THE death of Yegor Yakovlev removes from journalism, in contemporary Russia, one of its great voices of conscience. He was, in the eyes of many, the father of modern Russian journalism, sustaining standards of independent reporting and commentary in an era when, after the first flush of glasnost, the governments of the Russian Federation increasingly required the state press to toe the line.

Yegor Vladimirovich Yakovlev was born in Moscow in 1930. In 1954 he graduated from the Moscow Institute of History and Archives. His first significant journalistic appointment came in 1963 when he was made editor of the magazine Sovetskaya Pechat', later known as Zhurnalist.

In 1968 he was removed from his post at Sovetskaya Pechat' and began what was to be a four-year stint at Izvestia as a special correspondent. In 1972 he moved to Prague where he was involved in the publication of a theoretical party journal. On his return in 1975 to the Soviet Union he continued at Izvestia for another 11 years. In 1985-86 he was its correspondent in Czechoslovakia.

In 1986 he became editor-in-chief of the news agency APN (Novosti) from which, in 1990, he secured the independence of Moscovskie Novosti. This was the paper of perestroika, the reform of the political and economic system which gained momentum in the Gorbachev years.

In those years queues grew around newsstands known to stock it, and on Pushkin Square, outside its editorial offices, crowds gathered, awaiting the new editions and discussing those they had read. Under Yakovlev, Moscovskie Novosti became more than a newspaper, it was an event. It was where, as Yevgeni Yevtushenko commented, the pulse of perestroika was felt.

On August 27, 1991, Yakovlev received a telephone call informing him that he had been appointed head of the state TV and radio company (later renamed Ostankino). His response to the call (likened at the time in the British press to the editor of the New Statesman being put in charge of the BBC) was calm: “I’d better come over to the studio,” he said.

There, his first action was an indication of the radical change he envisaged. With only three hours to go before transmission, he controversially scrapped the Soviet 6 o’clock news programme Vremya, which the nation had, over decades, grown to expect. He moved television programming out of the Soviet time warp and into the 20th century with a combination of sport, talk shows, soaps, quality news and political discussion programmes. At his Ostankino offices the ubiquitous picture of Lenin was replaced with a sea view, giving rise to the joke that “Lenin drowned”.

His time at Ostankino was short. By November 1992 his dedication to intelligent critique had drawn on him the hostility of the President of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, and he was duly sacked. The very qualities that had made him a leading figure of glasnost and perestroika were to make him unpopular with the powers that be, as they recentralised control over the press in the mid-1990s.

The pressures on television in those years were immense. Some saw it as a solely commercial venture: programmes would be made as cheaply as possible with no pretence at quality, advertising revenue being all that mattered; others alternated cheap drama imports with ideologically correct (by this time that meant pro-Yeltsin) news and political programming.

As the Russian Government struggled with military disaster in the Caucasus and acute financial problems at home, the Kremlin reined in the media. Yeltsin himself appeared increasingly out of control. Incidents such as the bizarre “non-visit” to Ireland, where Yeltsin landed but never emerged from his aircraft, were given minimal coverage by a state press which became increasingly more obsequious.

By 1995 the press freedom earned in the early days of perestroika had been so eroded that Yakovlev regarded the “velvet revolution” as having become a “velvet dictatorship”. But he refused to be silenced. In December 1992 he had set up the newspaper Obshchaya Gazeta which maintained the values of Moscovskie Novosti, providing a bastion of good journalism and intelligent liberal critique in a climate of sensationalism and self-censorship. He worked on the paper until 2002, and in more recent years he was a prominent commentator on political events.

Alongside his career in journalism, which won him international awards, Yakovlev was a respected historian, writing more than 20 books, including a biography of Lenin. He asked for the highest standards of journalism from those who worked for him, and would not tolerate sloppy writing, shoddy research or political banality. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last President of the Soviet Union and the chief architect of the glasnost and perestroika which effectively brought the monolithic USSR to an end, spoke of the “immense contribution he made to the renewal of this country”.

Yakovlev is survived by his wife, Irina, and by a daughter and a son who founded of the Kommersant publishing house.

Yegor Yakovlev, journalist, was born on March 14, 1930. He died on September 18, 2005, aged 75.