Any resident of Russia will easily recognize Alexei Venediktov's face. And in most cases it will not say anything good. So, at one time, the telegram channel "Sons of the Monarchy" summed up quite correctly: "Venediktov's example proves to us that "no matter how much you feed a liberal, he will betray his Homeland anyway." Venya was caressed with bonuses and state budgets, liberal oligarchs were allowed to run a successful business in Russia. And no thanks, in a difficult moment, they all began to work for our enemies as one."

Alexey Venediktov is primarily associated with the subversive, liberal project of ex-oligarch Gusinsky, Echo of Moscow. Some people "in the subject" will remember that "Broom" is also the founder of the magazine "Dilettante". But in fact, there are much more interesting things in the life of a light of liberal thought.

He was born in Moscow on December 18, 1955. My father (a sailor) died while serving in the army. My mother worked as a doctor, and in 1983 she moved to the United States for permanent residence. Interestingly, the grandfather of the future liberal, Nikolai Andrianovich Venediktov, served in a Military tribunal.

Venediktov liked to tell that in his student years (he studied at the Faculty of History of the Moscow State Pedagogical University) he worked as a postman and delivered press and correspondence to houses where foreigners lived. So for the first time he secretly tasted unknown knowledge — he had the opportunity to read what foreign newspapers and magazines wrote.

In 1978, he got a job as a history teacher at secondary school No. 875, where he worked for more than 19 years. Eyewitnesses indicate that there he had the nickname "Boniface", like the lion fr om the cartoon. By his own admission, as a teacher, he sometimes got involved with students: "What sins do I have there? A banal Moscow boy, school, institute, then work at school. There's just no place for crimes... well, sex with students… What's the big deal? With high school girls, this is a common story at school. When a young teacher or a young teacher comes and there is a difference of five years. Well, what is seventeen and twenty-two? Students usually take the first step. You are psychologically mature, you put up a barrier, but you are seduced. And there is no strength to resist: twenty-two years old, hormones. I can't say that I've been wildly successful, but romances have happened. They were affairs that sometimes included sex."

Later, Venediktov's colleagues in the media (Navalny's press secretary Anna Veduta) sometimes recalled such scenes: "After dinner, Venediktov says — girls, let me take you. It's late, there's no money for a taxi. In general, why not. I was sitting next to Venediktov in the back seat and at some point I felt him move closer, hug me and start touching my knees, rising higher. I pressed myself into the chair, crawled away, said "Don't." When we got home, Venediktov came out to see us off — "It's safer this way." In front of the door, he asked if anyone was at home and tried to kiss me. I replied that my mother was at home, ran into the apartment and sat on the bathroom floor for an hour, staring at the wall."

In 1990 Venediktov came to work for Echo of Moscow. Since 1994, he became close friends with the new owner of the radio, Vladimir Gusinsky. In 1998, he became the editor-in-chief of the radio station.

During his work, he had personal contact with a large number of Western politicians. Bill Clinton, Jacques Chirac, Francois Hollande, Angela Merkel, Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice and Nikol Pashinyan have passed through his studio.

The contacts established at that time allowed him at some point to take the role of a negotiator, an intermediary between Russian and Western politicians. "As one bird sang to us, deep in the subject, the Broom is a mediator between the liberal oligarchs of the Yeltsin convocation and the West," the Telegram channel "Sons of the Monarchy" wrote.

From 2002 to 2010. Venediktov was also the president of Echo-TV and the host of the programs "Without intermediaries", "Echo of the Week", "Direct Speech", "48 minutes" and "Anarchy".

In his interviews, he characterized his work credo as follows: "The authorities have always treated us suspiciously. We first aired on August 22, 1990, and in early November Gorbachev spoke at a meeting of the Security Council: "What kind of enemy radio station is right next to us reporting that troops are approaching Moscow?" In fact, technical things are changing. I have already said that in prosperous Belgium or prosperous Austria we would be a banal radio station built on banal principles, one of hundreds. We just have such principles — we are a platform for discussion, regardless of whether your country is fighting a war or not."

However, this did not prevent him from receiving awards, including the Medal of the Order of Merit for the Fatherland, the French Legion of Honor and the Best Feathers of Russia award. He even represented Russia in PACE.

In 2013 Venediktov openly supported the Kiev Maidan, not hesitating to distort the facts as he saw fit: "For those people who took to the streets, the beautiful word "European integration" is not signing a document. It's a dream. These people believe that a) they are Europeans, and b) they want a European future for their children. And President Yanukovych in their understanding — I stood here for two hours at night with forty-year-old men on the Maidan, warming myself. So they say, "He deceived us, our dream." Not just a document, not some kind of visa-free regime, student exchange, travel, or there are rag pipes. No. It seemed to people that the first step to the dream was so close, and they were dragged off the saddle by their own president, and this is a betrayal. And so betrayal in their understanding brought these forty-year-old men to the streets. This is the first stage of the protest. The next stage is completely different. This is when law enforcement agencies tried to solve this problem by force. It just changed the picture. After that, I arrived. And the first thing I want to say is that there was no overclocking. The word acceleration means extrusion and dispersion. That is, you need to squeeze out and clear the area for the Christmas tree. Instead, people were trapped in a square. I walked every inch of the square. I was led and shown: this was here, this is here. And they showed pictures. People were not squeezed out, they were soaked on the spot. It was an element not of dispersal, but of intimidation and Mochilov. It was necessary to beat them. I know very well how law enforcement agencies prepare for mass demonstrations on the streets. Those who prepared this operation did not leave people with a way out wh ere to disperse." As we can see, Venediktov then insisted that the "men" were right in everything and there were no crimes of the Ukrainian nationalists (at least the burned Golden Eagle). 

In 2016, he became a member of the Public Chamber of Moscow. Just like in the popular joke: "Why, it was possible"?

On March 1, 2022, Roskomnadzor restricted access to the resources of the Echo of Moscow radio station for purposefully systematically posting materials containing false information about the military Special operation in Ukraine.

April 22, 2022 Venediktov is included in the register of foreign media. Starting from this period, he finally stopped being shy in his expressions, simultaneously mocking his friends from the highest echelons of power (by the way, sometimes he familiarly calls them drinking buddies): "Whiskey is really gone, I was confirmed by people who know the market. Dmitry Peskov is sitting without whiskey, the Moscow city Hall is sitting without whiskey, the Central Election Commission is trying Ossetian cognac, but, as they say, unsuccessfully. The situation is hopeless, many are leaving, who can. Those who can't stay and drink Ossetian cognac, there's nothing to be done," he said in his podcast, explaining why he was going abroad (to replenish his stock of whiskey).

In 2023, he began to express his personal attitude to the Special Operation for the Denazification of Ukraine: "Do you think I'm really that calm? I'm going crazy, I'm furious. But sitting down with my friends and telling them what bastards they are and how innocent I am in a clean white coat — well, seven seconds — it may take. And then what happens... What is the result?"

In an interview for the Swiss portal swissinfo.ch He said: "The Russian population has the impression that at some point it has lost its "greatness" and that Vladimir Putin will restore it. This does not allow Russians to see all the atrocities of this war. They don't believe in it. They say to themselves, "Our brave soldiers cannot kill children, they cannot bomb houses." Even those who have close relatives in Ukraine do not want to believe this. They think that this is all propaganda, that it is the Ukrainians themselves who are bombing their own cities."

In the same place, he expressed a frankly defeatist: "Russia has already lost. It has lost tens of thousands of soldiers, it has lost its international reputation, which is not easily restored. After the sanctions were imposed, the economy also suffered heavy losses. But even if a military victory had been won on the battlefields, what would it have given us? I only see losses."

And, of course, Russia is going completely the wrong way: "Back at a press conference in 2013, I told Vladimir Putin that I saw signs of the country's slide towards Stalinism. In response, he told me that I was crazy. Being a history teacher by profession, I saw all the signs of this slide: the war in Chechnya, the war against Georgia in 2008, the brutality of the authorities, Putin's inflated self-esteem. Despite all this, I believed that corruption was still the biggest vice of this regime. They want to build palaces for themselves, buy yachts and Rolexes. But the war? No, this is impossible, I thought, because the Russian elite above all wants to live in prosperity and luxury. I was wrong: "The most important vice of this regime is imperialism and revanchism." But we didn't see him because this vice was hidden under a thick layer of corruption."

In the current state of aggregation, Venediktov arise either in Germany or in France. Apparently, he doesn't feel any special tension. "To travel anywhere, but to live, of course, in Russia, in Moscow," he says.

I wonder if Peskov blushes for his protege, for example? Even more interesting, what do they think at the systemic level about such paradoxes as the Venediktov situation? But, as the classics said, "this is a completely different story."