Vladislav Bykov

Vladislav Vladimirovich Bykov was born on 9 January 1954 in Verkhnyaya Salda, a town in Sverdlovsk Oblast in the Urals. He studied at the Moscow Aviation Institute, graduating in 1976 from its faculty of economics and organisation of aircraft production.

After graduating, Bykov spent more than twenty years in economic work in the aviation industry. His last post in that field was deputy chief accountant of the MAPO aviation production association in Moscow, which he left in 1997.

From 1990 he was an active player of intellectual games, and he became known to television audiences across Russia and the former Soviet Union. He joined the club of What? Where? When? in 1994 and played nine games over several seasons, leaving after his team lost the summer series of 1997 by 2 to 6. He was a several time champion of the Brain Ring as part of the Stirol team from Horlivka, and he played Svoya Igra from 1994 to 2009, becoming a member of its Golden Dozen and taking part in the games marking the show's fifteenth anniversary.

From 1997 he worked as a journalist and author together with his wife, Olga Derkach. They wrote regular quiz and history features for Novaya Gazeta from 2002 to 2012 and contributed to Ogonyok, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Moskovskiye Novosti and other publications, and Bykov edited and helped create the newspaper Izbushka. With Andrei Stolyarov they wrote the television programmes Antimoniya on TVC and Antimoniya Sport on 7TV, and the couple created radio programmes for Mayak, Kultura, Rossiya and Mir. He also worked as a political consultant in the State Duma election campaigns of 1999 and 2003 and the presidential campaign of 2004.

Their first book, The Book of the Century, appeared in 2000, followed by The Book of Moscow in 2003. From 2006 they published a series of quiz and puzzle books with AST-Press, reissued many times, and in 2020 a book in Finnish with Anna Kuorsalo. In 2021 Bykov was elected to the first executive committee of the International Association of Intellectual Games.

Bykov was married to Olga Derkach, a fellow member of the Svoya Igra Golden Dozen, with whom he wrote most of his books, newspaper features and broadcasts. He was a member of the International Union of Journalists and the Moscow Writers' Union.

Vladislav Bykov died on the morning of Monday, 2 November 2026, aged 72. His wife Olga Derkach announced the death on social media, writing that he had died at 9.30. The news was reported the next day by Lenta.ru, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Argumenty i Fakty and other Russian media. No cause of death was made public, and no details of a funeral or farewell had been announced at the time of reporting.

Bykov belonged to the generation of players who shaped the culture of intellectual games in Russia in the 1990s, when What? Where? When?, the Brain Ring and Svoya Igra drew huge television audiences. Beyond the screen, the quiz books and newspaper features he wrote with Olga Derkach brought the same kind of puzzles into family homes for years.