Nikolai Karlovich Svanidze was born on April 2, 1955, in Moscow, into a Georgian-Jewish family.
His paternal grandfather, Nikolai Samsonovich Svanidze, was a Bolshevik Communist Party official. He was arrested in 1937 and died in prison that same year. His paternal grandmother, although a member of the Bolshevik Party since 1916, according to her grandson, hated Stalin.
His wife, Marina Zhukova (Svanidze), played a major role in his professional life. Together, they co-authored several books, and she wrote the majority of the scripts for the documentary series Historical Chronicles with Nikolai Svanidze.
She was the granddaughter of Zinaida Vasilievna Ershova, a prominent Soviet radiochemist, recipient of three Stalin Prizes, and an intern at the Curie Institute in Paris. She was the first in the USSR to obtain micrograms of plutonium. Nikolai Svanidze speaks about her in the aforementioned series, notably in the episode “1949 — The Temptation of the Bomb.”
In 1977, he graduated from the History Department of Lomonosov Moscow State University.
From 1977 to 1990, he worked as a researcher at the Institute for the USA and Canadian Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.
From 1990 to 1991, he lectured in the General History Department at the Moscow State Institute of History and Archives.
In 1991, he began his journalism career on television with the news program Vesti on the state channel Rossiya.
From 1996 to 2007, he was the author and host of the weekly show Zerkalo (Mirror), also on Rossiya.
Starting in November 1996, he became director of the Information and Political Programs Department of Rossiya, and served as its president from 1997 to 1998. He resigned from this position, declaring he preferred journalism over administration; some sources claim this was also due to disagreements with the government.
From 2003 to 2013, he was the author and presenter of the historical documentary series Historical Chronicles with Nikolai Svanidze, aired on the Rossiya channel.
From 2005 to 2014, he was a member of the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation, within the Commission on Communications, Information Policy, and Freedom of Expression in the Mass Media.
In 2010, he was one of the organizers of a public campaign against the textbook “History of Russia. 1917–2009” by A.S. Barsenkov and A.I. Vdovin, professors from the history department of Moscow State University.
From 2010 to December 2022, he served as director of the Institute of Mass Media and Advertising at the Russian State University for the Humanities.
From 2012 to November 2022, he was a member of the Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights. He was removed from this position by presidential decree.
On February 24, 2022, the very day of the invasion of Ukraine, Nikolai Svanidze publicly declared his opposition to the war in Ukraine, calling it “an undeclared war.”
From the end of 2022, he was ill and passed away on September 11, 2024.
In her article “The Man Who Wasn’t Afraid Not to Stay Silent”, published in Novaya Gazeta–Europe and listed in our bibliography, Mira Livadina writes:
“What is the Svanidze phenomenon? Is it that, born into a family with a complex past, he was able—with the detachment and professionalism of a historian—to reflect on his own roots? Or is it that he tried to understand his country’s dramatic history as it truly is, without smoothing the edges, without hiding the facts? And he did so on the nation’s main television channel. Almost a kind of sabotage.
Svanidze is gone—coincidentally or not—at the beginning of a new catastrophe. But we still have his Historical Chronicles, his books, his writings, his lectures, and his televised archives.”
[Source : https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2024/09/14/chelovek-kotoryi-ne-boialsia-ne-molchat]
