officials accountable—all a sharp break with the propaganda sheets that masqueraded as newspapers in the Soviet Union.
Pauls Raudseps and Sarmīte Ēlerte, who created the blueprint for Diena. Photo courtesy of Pauls Raudseps
But that morning in 2009, Raudseps realized the Diena founders had lost—not to the Communists, as they once feared, but to local oligarchs. These oligarchs were a force unforeseen in the heady first days of true independence after the Soviet collapse in 1991. But as Latvia transitioned into a democracy, they had accumulated wealth and political power.
For years, Diena had investigated and exposed their shadowy operations and corruption. However, during the global financial crisis that began in 2008, as the newspaper and the rest of Latvia struggled, the oligarchs struck back.
A few months before Raudseps began his final day at the paper, a man in a white BMW had arrived at Diena’s offices. He brought news that the Swedish Bonnier publishing house, which owned a controlling majority in the paper, had now sold it. The buyer’s identities were concealed behind offshore entities.
And now, on that October day, the paper’s top editors were forced to leave. Raudseps packed his belongings in his glass-walled office as a lawyer for the new owners watched. Outside, Diena’s journalists observed in silence. Raudseps’ wife, Dace, a veteran journalist and Diena’s weekend magazine editor, quietly wept.
“I knew this day would come,” Raudseps reflected years later. “But there’s still bitterness. The Swedes should have at least offered us the chance to buy the paper instead of selling it out to the oligarchs. They would never have done something like this in their home market.”
Latvia and its Baltic neighbors Estonia and Lithuania—now all NATO and European Union members—are often heralded as success stories of post-Communist transition. Diena’s journalism helped cement this success in Latvia by exposing corruption and promoting transparency. Not all former Soviet republics have fared so well. Independent media struggle for survival in most of them, in part because democracy and the freedoms it implies have never taken root. Some former Soviet republics still operate under outright authoritarianism.
But even the Baltic success stories are not unblemished democratic victories. In Latvia, for example, despite aggressive media reporting on economic corruption, oligarchs who grew rich in the early years of independence continue to wield outsized influence on the national stage. One of their most important victories came in 2009, when Diena fell into the grip of oligarchs, underscoring that even the strongest symbols of democracy can face setbacks.
In the late 1980s, as political liberalization under Mikhail Gorbachev sparked change in the Soviet Union, the country’s three Baltic republics—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—seized the moment. Despite the risks of police brutality, people took to the streets in a movement known as the Singing Revolution. Their independence movement sought to regain freedom for the Baltics as sovereign nations, after nearly fifty years of Soviet rule.
“I lived in the Soviet Union; my TV and radio were full of Communist bullshit. But when the first opportunity came to regain freedom, my grandfather’s stories about independent Estonia were much more powerful,” says Estonian media pundit Raul Rebane. “In the Baltics, people were ready to sacrifice everything, even life, for independence.”
For Latvians, independence had a special urgency. The Soviet Union had intentionally relocated Russians and other Soviet citizens to Latvia to work in factories and on collective farms, and by the late 1980s, native Latvian speakers were only 52 percent of Latvia’s population of 2.5 million people. Continued Russification could make Latvians a minority in their own land. Without independence, there was a widespread fear Latvia might not survive as a nation.
That was all part of the message that young independence activist Sarmīte Ēlerte took with her when she visited the United States in 1989.
Ēlerte, a founder of the pro-independence Latvian Popular Front, was tasked with meeting members of the 100,000-strong Lativan-American community in order to “convince the exiles that these changes must be supported,” she recalls.
That’s how Ēlerte met Pauls Raudseps, at a dinner in New York organized by a local Latvian. Back then, Raudseps was a young Harvard graduate. His parents had fled the Soviet occupation of Latvia as children in 1944. Both eventually resettled with their families as refugees in the United States; that’s where Raudseps’ parents met, years later, as university students. They raised Raudseps to be fluent in the Latvian language and culture. At the New York dinner, where Ēlerte described the exciting new independence movement in Latvia, Raudseps asked Ēlerte what he could do for his parents’ homeland. Ēlerte’s answer: “Come and help the Popular Front.”
Ēlerte, who had started her career as an editor at a Soviet cultural magazine, was in charge of the Popular Front’s information center. Raudseps’ bilingual skills would be welcome in the Front’s office, which was a must-stop for foreign journalists writing about the independence movement.
Raudseps accepted Ēlerte’s invitation, moving to Riga in 1990 as the Baltic push for freedom gained momentum and helped ease Soviet-imposed restrictions, such as prior censorship of media.
“When I arrived in Latvia, censorship had ended,” Raudseps recalls. “Yet there was no real newspaper. I was shocked when Lithuania declared independence on March 11 [1990], but a significant article about it appeared only a week later.”
Sarmīte Ēlerte and Pauls Raudseps in the summer of 1990, when they developed the blueprint for Diena.
Soviet Latvian “news” coverage bore little resemblance to that of Western media at the time. Most newspapers served as little more than propaganda for the Communist Party and its leaders. Articles consisted of slogans and personal opinions rather than objective reporting. Trustworthy journalism, defined by fairness and neutrality, was absent.
The Popular Front’s leaders realized they had a media problem. They had won parliamentary elections in March 1990, but they were taking office in a country whose media outlets were stuck in Soviet practices; for example, parliamentary leaders, eager to make changes, couldn’t get their newly adopted laws and decisions published in a timely manner.
With their newfound political power, the Popular Front leaders decided to launch a new paper. Though government-backed at first, it had a mandate to report independently, and in 1992 the paper was privatized (employees initially held a majority of the shares, but the Swedish Bonnier publishing house owned 49 percent, a stake that it increased over the years).
Journalists at Soviet Latvian newspapers couldn’t be trusted to create an independent paper, so the Popular Front turned to Ēlerte and Raudseps, neither of whom had typical credentials for the job.
In her job at the Soviet cultural magazine, Ēlerte had often battled to sneak content past the censors. Raudseps, an avid reader of New York Times and Boston Globe articles, had no newsroom experience at all—unless you count the day he spent shadowing a Globe editor in preparation for creating Diena.
Ēlerte and Raudseps quickly got to work. In the summer of 1990, they retreated to a country house in Latvia and developed a blueprint for what became the newspaper Diena. Unlike its Soviet predecessors, this paper would separate news from opinion, like the Globe and the Times did. Page one would prioritize the most significant stories, and articles would be written in an inverted pyramid style, telegraphing the important news at the top before filling in details and context.
Next came the task of assembling a news team. Again, veterans of Soviet media were not welcome. Ēlerte and Raudseps instead solicited students with no prior journalism experience—but, presumably, a more open mind about learning to report using rigorous journalistic standards. Applicants came from law, economics, and journalism faculties at Latvian universities. One early hire was a firefighter by day who wrote fiction by night; he went on to become one of Diena’s most respected political columnists.
The first issue of Diena came out in November 1990. The front page highlighted local news about a tax system threatening government stability, along with Latvia-related analysis from Moscow and Washington about proposed Kremlin reforms. It also noted the upcoming resignation of UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and featured a lengthy interview with Laima Vaikule, a Latvian pop singer well-known in the Soviet sphere. The stories brought a new urgency and a real news sensibility to Latvian media.
However, the Soviet mentality and corruption still lingered. About a year after launch, Diena managers discovered the head of the business section had accepted a bribe from a local company to write a favorable story about the business.
“It was a rude awakening to how naïve we were,” Raudseps recalls. “Our goal was to transform Latvia into a democratic, free-market society. We assumed everyone on our team shared that vision.”
The business editor was swiftly dismissed, and to head off further incidents, Raudseps drafted Diena’s first code of ethics. It included strict prohibitions on accepting gifts or special treatment from sources. And it emphasized that “truth is our primary goal,” instructing journalists that any mistakes they made needed to be quickly acknowledged and corrected.
By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, Diena was growing in stature as the three Baltic states sought a single goal: reintegration into Europe.
“Everything seemed possible,” said Ēlerte. “The question wasn’t if, but when we will be part of a modern Europe again.”
“When” turned out to be 13 years later—that’s how long negotiations dragged on before the European Union and NATO finally welcomed the Baltics into membership.
The lengthy timetable was unforeseen in the early days of independence—a period that, in retrospect, Ēlerte calls a time of naïveté. The paper she led as editor-in-chief shared in that naïveté.
Diena also shared the Baltic countries’ political goal of rejoining Europe and Latvia’s political goal of securing the withdrawal of Russian troops from their now-independent state. At the time of independence, 50,000 to 60,000 Russian military personnel were stationed in Latvia. Some of them remained, post-independence, until a breakthrough in 1994, when U.S. President Bill Clinton helped persuade Russian President Boris Yeltsin to withdraw all remaining troops.
Before the final agreement was signed, though, local intellectuals opposed a provision allowing retired Russian military personnel to stay in Latvia. They argued that the continued presence of the Russians would pose a persistent threat to Latvia’s independence. Diena, by then the country’s most popular newspaper, stepped in with strong editorials calling for the agreement’s ratification despite the allowance for military retirees to stay on.
Raudseps recalls the paper’s message: “If we don’t sign, we won’t get a better deal—and we might not get anything at all.” The agreement was signed.
The long negotiations with the EU and NATO were certainly not anticipated in the heady early months of Baltic independence. But that process proved beneficial for Latvia, as the Western organizations mandated institutional changes to address deep-rooted, systemic issues. Throughout those years, Diena was there, covering in detail the complexities of European integration. The paper praised the United States as a crucial ally, even when other Western nations were skeptical of Baltic aspirations. It also editorialized in favor of Europe’s demands for reforming Latvia’s economy and democratic development.
In September 2003, when Latvia had to make its final decision on joining the EU, Diena was unequivocal, using its front page as a graphic editorial. On the day of the EU referendum, page one featured a giant yellow dahlia and the word “yes.” The final result: 67 percent of those who voted supported EU membership.
As Latvia modernized, its wealth grew. Diena’s founders could feel it in their personal lives. Raudseps and his family took regular trips to Paris and other European capitals, while Ēlerte became a regular operagoer in Austria and built a home near a white-sand beach 30 minutes from Riga’s capital.
But while part of Latvian society could embrace a more luxurious lifestyle, many Latvians couldn’t. Almost half a million emigrated in search of better economic opportunities—especially after the country joined the EU, giving Latvians and residents of the other Baltics the right to move and seek work throughout the union.
For years, Latvia had one of the highest income inequality rates in the EU, according to Eurostat data. By the early 2000s, the World Bank identified “state capture”—a form of corruption where a small elite manipulates government policies for their own benefit—as a key factor behind Latvia’s social inequality and growing public dissatisfaction with politics. These persistent, Soviet-era practices eventually would contribute to Diena’s downfall.
Despite the long and arduous negotiations with the EU and NATO, Latvia’s political integration into Europe turned out to be a smoother process than its efforts to establish a stable market economy.
In Latvia, corruption persisted, a hangover from the Soviet era that was reinforced by ongoing ties to Russia and other autocratic countries. In the late 1990s, Transparency International gave Latvia a dismal score of 2.7 out of 10, signaling pervasive corruption. By comparison, neighboring Estonia scored 5.7.
Transparency’s assessment came amidst political turmoil in Latvia. Social inequality was high, and a major bank collapse in 1995 wiped out many people’s savings. Meanwhile, populist forces were gaining ground, and attempts to form a stable, pro-Western government were failing.
Enter businessman Andris Šķēle, who had privatized several food-processing companies and amassed wealth that made him one of the country’s richest oligarchs. In 1995, Šķēle was nominated to become prime minister. Diena had serious concerns about his business practices but decided to back him on the editorial pages due to his support for NATO and EU membership.
“We didn’t have much choice,” says Raudseps, “otherwise we would fall back where Georgia and Ukraine were.” (Both countries were in considerable political turmoil at the time.)
Between 1995–2000, Šķēle served as prime minister three times. In 1998 he formed the People’s Party, which won parliamentary elections and held power even when the party founder was no longer in office.
More than a decade after Diena’s initial endorsement, Šķēle’s party was still in power—but Diena’s stance had changed dramatically.
The change culminated after the prime minister from Šķēle’s People’s Party had attempted to remove the head of the Corruption Prevention and Combating Bureau (KNAB), which was investigating some of the country’s business elites and the awarding of state contracts.
The political threat to the anti-corruption office was covered widely in Latvian media. But the coverage didn’t stop the prime minister, who announced the dismissal of KNAB’s head in September 2007. The action was so alarming that Catherine Todd Bailey, then the U.S. ambassador to Latvia, broke diplomatic norms by asking, in a public speech: “Will Latvians let the state become the playground of a few individuals where they line their own pockets?”
Sarmīte Ēlerte remembers being “stunned” by the brutality with which Šķēle’s party pushed the dismissal forward. A friend called her and said, “Sarmīte, do something.” The next day, Ēlerte told her colleagues at Diena she wouldn’t come into the office. Instead, she began calling her network of artists and cultural figures, urging them to join a rally outside Parliament.
Three weeks after the firing, more than 5,000 people heeded that call. They gathered in the rain to protest, marking the start of what became known as the “Umbrella Revolution.”
Latvia’s “Umbrella Revolution” in 2007 was supported by Diena and led to the prime minister’s resignation. Photo: LETA
“These were middle-class people,” says Ēlerte. “They came not for personal gain, but to support justice and democratic values.”
Within two months, the prime minister from Šķēle’s party was forced to resign, largely due to Diena’s influence.
But the newspaper’s influence would not last much longer. By the late 2000s, Latvia faced a double blow: the global financial crisis and a downturn in the print media sector. Diena, like many independent outlets, struggled with layoffs and financial losses.
Then came Bonnier’s decision to sell Diena. Bonnier, the Swedish publishing house and majority owner, had been a key shareholder since Diena transitioned to private ownership in 1992, increasing its stake over the years and expressing support and admiration for Diena’s journalistic achievements and profitability.
Ēlerte, who had left Diena a couple of years before the sale and eventually went into politics, said she believed a change in Bonnier’s management was a factor in the sale. “The older generation respected our achievements,” she says. “The younger one wasn’t interested.”
“I took it as a stab in the back. To me, this was the most terrible professional betrayal,” says Nellija Ločmele, the editor of the Diena publishing house at the time of the sale.
Bonnier’s leadership never fully explained why the company sold Diena, nor is it clear that Bonnier knew the new owners had links to Latvian oligarchs, as was revealed years later. Publicly, they framed the deal as a management buyout: a former business manager of Diena was the new owner’s representative, according to Bonnier. However, that manager had left Diena by the time of the sale, and he offered vague and shifting responses when journalists asked who the real owners were.
Then, in 2011, Latvia’s anti-corruption bureau, KNAB, launched an investigation, secretly recording conversations between an oligarch, Ainārs Šlesers, and his associates in a hotel room over a period of weeks or more. The tapes revealed discussions about which journalists at Diena should be dismissed, who should replace them, and how the newspaper could be leveraged to sway upcoming elections.
In 2017, the recordings were leaked to the media, exposing the oligarchs’ wish to take revenge on Diena, which had reported extensively on their questionable dealings over the years.
Diena’s reporting included investigations of Šlesers, a former transport minister who used his government position to advance private business interests in Riga’s Freeport. And it included investigative reporting on Aivars Lembergs, also heard on the recordings, for profiting from oil deals with Russia. The recorded conversations between Šlesers and Lembergs also made clear that Šķēle, the three-time prime minister, now with the wealth and power of a full-fledged oligarch, was connected to Diena’s new ownership; Šķēle was the subject of a series of articles written by this author while working at Diena, detailing how he built his business empire by privatizing the state food industry and acquiring millions of Euros worth of state land and property at bargain prices. Though the recordings revealed connections, the exact structure of Diena’s new ownership was never made public. Public records only list proxies, not the investors behind them.
“I believe that was one of the oligarchs’ big wins—to destroy Diena,” says Ločmele, who thinks they bought the paper to exact revenge on its journalists and silence further reporting on their business dealings.
After ousting experienced editors and witnessing nearly a third of the remaining staff walk out in protest, the new owners attempted to turn Diena into a political mouthpiece. Instead, under a weak professional team and management with little understanding of media dynamics, Diena lost most of its audience and today exists as a marginal newspaper with no impact.
However, the spirit of Diena has endured. Journalists who left after Bonnier sold the paper have gone on to become leaders in Latvia’s media landscape. One serves as editor-in-chief at Latvian Public Radio. Pauls Raudseps, Nellija Ločmele and other members of the former Diena editorial team launched a successful weekly magazine IR; it’s the outlet that in 2017 published the leaked conversations between the oligarchs behind Bonnier’s sale of Diena. And the author of this story, a former member of Diena’s investigative team, founded an award-winning nonprofit investigative journalism center, Re:Baltica. The center conducts deep investigations on Russia’s influence operations, money laundering, and crucial social issues in Latvia.
That legacy reflects the resilience of Diena’s journalists, who contribute to a vibrant media environment in Latvia. The country ranks among the top nations in the world for press freedom—Reporters Without Borders puts it in 12th place, above all the countries that were once part of the Soviet Union except for Estonia (which ranks 6th; Russia, by comparison, ranks 162nd).
This freedom is supported by a robust legal framework that upholds journalistic independence, fulfilling one of the important promises of Latvia’s hard-won freedom. But challenges—to Latvia and to its media—certainly persist. Though the record on corruption has improved over the past three decades, it’s still a prime focus of investigations by Latvian media, and too often, the wrongdoing they expose goes unpunished. Despite investigations by journalists and anti-corruption officials, only one oligarch—Aivars Lembergs—has been sentenced to four years in prison for financial crimes. But he is still free, awaiting a final verdict by Latvia’s Supreme Court.
For the media themselves, the challenges are similar to those facing journalism in other democratic Western countries: diminishing public trust and ongoing economic hardships.
Like its Baltic neighbors Estonia and Lithuania, Latvia has achieved its initial goal of integrating into Europe and securing a place in NATO. Yet even for the Baltics, democracy remains fragile, a reality underscored by the ongoing war in Ukraine. Russian disinformation, picked up and spread by populist politicians, is a particular problem for three small countries that feel threatened by their Russian neighbor.
“In 2003 [before joining the EU] and 2008 [the year of the financial crisis] everyone complained that times were tough,” says Estonian media expert Raul Rebane. Still, “We, the older generation, compared life to the Soviet Union and were happy, while the younger ones compared it to Luxembourg and were not happy.”
Rebane says Russia’s assault on Ukraine has brought a shift in thinking. “It’s clear that the war in Ukraine has sharpened our understanding of what we have and what’s at stake,” including the free press that has covered the past three decades of independence and reunion with Europe, he says. “Independent media is crucial for democracy.”◆
Inga Spriņģe is an award-winning investigative journalist and co-founder of The Baltic Center for Investigative Journalism Re:Baltica. Springe previously worked at Diena when it was Latvia’s leading newspaper. She was a visiting scholar at the Harriman Institute in 2018.
Featured photo (at the top): In August 1991, when hard-line Communists attempted to overthrow Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet special forces and armored vehicles moved into the center of Riga, the Latvian capital. Diena, the newspaper founded by pro-independent Latvian leaders who opposed the coup attempt and sought freedom from Soviet rule, was handed out to the soldiers. Photo: Jānis Deinats
