This chapter considers transformations of the press during perestroika and immediately after the Soviet collapse. On the example of the popular daily newspaper Komsomol’skaia pravda, Doucette shows that, between 1985 and 1995, the voice of the reader all but disappeared from the printed page: gone were letters and articles by readers, interactive activities, and announcements of reader-centric events like surveys, telethons, and receptions. This change was no mere casualty of a more general turn away from print media and toward television, but the result of deliberate editorial decision-making. The erosion of the Soviet-era relationship between readers and newspapers, the author argues, undermined the democratic potential of the press—and of early post-Soviet society as a whole—by discouraging popular investment in civic life.