Jeff Magness notes that the dramatic and (for it) unusual cover of Izvestia (above) has had an unfortunate result for the editor and Russian press freedom.

Nevertheless, the impulse to play down bad news appeared to remain strong here. On Monday, the editor in chief of Izvestia, Raf Shakirov, announced his forced resignation after publishing a front page on Saturday that carried nothing but one huge, harrowing photograph of a man carrying a wounded child.

Speaking on Radio Liberty, Mr. Shakirov, who had built the former Communist government newspaper into one of the country's most forthright publications, said he had been forced by the newspaper's owner to resign for what he called his "emotional'' coverage of the siege.

"We ran that photo to show what this means to our country,'' he said. "And basically this image was later confirmed. This was a war.''

Commenting on Mr. Shakirov's dismissal, Viktor Loshak, the editor of the popular magazine Ogonyok, told the radio station, "This scares me because we are moving far away from the country that we had been trying to build for the past 10 years."

>Grief in Russia Mixes With Harsh Words for Government [The New York Times]