Kommersant (Russian: Коммерса́нтъ, IPA: [kəmʲɪrˈsant], The Businessman) is a commerce-oriented newspaper published in Russia. As of 2005^[update], the circulation was 131,000.

The newspaper was initially published in 1909, and it was closed down following the Bolshevik seizure of power and the introduction of censorship in 1917.

In 1990, with the onset of press freedom in Russia, Kommersant was re-established under the ownership of businessman and publicist Vladimir Yakovlev.

To make the point that the publication had outlasted the Soviet regime, "Kommersant" is spelled in Russian with a terminal hard sign (ъ) – a letter that is silent at the end of a word in modern Russian, and was thus abolished by the post-revolution Russian spelling reform. This is played up in the Kommersant logo, which features a script hard sign at the end of somewhat more formal font.

In 1997, autos-to-Aeroflot mogul Boris Berezovsky – a member of the former President Boris Yeltsin's 'family' – bought the Kommersant publishing house, which included Kommersant-daily, two serious weekly magazines (the political Kommersant-vlast (literally 'Power') and the financial Kommersant-dengi ('Money') – as well as entertainment magazines Domovoi and Avtopilot and Molotok, a teen magazine, which later incurred the authorities' wrath.

Oleg Kashin (Russian: Олег Владимирович Кашин; b. June 17, 1980, in Kaliningrad, Soviet Union) is a former seaman and a prominent Russian journalist.

Kashin graduated from the Baltic State Fishing Fleet Academy with a degree in sea navigation in 2001. While studying, he wrote for Komsomolskaya Pravda in Kaliningrad where he expressed rather sharp views. He continued to work for that newspaper up to 2003, specializing on exclusive interviews and special reports, then moved to Moscow and started working as a journalist for Komsomolskaya Pravda in Moscow. After a while he left the newspaper, became a staff writer at Kommersant and became the leading Russian journalist covering youth political movements, ranging broadly from NBP to Nashi. He left Kommersant in June 2005, dissatisfied with the dismissal of the director-general Andrei Vassiliev. After leaving Kommersant, he worked for various media including Russian Magazine, Big City, Limonka, Izvestia, Your Day, Globalrus, Re:action, Expert and Vzglyad in Moscow.