While these questions have not gone away entirely, the Lebedevs have consolidated their membership in London’s social, business and political elite. When Evgeny Lebedev recently threw a party, hosted by Elton John and David Furnish, to celebrate receiving British citizenship, Mayor Boris Johnson gave a speech and Prime Minister David Cameron sent congratulations.

And Fleet Street now seems more interested in the Lebedevs’ new ventures, like i, and the impressive turnaround at The Standard.

“The most basic reason to welcome the Lebedevs’ ownership of The Independent and Standard titles is that they are spending money on journalism,” said Tim Luckhurst, a professor of journalism at the University of Kent. “At a time like this, when such investment is sorely needed, you aren’t going to find anyone in British journalism who will knock a proprietor like that.”

When the Lebedevs bought a controlling stake in The Evening Standard from Daily Mail & General Trust in 2009, it had fallen on particularly hard times. Circulation of the newspaper, long a fixture of London afternoon commutes, had dropped to less than 200,000, as free newspapers moved onto its turf and a relentlessly downbeat editorial tone grated on many readers.

The Lebedevs revamped the newspaper by bringing in a new editor, Geordie Greig, from the society magazine Tatler. Then they gambled by switching to free distribution of The Standard, a decision that paid off when the other free papers bowed out of the market.

Circulation of The Standard has risen to more than 700,000, allowing the paper to raise its advertising prices.

Barring nasty surprises from the economy, it is on track to break even in 2011 after years of losses, Evgeny Lebedev said.

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“The Standard is outperforming all of our business plans,” he said. “The Independent papers are still more complicated.”

The Independent, acquired from Independent News & Media in March, is the smallest of the major national newspapers in Britain, with a circulation of 177,000. But it has often been an innovator; in 2003, for example, it was the first of the country’s national broadsheets to adopt a tabloid format.

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Now the industry is watching The Independent’s latest move, the introduction of i at the end of October. In an effort to reach new readers, or those who no longer pick up a daily paper, i is sold at a bargain-basement 20 pence, or about 30 U.S. cents, a fifth the price of The Independent.

Much of the content of i comes from The Independent, allowing the Lebedevs to minimize the investment in the new paper. But it has an entirely different look, with shorter articles and a graphics-driven design along the lines of USA Today.

“It looks good and is doing what newspapers should have been doing for decades: repackaging their content,” said Jim Chisholm, an industry consultant in Lille, France. “Why can Ford or Renault make different models in the same plant, but not newspapers? I does exactly that, in an innovative way.”

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The Independent has yet to report sales figures for the new paper, though analysts say the Lebedevs’ initial circulation goal of 400,000 might be optimistic.

One concern, that the less expensive i would cannibalize sales of The Independent, does not appear to have materialized yet, however; in November, circulation of The Independent was down 5 percent from a year earlier, but that was a better performance than any of the other three quality, general interest national papers in Britain — The Guardian, The Times and The Telegraph — turned in over the period.

While sharing journalistic resources, the editors of The Independent and i have strived to give the papers a different look and feel. On the day after Prince William announced his engagement to Kate Middleton, for example, i splashed the couple across the front page while The Independent, which often turns up its nose at populist stories, carried the news inside.

Evgeny Lebedev is no stranger to the gossip columns, where he is sometimes pictured in the company of the actress Joely Richardson. He said he wanted i to occupy a niche between the quality publications and Britain’s raucous, celebrity-obsessed tabloids.

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“I think there is a difference between Nicole Kidman and Katie Price,” he said, referring to a British glamour model. “If you know the difference between the two, you can make a newspaper entertaining, without going totally downmarket.”

The Lebedevs are also paying more attention to the Web, where The Standard and The Independent have lagged behind newspapers like The Guardian and The Daily Mail, for example. Recently they hired a top digital executive away from News Corp., which publishes The Times, to head The Independent’s Web efforts.

Evgeny Lebedev said The Independent and The Standard had no plans to emulate the News Corp. strategy of charging readers for Web access, after The Times and other papers published by that company recently erected so-called pay walls.

“One of the critics at The Times wrote a negative review of my Japanese restaurant,” he said, referring to Sake No Hana in London. “When I realized I would have had to pay to read it, I couldn’t be bothered.”

While Evgeny Lebedev has been playing an active role in developing strategies for The Standard and The Independent, he insisted that he did not interfere in the editorial process. Any articles with Russian themes are pored over on and off Fleet Street for signs of bias, however.

A recent profile of the mayor of St. Petersburg, Valentina Matviyenko, in The Independent, portraying her as a possible future leader of Russia, drew a protest to Britain’s Press Complaints Commission from a group of Russian businessmen, politicians and others.

Evgeny Lebedev said he had been unaware of the article until it appeared in print. He noted that Novaya Gazeta, in which Mikhail S. Gorbachev is an investment partner of the Lebedevs, has written critically about Ms. Matviyenko.

“One only has to look at that to see the plurality that exists in our papers,” he said. “Our journalists are free to write whatever they feel strongly about.”