Mikhail Fishman

On 09/12/2022, he was added by the Russian Ministry of Justice to the register of media outlets and individuals acting as foreign agents. He was born in Moscow, the grandson of biophysicist Mikhail Volkenstein and the nephew of film director Vladimir Alenikov. In 1995, he graduated from the Faculty of Philology of Lomonosov Moscow State University. He collaborated with Radio Echo of Moscow and the newspaper Kommersant. Later he worked with such publications as Itogi, Russky Telegraf, and the magazine Internet. Since 2000, he wrote articles for the online publication Gazeta.Ru, ending his collaboration with it in 2008. From 1998 to 2003, he was a journalist, columnist, and editor for the online publications Polit.ru and Ezhenedelny Zhurnal. In 2004, he became a political columnist for the newly created Russian-language version of Newsweek. He then became deputy to its editor-in-chief, Alexander Gordeyev. After a break from January to November 2006, when Fishman was a special correspondent for the Kommersant publishing house, he returned to Newsweek, and in April 2007 became editor of the politics section there. He took part in the March of the Dissenters rally in spring 2007. In September 2008, after Kirill Vishnepolsky left the post of editor-in-chief of the publication, Mikhail Fishman became editor-in-chief of the magazine. He held this post until October 2010, when Axel Springer Russia JSC (a subsidiary of the German media holding Axel Springer AG) terminated its license agreement with Newsweek and discontinued the Russian edition of the magazine “for economic reasons.” The final issue of Russian Newsweek, No. 310, was published on October 18, 2010. On March 15 and 22, 2010, videos appeared on YouTube showing, among other things, a person resembling Fishman. In the first video, he, together with Ilya Yashin and Dmitry Oreshkin, allegedly tried to bribe traffic police officers, and in the second he used drugs in the company of two half-naked girls. On March 24, 2010, leading Russian media outlets and the Moscow Union of Journalists came out in Fishman’s defense. The journalist himself said that