A Hero of Independent Media

The founder of Glasnost died yesterday but so did one of Glasnost’s staunchest defenders

Maria “Manana” Aslamazyan in Siberia, 1993

Everyone I know who traveled to the former Soviet Union and worked there during that all-too-brief window of openness in the 1990s had someone watching their back. For me that person was Manana Aslamazyan. On August 30th, 2022 she was blindsided by a car in Yerevan…