What is Gleb Pavlovsky famous for? – Picture of the Day – Kommersant

February 27 after a long illness died Russian journalist and political scientist, founder of the Effective Policy Foundation, former dissident Gleb Pavlovsky. Details of his biography – in the help of “Kommersant”.

Pavlovsky Gleb Olegovich was born on March 5, 1951 in Odessa. In 1968 he entered the history department of the Odessa State University. During his studies, he became a member of the “Subject of Historical Activity” circle-commune, which adhered to an alternative view of Marxism. In 1969, he was expelled from the Komsomol “for anarchism and left-wing extremist deviation.”

In 1973, by distribution, he ended up in a rural school, where he taught in the Ukrainian language. A year later, he lost his job due to “political disloyalty”: he was detained by the KGB for distributing Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel The Gulag Archipelago.

In 1974 he moved to Moscow. To avoid prosecution for parasitism, he worked as a carpenter, construction worker, lumberjack. At the same time, he entered the circle of Soviet dissidents, becoming close to the historian Mikhail Gefter.

In 1978, he joined the editorial group of the samizdat magazine “Search” (closed three years later), published in emigrant publications.

In April 1982, he was arrested in the “Search” case for anti-Soviet activities. He cooperated with the investigation and pleaded guilty at the trial. From 1982 to 1985 he was in exile in the Komi ASSR, after which he returned to Moscow.

Since December 1985 – one of the founders of the first legal political opposition organization in Russia – the “Club of Social Initiatives” in Moscow. Participated in the creation of the “Moscow People’s Front”, the purpose of which was declared to be the construction of “democratic socialism”.

In 1986, he began collaborating with the monthly “Century of the XX and the World”, which was published by the Soviet Committee for the Defense of Peace. In 1990, he became its editor-in-chief, holding this position until the closure of the publication in 1995.

In 1987, he co-founded Vladimir Yakovlev’s Fact information service, which two years later became the first private news agency, Post Factum. Until 1993 he was its director. In 1991–1992, he was also Deputy Chairman of the Board of the Kommersant Publishing House.

From 1993 to 1994 he was a member of the editorial board of Obshchaya Gazeta, in 1994-1995 he was a consultant to the board of directors of Ogonyok, in 1995-1996 he was the founder and co-editor of the journalistic review Sreda. He also published his own magazine, Limits of Power, collaborated with Nezavisimaya Gazeta and Moskovsky Komsomolets.

In 1995, together with Maxim Meyer and Marat Gelman (recognized as a foreign agent), he created and headed the Effective Policy Foundation (FEP), which is known as the organizer of election campaigns for a number of political figures and associations. The fund conducted its first large-scale campaigns for the leader of the Union of Right Forces bloc, Sergei Kiriyenko, who ran for mayor of Moscow in 1999, then worked on the presidential campaign of Vladimir Putin.

In 1999, the publication Gazeta.ru appeared as a FEP project, and the foundation also participated in the creation of SMI.ru, Vesti.ru and Lenta.ru. By 2002 FEP and Pavlovsky left all these projects.

In 2004, he worked in the election headquarters of the leader of the Party of Regions Viktor Yanukovych in the presidential elections in Ukraine. From 2005 to 2008, he hosted the Real Politics program on NTV.

In 2011, the presidential administration ceased cooperation with the FEP, and Mr. Pavlovsky was relieved of the post of adviser to its head, Sergei Naryshkin, which he had held since 2008. The political scientist openly spoke out in support of the re-election of the then President Dmitry Medvedev. In 2012, he took part in protests on Bolotnaya Square.

In 2021, the Effective Policy Fund was excluded from the Unified State Register of Legal Entities due to the inaccuracy of the information provided.

He was awarded the medal of the Order “For Merit to the Fatherland” II degree (2008), laureate of the Alexander Pyatigorsky Literary Prize (2020).