Alexey Polikovskiy

Alexey Polikovskiy was selected for the 2020 European Press Prize shortlist with ‘The Curse of Poverty.’

Alexey Polikovskiy was born on February 17, 1955 in Moscow.

Following the traditions of his family, he entered the Moscow Aviation Institute after school, but soon left it and, after working for a year as a postman, decided to do Germanic studies at the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute, which he graduated from in 1979.

In his third year he was taken on the staff of the popular youth magazine “Rovesnik”. His article about Ringo Starr was the first positive publication about the Beatles in the Soviet press.

During the years of deep stagnation Polikovskiy left the editorial office of “Rovesnik” and worked as a night watchman at the Pushkin Museum, as well as a librarian and a school teacher.

During “perestroika” he returned to journalism and became editor-in-chief of the magazine “Sport, Country and World” of the media holding “Woskresenie” and then editor-in-chief of the magazine “Home Computer” of the publishing house “Computerra” and tried to publish his own magazine “Island”.

Since 2000, he has been a columnist for Novaya Gazeta.

Alexey Polikovskiy is a multi-faceted journalist who writes on a high professional level about social problems, high technology, music and sports, but above all about people. The heroes of his interviews and essays were, among others, Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Nemtsov, Maya Plisetskaya, Janusz Korczak, Simon Fraser, 15th Lord Lovat, Carl von Ossietzky, Irena Sendler, Beth Hart and others.

His texts “The Gilded Bastard” about Stalin monuments in modern Russia, “Voices of Saur-Grave” about the war in Ukraine and “Why Russia is not the West” were read by hundreds of thousands of people.

In 2014, he won the “Golden Pen” award of the Union of Journalists of Russia.

Alexey Polikovskiy is the author of 12 books, including

“Rock on Paveletskaya”, the history of an underground rock band in the USSR,

“Millionaire’s Wife,” a love story during the period of wild Russian capitalism,

“The journey of the shaman. Jim Morrison.”

“Waterloo Night”, a bright and passionately written antimilitaristic book, especially modern sounding in our time, swelling with a premonition of war,

“Moscow vs. Mordor”, a history of Moscow protests in 2011-2012,

“The Lion’s Garden,” a book about Leo Tolstoy.

After reading one of Alexei Polikovskiy’s articles, the famous Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote him a letter with the following lines:

«… in the only piece of yours the mind of a realist and the inspiration of a romantic, the pain for the self-esteem and mutual estrangement of people, and a mighty avalanche of emotions, in spite of the hopelessness that presses hard on everyone, which does not allow you to settle accounts with the epoch, for you are interested in everything on earth and everything of your own, and this does not allow you to lose and preach love of live, though you may not see it in yourself. We don’t have any writers like the one you can be – not a single one!”