So here we are, and how happy we are to be here!


This newspaper began as a flash of inspiration last October. It has been a long road over the past year from that twinkle in the publisher's eye to the birth of The Moscow Times as a daily newspaper.


The fact that we are able today to launch an English-language paper published five days a week in Moscow is a testament to the determination of a hardworking group of individuals, to the support of our ever-widening foreign community and, most of all, to these historic times.


Historic because of the momentous nature of the changes occurring daily around us in Moscow and in Russia. Historic too, on a different level, because never before has Russia allowed a community of foreigners to take part so broadly in the forging of its future.


Our goal, as we begin the somewhat daunting task of daily publication, is to serve this community. We are here for you; you are the very reason for our existence. We hope constantly to interest and inform you, to amuse and provoke you, and to make the challenge of living in Moscow a thoroughly more rewarding experience. We hope also to create a dialogue with you, making these pages, and especially this page, a forum for the exchange of ideas on the issues affecting us all.


Looking ahead, we also envision a larger purpose. We learned with pleasure from the readership survey we conducted this summer that many of our readers are Russian. We intend to address their needs and interests as well. For as the barriers of the last decades come down, we hope more and more to become a part of the larger community around us.


We see this newspaper as a unique opportunity. As foreigners who have arrived here without the terrible baggage of the Soviet past, we bring to current events a fresh, and hopefully refreshing, point of view. Through a number of new features, including the "On This Date" box in the lower right-hand corner of this page, we hope to help Russia rediscover its past. Through daily reporting of events as they unfold, we will document history as it happens.


We hope that, 100 years from now, this newspaper will be the kind of document historians will turn to for the study of this most fascinating if difficult era. We feel very strongly that we are here at a privileged moment in time, a moment that has made our existence possible. To serve the foreign community, to rediscover Russia's history, record its present and perhaps in our small way help create its future -- these are our aims. Watch this space.