Sergey Parkhomenko


Sergey Borisovich Parkhomenko is a Russian publisher, journalist and political commentator.

Biography

Sergey Parkhomenko was born in Moscow in 1964 and graduated from the Department of Journalism of the Moscow State University. In the early 1990s, he worked as a political reporter and columnist in Russian dailies such as Nezavisimaya Gazeta and Segodnia.
In 1996, Parkhomenko founded Russia's first news magazine Itogi, which was published in cooperation with Newsweek. Parkhomenko was the chief editor of the magazine until 2001, when the new owner fired the magazine's entire team. Parkhomenko then launched a new news magazine, Yezhenedelnyi zhournal, and was its editor-in-chief until 2003.
From 2004 to 2009, Parkhomenko successively headed several publishing houses. From October 2009 till the end of 2011, he headed the Vokrug sveta publishing house, where he was the chief editor of Russia's oldest travel magazine by the same name.
Since 2003, Sergey Parkhomenko hosts the political talk show Sut' Sobytiy, which airs on the radio station Echo of Moscow.
Since autumn 2016 Public Policy Fellow and later Senior Advisor at The Kennan Institute of Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington DC.

Public activities

Sergey Parkhomenko is known as an author or participant of various civic initiatives.
In 1994 he was one of the founders of the Moscow Journalists' Charter. In 2004 he became a member of Committee 2008 which tried to find a "democratic alternative" facing the upcoming presidential elections of 2008. Parkhomenko is also the author of the idea and the name of the public movement "Society of Blue Buckets" that fights against the privileged position of road vehicles with flashing lights ; S. Parkhomenko was an organizer of the society's first public events in spring 2010.
During Russia's civic protest movement in 2011-2013, Sergey Parkhomenko was one of the leading figures of the movement. In the fall of 2012 he was elected a member of the Russian Opposition Coordination Council. Parkhomenko was instrumental in organizing mass rallies in Moscow in Winter 2011 – Spring 2012. In the spring of 2012, he co-founded the League of Voters and initiated mass lawsuits against government election fraud. This activity resulted in March 2013 in Constitutional Court of Russia hearing where the Court ruled that Russian voters should be allowed to appeal election results directly.
S. Parkhomenko is one of the founders and an active popularizer of a voluntary networking community Dissernet whose activity aimed at purification of the Russian science from plagiarism, especially among Doctoral and post-Doctoral dissertations in Russia. Parkhomenko is also one of the initiators of the project Last Address. This project implies installing a small memorial plaque on the wall of the last house of a person subjected to political persecution in the Soviet years.
In 2014 Parkhomenko was a member of the Congress "Ukraine – Russia: A Dialogue", held in Kiev. In May 2014 S. Parkhomenko was elected a member of the Russian PEN Center, the Russian branch of the PEN International. In January 2017 he was expelled from the group for "provocative activity"; Parkhomenko claimed he was expelled for criticizing the Russian PEN Center for failing to support imprisoned Ukrainian filmmaker Oleh Sentsov.

Awards

2012 – the film "Term". Directors: Alexey Pivovarov, Pavel Kostomarov, Alexander Rastorguev.