Segodnya was a Russian-language

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

 newspaper published in Riga

Riga

Riga is the capital and largest city of Latvia. With 702,891 inhabitants Riga is the largest city of the Baltic states, one of the largest cities in Northern Europe and home to more than one third of Latvia's population. The city is an important seaport and a major industrial, commercial,...

, Latvia

Latvia

Latvia , officially the Republic of Latvia , is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by Estonia , to the south by Lithuania , to the east by the Russian Federation , to the southeast by Belarus and shares maritime borders to the west with Sweden...

 from 1919 to 1940.

Its editorial line was liberal

Liberalism

Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...

 and democratic. It had a comparatively well-developed network of foreign correspondents and extensive analysis of European affairs, making it popular amongst Russian émigrés, and thus the Russian newspaper with the largest circulation outside the USSR in the 1930s.

The newspaper was shut down by the Soviet authorities following the occupation and annexation of Latvia by the USSR in 1940. Due to the paper's editorial line critical of Soviet communism

Communism

Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...

, a number of the persons connected with Segodnya were singled out for persecution by the NKVD

NKVD

The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....

.

A number of its staff and contributors came from Latvia's Jewish community

History of the Jews in Latvia

The History of the Jews in Latvia dates back to the first Jewish colony established in Piltene in 1571. Jews contributed to Latvia's development until the Northern War , which decimated Latvia's population...

, and perished in the Holocaust during Latvia's occupation by Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...

in 1941–1944.

Literature

• Abyzov, Iu. (ed.), Gazeta "Segodnia", 1919–1940: rospis. Riga: Latviiskaia natsional'naia biblioteka, 2001. 2 v. ISBN 9984607348 (ch. 1) ISBN 9789984607344 (ch. 1) ISBN 9984607364 (ch. 2) ISBN 9789984607368 (ch. 2)
• Равдин Б., Флейшман Л., Абызов Ю. «Русская печать в Риге: из истории газеты „Сегодня“ 1930-х годов», Stanford 1997

External links

• Part of newspaper's archive available (until 1938)
• http://forum.myriga.info/lofiversion/index.php/t598.html
• Letters by A. Milrud
• Feigmanis A. Latvian Jewish Intelligentsia, Victims of the Holocaust