Skip to main content
Support

Sergey Parkhomenko

Senior Advisor

    Term

    November 6, 2017 — November 28, 2018

    Professional affiliation

    Journalist, publisher, organizer of civic projects

    Sergey Parkhomenko is a Russian journalist, publisher, and founder of several projects aimed at developing civic activism and promoting liberal values in Russia. Since August 2003, Parkhomenko has been presenting Sut' Sobytyi (Crux of the Matter) on Radio Echo of Moscow, a weekly program making sense of the events of the past week. When the radio station was shut down by the Kremlin immediately after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, he became the host of his own YouTube channel under the same name.

    Wilson Center Projects

    "Creation of an Independent Media Platform in Russia"

    Full Biography

    Sergey Parkhomenko is a Russian journalist, publisher, and founder of several projects aimed at developing civic activism and promoting liberal values in Russia.

    He founded and was the first editor in chief (1995–2001) of Itogi (Results), Russia's first current affairs weekly, published in cooperation with Newsweek. He also served as editor in chief of several publishing houses producing translated fiction and nonfiction and of Vokrug Sveta (Around the World), Russia's oldest monthly magazine.

    Parkhomenko is one of the founders of Dissernet, a network community dedicated to fighting plagiarism in Russian science and academia, as well as the founder and coordinator of Last Address, a movement to commemorate the victims of mass political repression in the Soviet Union and Russia.

    Parkhomenko is the leader of the Redkollegia project, a prestigious professional award created to support independent journalism in Russia. Since November 2017, he has been senior advisor at the Kennan Institute and head of the Russian Newsroom Project, which aims to support independent Russian journalists and foster professional contacts between the Russian journalistic community and their colleagues in Europe and the United States.

    Since August 2003, Parkhomenko has been the author and presenter of Sut' Sobytyi (Crux of the Matter), a weekly program on Radio Echo of Moscow. When the radio station was shut down by the Kremlin immediately after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, he became the host of his own YouTube channel under the same name.

    Major Publications

    Previous Terms

    George F. Kennan Fellow, Kennan Institute: "Creating an Independent Media Platform" - Designing an independent online media platform is an important topic for Russia and other post-Soviet countries, where many "citizen journalism" projects are being actively developed. These initiatives are crucial for protecting the freedom of speech. Russian journalists and general public interested in free exchange of information and opinion are in desperate need of organizational, technological and managerial solutions that would provide for an effective defense against government pressure and outright censorship. There is a great need for truly innovative, thought-through, technologically advanced ways of designing new generation media — those that would reliably protect the free exchange of information and opinions online. It seems that the most effective method of ensuring the freedom of speech is the introduction of collective, "distributed" information projects. Such projects can be best organized through the establishment of volunteer communities — groups of civil society activists that work together to develop and maintain information resources.