Journalist and TV presenter Vladimir Molchanov has died at the age of 75, photographer Yuri Rost said.
“Woe! A wonderful and worthy man, Volodya Molchanov, has died. A gifted and intelligent Russian intellectual, an ethical journalist, a brilliant TV presenter, an honest writer and my great friend. The loss is great and irreparable,” Rust wrote.
Since the early 1970s, Vladimir Molchanov has worked for the Soviet news agency Novosti (APN) and was its correspondent in the Netherlands. Since the late 1980s, he has been the author and presenter of the popular nightly television show Before and After Midnight, which became a harbinger of perestroika. In addition, Molchanov was the host of “Time” and “90 Minutes” and the author of the series “And Longer Than a Century.”
In an interview with Meduza, Molchanov said that during the events of January 1991, he refused to host the Vremya program and threw away his party card. According to him, they left the program to him, but “sometimes they started coming into the editing room and spying on what we were editing.”