Novaya Zhizn (newspaper)

Founding and Character

Novaya Zhizn was launched in Petrograd on April 18 (May 1), 1917, edited by Maxim Gorky and published by A. N. Tikhonov. It drew together writers from the literary journal Letopis and Menshevik-Internationalist intellectuals aligned with Julius Martov's faction. Contributors included Nikolai Sukhanov, Vladimir Bazarov, V. A. Desnitsky, and Anatoly Lunacharsky. Gorky sought to transcend the factional divide between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, but the paper's political line was effectively that of the Menshevik-Internationalists. According to Sukhanov's memoirs, Novaya Zhizn was the most widely read daily in Petrograd, with the largest circulation among the city's newspapers, including among working-class readers.

October 1917: The Kamenev-Zinoviev Affair

The paper's most consequential moment came on October 18 (31), 1917. After the Bolshevik Central Committee voted to proceed with an armed uprising, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, who had opposed the decision, sought to publish their dissent in the party press. When refused, they turned to Novaya Zhizn. The note, published under Kamenev's name, argued that the "adventure of an uprising" would endanger the party and the revolution, and in doing so revealed the secret CC resolution to the Provisional Government and the public. Lenin denounced the act as "unheard-of strike-breaking" and demanded their expulsion; Stalin later weaponized the episode repeatedly in factional struggles throughout the 1920s.

Closure and Legacy

The paper was briefly suspended by the Provisional Government in early September 1917, reappearing for a week under the title Svobodnaya Zhizn (Free Life). After the October Revolution, Novaya Zhizn grew increasingly critical of the Soviet government. Gorky's series Untimely Thoughts (Nesvoyevremennyye mysli), published in its pages, offered a searing indictment of revolutionary violence and cultural destruction and remained effectively banned in the USSR until 1988. A Moscow edition was launched in June 1918, but on July 16, 1918, the Bolshevik government closed all remaining non-Soviet newspapers, and both editions were shut down. The paper is distinct from the Bolshevik organ of the same name that appeared briefly in 1905.