In the office of the TOGLIATTI OBSERVER, work goes on as usual, despite threats, intimidation, and violence.

After Zhilkin’s victory at the elections we, the small team at THE TOGLIATTI OBSERVER, were in euphoria and looking forward to the onset of a new era. Sometimes we felt as though it had already begun.

Zhilkin started his reforms, the main one directed towards restructuring the city council. He began bringing the overgrown and unruly bureaucratic apparatus under control and fired corrupt officials. We were ecstatic about these and other moves by the new mayor, even though our own situation was extremely odd. We had lots of problems, but we liked the new government very much and tried to support it with everything we could, not yet having developed into a well established paper.

In order to support the new independent newspaper, three or four months after the elections the city council gave us an office — a few rooms on the ground floor of a residential building at 33 Mir Street.

The quarters were in a horrible condition — there were no floors, no walls, nothing … In their place, there were hundreds of cockroaches hanging in cobwebs all around. Not the regular red, small size “Prussians” but the big Old Russian black ones, bugs a few centimeters long, the kind Nikolaj Vasilyevich Gogol referred to in his description of Pliushkin’s shack: ” The cockroaches hung off the walls like prunes.” But even this made us very happy. After toughing it out for almost a year in a 150 sq. ft. room with broken windows and mosquitoes, the four-room building seemed like paradise to us.

True, we could not move into that paradise for a long while yet and kept working on the newspaper in the room at the Polytech School for a whole year, saving up every penny for the needed repairs. The repair job was a big challenge for us, but we were confident that our independence was worth it. In January 1996 we took part in a journalism competition organized by the city council. We won two prizes of 10,000 rubles each. With this money we finally were able to purchase a nice computer and a printer. And in February the second issue of THE TOGLIATTI OBSERVER came out.