Viktor Khelemendik

Viktor Sergeyevich Khelemendik was born on 7 November 1934 in the village of Zhovta Krucha, about thirty kilometres from the island of Khortytsia in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine. In a 2014 interview with the historian Alexander Chernyak he recalled that his father, Sergei Yakovlevich, had organised the village collective farm at the age of 22, was briefly arrested on a false denunciation in 1937, and later served in the Second World War, receiving the Order of the Red Star. His mother, Tatyana Romanovna, was a teacher.

As a child he lived through the German occupation, staying with his grandfather in the village of Tarasovka, and he described the hangings and deportations he witnessed. He learned to read early alongside his older brother. After school he entered the philosophy faculty of Kyiv University, moved after two years to the journalism faculty, and graduated with honours in 1957.

After university Khelemendik was assigned to the Ukrainian youth newspaper Molod Ukrainy as a literary staff writer, and around 1960 he became editor in chief of Kievsky Komsomolets. In Moscow he worked on the magazine Selskaya Molodyozh and served as an instructor of the Komsomol Central Committee. In May 1964 Boris Stukalin, chairman of the newly created RSFSR Press Committee, persuaded him to become chief editor of its social, political and agricultural literature section, which reviewed publishing across the Russian republic.

That work led him to the question that shaped his research: how the different parts of the media system relate to one another. He entered postgraduate study at the Academy of Social Sciences in 1966 and defended his candidate dissertation on the coordination of newspapers, radio and television in 1969, followed in 1982 by a doctoral dissertation on the system of mass media and propaganda. His monograph Soyuz pera, mikrofona i telekamery (1977) received the USSR Union of Journalists prize for the best scholarly book of the year, and he published dozens of articles on the subject in Russian and seven foreign languages.

From 1977 to 1992 he directed the Pedagogika publishing house of the USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences. According to the Russian Academy of Education, he expanded its output of literature on teaching and education and started a line of books about the lives of well known educators. He was among the editors of the Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Young Philologist (1984) and wrote the biography Vsevolod Vishnevsky for the Lives of Remarkable People series (1980). Later books included Sistema SMI (1985) and Vospitatelnye funktsii sredstv massovoy kommunikatsii (1989), on the influence of the media on the interests of children and young people. In later work on modern media he proposed the concepts of information globalism and information identity.

In his later years he was a chief researcher at the Russian Academy of Management and sat on a dissertation council at the Academy of Media Industry, supervising postgraduate students. He published more than 150 scholarly, popular and journalistic works.

Khelemendik was the father of Sergei Khelemendik (1957 to 2016), a writer and publicist who settled in Slovakia, was elected to the Slovak parliament for the Slovak National Party and served in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. He was a member of the Writers' Union, a member of the board of the Russian Children's Fund and a full member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and the Jan Amos Comenius International Slavic Academy of Education.

Viktor Khelemendik died on 20 October 2026, aged 91. The Russian Academy of Education announced his death on 22 October, offering condolences to his family, colleagues and students and calling it an irreplaceable loss for Russian science and for the Academy. The place and cause of death were not made public.

Khelemendik was one of the first Soviet scholars to treat newspapers, radio and television as a single interacting system, and his work on the educational functions of the media influenced research on children and young people. His years at Pedagogika shaped a generation of Soviet books on education. He was awarded the Order of Friendship of Peoples, the title Honoured Worker of Culture of the RSFSR (1983) and the M. N. Skatkin Medal of the Russian Academy of Education.