Sergei Parkhomenko, Journalist and Editor
What will happen in 2012 if everything stays the same? I think we’ll lose time, we’ll get stuck, because the most valuable thing in life is time. We’re losing time. Soon our country will get stuck and start moving backward. Today, Russia is in a situation similar to that of a person who thinks a different life is in his future. Like that person, Russia’s attitude is not to stress — it can tolerate its current life and ready itself for what lies ahead.
Many people live like this; they think their current life is a dress rehearsal for the future. But, as is often the case, it will soon become clear that this life, full of suffering and overcoming, was their real life. More often than not, this is discovered too late.
Meanwhile, time is running out, and soon the current generation will cease to exist. The people who were destined to live through these strange and scary years — scary mostly for the deceit, which has become an important characteristic of Russian society — will disappear. There is a lot of lying happening — ongoing, daily, routinely — pervading human relationships on various levels, for various reasons, and in various situations. People are poisoned by the duplicity that surrounds them and by lies about the rules of the game being played around them, a game in which they are frequently forced to take part. These people will not get back the years they lived in a web of lies, and this life will become their only one.
Born in 1964, Sergei Parkhomenko graduated from Moscow State University with a degree in Journalism. He then worked as a political journalist, writing for the newspapers Segodnya and Nezavisimaya Gazeta. In 1996, he founded and became editor-in-chief of Itogi, the first world-class socio-political weekly news magazine in Russia, which was published in cooperation with Newsweek. After the 2001 destruction of Vladimir Gusinsky’s media empire, which owned Itogi at the time, Parkhomenko was forced to step down from his position as head of the magazine. With his team from Itogi, he launched a new magazine, Yezhenedelny Zhurnal.
He later worked in the book publishing industry, successively heading the Inostranka, KoLibri, Atticus, and Corpus publishing houses. In 2009, he became the editor-in-chief of the Vokrug Sveta publishing house. Outspoken and uncompromising, he hosts a weekly live radio show, Sut’ Sobitii (the Essence of Current Events), on the radio station Ekho Moskvy.
