The Glossy Mirage

We’re going to make a new magazine. Absolutely new. Ours. A Russian magazine,” a publisher declares to employees in a glass-walled conference room. The staff, reeling from the news that their American counterparts pulled their local license, nod along listlessly. The editor, now incensed by their pliability, scolds them. “You don’t give a shit,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what name the magazine publishes under, it doesn’t matter what you write about, as long as everything stays the same—an advance on the fifteenth, payment on the first.” He rises. “I don’t intend to publish this crap,” he says, and storms out. The door rattles behind him. No one mentions the invasion of Ukraine.

That scene comes from The First Issue, a 2024 TV show scripted by Sergei Minaev, the former editor in chief of Esquire Russia. It is not strictly true to life, and yet it reflects the wartime mood of Russian glossies—many of which had been, until troops moved, in February of 2022, local versions of American magazines published by Hearst and Condé Nast. A week into the war, Russia introduced censorship laws barring people from criticizing the country’s aggression—the penalty came with a sentence of up to fifteen years in prison—and independent media were banned. Even so much as calling the invasion a “war” instead of a “special military operation” became a crime. Journalists fled en masse; international outlets—including the BBC, Euronews, and France 24—were inaccessible. By early March, Roger Lynch, the CEO of Condé Nast, announced that the company would pause its local editions and shut down operations in the country. “It is paramount that we are able to produce our content without risk to our staff’s security and safety,” he wrote. (I’ve been a Condé contributor.) A day later, Hearst revoked its Russian editions’ licenses.