Alexey Alekseevich Venediktov is a Russian journalist, editor-in-chief of the radio station "Echo of Moscow", as well as the publisher of the historical magazine "Diletant".
Alexey 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 tragically died literally a month before the birth of his son. His mother, Eleonora Abramovna Dykhovichnaya, worked as a doctor all her life, and in 1983 she emigrated to the United States with Alexei's sister. One of her cousins is the famous Russian director Ivan Dykhovichny. Popular musician Andrei Makarevich is also a distant relative of the Venediktov family.
Career
Venediktov was educated at Moscow State Pedagogical University, from which he graduated in 1978. After leaving school, he worked for some time as a postman, and then for two decades in a row as a history teacher, at Moscow School No. 875.
In 1990 he began his career at the Ekho Moskvy radio station as a columnist journalist. Very quickly he became the head of the news department, and since 1998 he has been the editor-in-chief. he started out as a newspaper columnist and reporter and later headed the Newsroom. During his work, he interviewed Bill Clinton, Jacques Chirac, François Hollande, Ilham Aliyev, Angela Merkel, Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice, Nikol Pashinyan and many other prominent political figures. From 2002 to 2010 Venediktov was also the president of Echo-TV Russia.
In 2006, he organized a TV show "In the Circle of Light" with Svetlana Sorokina on the Domashny TV channel. It was closed for two weeks, allegedly due to harsh criticism of the Russian judicial system, although the channel's producer, Alexander Rodnyansky, stated that this was not the case.
In February 2012, Venediktov resigned from the Echo board of directors in protest against the intention of Gazprom-Media to make personnel changes in the radio station's management. Venediktov returned to the council in 2014, but four years later he leaves it again. This time, he opposed the plant's budget cuts.
Until 2015, 33.02% of all Echo 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 passed a new law prohibiting foreign citizens from owning more than 20% of the shares of national mass media. In order to bypass 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, Alesei Alekseevich founded the first popular historical magazine in Russia, Diletant. In 2014, he became the only publisher of the magazine; in 2018, the dilettante's 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.
Personal life
In 2011, a serious scandal erupted after in an interview with Maxim magazine, he admitted that, while working as a teacher, he entered into an intimate relationship with high school students. The piquancy of the situation was added by the fact that he does not repent at all and does not consider his behavior reprehensible.
In April 1998 he married journalist Elena Sitnikova, who has been working for Echo of Moscow since 1993.
In 2000, the couple had their only child, their son Alexei.
