Vsevolod Bogdanov

Vsevolod Leonidovich Bogdanov was born on 6 February 1944 in the village of Kekhta, Kholmogorsky District, Arkhangelsk Oblast, in the Russian SFSR of the Soviet Union. His parents were front-line veterans of the Second World War. He graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of Leningrad State University (then named after A. A. Zhdanov; today Saint Petersburg State University). He began journalistic work at Arkhangelsk radio before entering the regional press.

From 1969 to 1980 Bogdanov served as correspondent, editor and deputy editor-in-chief of Magadanskaya Pravda in Magadan. The paper served Kolyma and Chukotka with a circulation reported at more than 100,000 copies. In 1980 he moved to Moscow. Between 1981 and 1986 he was a special correspondent of Sovetskaya Rossiya covering Karelia and the Murmansk Region. From 1986 to 1989 he headed the Main Directorate of Periodical Publications of the USSR State Committee for Publishing (Goskomizdat). From 1989 to 1991 he was general director of the Central Television directorate under the USSR State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting.

In 1992 he was elected the first chairman of the Russian Union of Journalists. He was re-elected in 2008 and voluntarily left the chairmanship in November 2017 after about twenty-five years, thereafter serving as honorary chairman. From 1998 he also chaired the International Confederation of Journalists' Unions. He became an honorary professor of Saint Petersburg State University.

As a writer he preferred essays and sketches that offered practical counsel drawn from real lives, and he publicly opposed treating the press as a paid political-technology resource. In 2001 he signed a letter defending NTV. In July 2012, after hesitation and under pressure from peers, he criticised the reinstatement of a criminal libel article in the Russian Criminal Code. Estimates he cited put SZHR membership above 100,000 media workers around 2012, though independent verification of membership rolls was disputed in the press. Critics, including a widely discussed 2012 Kommersant article, accused the union of conformism and of mishandling international press cards; Bogdanov denied selling cards while admitting the credential worked poorly inside Russia even as demand for it remained high.

Bogdanov was married and had three daughters, a grandson and a granddaughter. His wife and his two younger daughters worked as journalists.

Vsevolod Bogdanov died on 10 September 2026 at the age of 82 after a long and serious illness. The press service of the Union of Journalists of Russia announced his death and expressed condolences to his family, friends and colleagues. Russian news outlets including Izvestia reported the announcement the same day.

Bogdanov is remembered as the long-serving first chairman of the post-Soviet Russian Union of Journalists and as a bridge between Soviet-era media administration and the organised profession of the 1990s and 2000s. His state honours included Honoured Cultural Worker of the Russian Federation (1994), the Order of Honour (2010) and the CIS Interparliamentary Assembly's Order of the Commonwealth (2019). Supporters credited his endurance building a national journalists' organisation; detractors argued that the SZHR under his leadership often stood apart from leading federal newsrooms. He left the chairmanship of his own accord in 2017 and remained honorary chairman until his death.