Aleksei Alekseevich Venediktov is a Russian journalist, editor-in-chief of the Ekho Moskvy radio station, and also the publisher of the journal, the historical journal Diletant.
Alexei Venediktov was born in Moscow on December 18, 1955. His paternal grandfather Nikolai Andrianovich Venediktov led the NKVD detachments during the Second World War, for which he was awarded the Order of the Red Star. His father, Alexei Nikolaevich Venediktov, a submarine officer, died tragically literally a month before the birth of his son. His mother, Eleanor Abramovna Dykhovichnaya, worked as a doctor all her life, and in 1983 she emigrated with her sister Alexei to the United States. One of her cousins is the famous Russian director Ivan Dykhovichny. The popular musician Andrei Makarevich is also a distant relative of the Venediktov family.
Career
Venediktov was educated at the Moscow State Pedagogical University, which he graduates in 1978. After leaving school, he worked for some time as a postman, and then for two decades in a row was a history teacher at Moscow school No875.
In 1990, he began his career at the Ekho Moskvy radio station as a columnist. Very quickly, he becomes the head of the news department, and since 1998 he has occupied the chair of the chief editor. he started as a newspaper columnist and reporter and later headed the Newsroom. During his work, he interviewed Bill Clinton, Jacques Chirac, Francois Hollande, Ilham Aliyev, Angels Merkel, Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice, Nikola Pashinyan and many other prominent political figures. From 2002 to 2010, Venediktov was also president of Echo-TV Russia.
In 2006, he organized the TV show "In the Circle of the World" together with Svetlana Sorokina on the Domashny TV channel. It was closed for two weeks, ostensibly due to harsh criticism of the Russian judicial system, although the producer of the channel, Alexander Rodnyansky, said that this was not so.
In February 2012, Venediktov resigned from the board of directors of Echo in protest against the intention of Gazprom Media to make staff changes in the leadership of the radio station. Venediktov returned to the council in 2014, but four years later he leaves him again. This time he opposed cutting the station’s budget.
Until 2015, 33.02% of all Ekho Moskvy shares belonged to the American company EM-holding, of which a third part belonged to Venediktov and Yuri Fedutinov (ex-executive director of the station) and Israeli media tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky and his partners. But in 2015, the Russian State Duma adopted a new law prohibiting foreign citizens from owning more than 20% of the shares of national mass media. In order to circumvent it, the Russian company Echo of Moscow Holding was registered. As of 2016, he owned 13.10% of the total number of shares (49.5% of them belonged to Venediktov personally), while the American company controlled 19.92% of the shares.
In 2012, Alesey Alekseevich founded the first popular historical magazine Diletant in Russia. In 2014, he became the sole publisher of the magazine; in 2018, the “amateur” tirade reached 60, 000 copies.
Venediktov characterizes his political views as conservative, and considers himself a reactionary. According to him, his political ideals are Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
