Savik Shuster

Savik Shuster (Савик Шустер; Савік Шустер; born Ševelis Šusteris; November 22, 1952) is a journalist and television anchor.

Born in Vilnius (then former part of the Soviet Union now the capital of Lithuania) Shuster left the Soviet Union 1971, his parents (his father was a football coach) emigrated from their native Vilnius via Israel to Canada.

A distant uncle, who was vice president of the oil company Shell Canada, intervened with Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin on their behalf.

Addition: Savik Shuster studied at the Moscow Institute of Petrochemical and Gas Industry since 1972.

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In 1973 Shuster began a Bachelors at McGill University in Montreal, graduating in 1976 with a medical degree.

He then moved to Florence in Italy to continue his studies.

There, he began writing for a local newspaper.

He stopped his studies in 1973, and emigrated to Canada with his parents after.

In 1980 Shuster worked for three months with a French humanitarian organization that was working on the side of the anti-Soviet mujahedin in Afghanistan, there he met Newsweek magazine's Asia editor and was offered a chance to write a few articles for them.

Shortly after Shuster started to write for French newspaper Libération and the Italian magazine Frigidaire.

From 1988 (when he didn't speak Russian often ) to 2001, Shuster worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

From 1996 to 2001 he was the head of their Moscow office.

In 1998 he began presenting a football show on NTV.

From 2001 to 2004, Shuster presented talk shows on the Russian channel NTV.

Shuster holds Canadian and Italian citizenships.

Radio Liberty fired him over a perceived conflict of interest during Gazprom's takeover of NTV from Vladimir Gusinsky's Media-MOST in April 2001.

Radio Liberty said that, by continuing with his (Football) program at NTV, Shuster had violated its professional code and policy over conflicts of interests.

Weeks after Gazprom's takeover, Shuster began anchoring NTV's "Hero of the Day" interview show and then "Svoboda Slova" (Freedom of Speech).

Allegedly Shuster's and his employer NTV's coverage of the Moscow hostage crisis infuriated (then) President Vladimir Putin in 2002.

Until 2004, he was the host of several talkshows on the NTV channel.

In 2004 his show "Freedom of Speech" was awarded a "TEFI" by the Russian Academy of Television.

Shuster's last Russian show was cancelled by NTV because "the audience was too old".

According to Shuster, this was not the real reason the station closed his talkshow: "the truth was the Kremlin could no longer afford an open, live show".

According to Shuster, in the Soviet era "in Kiev it was a dream to get to Moscow, but now Putin's politics is killing a lot of creativity, and Moscow is becoming less attractive for Ukrainians".

He presented The Freedom By Savik Shuster, and starting in 2005, Svoboda slova, on ICTV.

Since 2005 Shuster has been working in Ukraine.

According to Shuster, at first he had no plans to work in Ukraine but changed his mind shortly after a 2005 visit to a friend, Russian politician Boris Nemtsov, in Kyiv a few months after Ukrainians "Orange Revolution" (Nemtsov was an adviser to Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko at the time).

"I decided to go and make some fun of him, I planned to say to him, 'Boris, you finally found a place in politics, but it is in the wrong country.' But when I came into his office, I saw he was in a very good mood, and I said, 'Boris, maybe I, too, should go to Ukraine.'" A few months later, he lived in the Ukrainian capital, studied Ukrainian and worked in Ukraine as a broadcaster.

From May 2005 Savik hosted "Freedom of Speech" talk show on ICTV.

Later that year he presented "Freedom by Savik Shuster" on Inter TV.

In August 2008 the production-studio "Savik Shuster Studios" was created, and in 2008 TV-channel "Ukraina" made a three-year contract with this studio for broadcasting the social-political talk show "Shuster Live".

According to Shuster, in 2008, "When our program is on the air, it is watched on every third TV set in the country".

"Ukraina" saw a sudden boost in popularity ratings after the start of Shuster's political talk show in September 2008.

In July 2009 Shuster broke ties with the production company, which was renamed to Istil Studios.

Since December 2015, he produces and leads political talk shows on his independent 3S.tv, after he has been cancelled from several tycoon-owned channels.

In December 2016, 3S.tv announced it had ceased its activities, and on 1 March 2017, the channel stopped broadcasting.

According to an official statement, the reason was that the business was no longer viable due to several litigations and corresponding financial constraints.

All court cases were subsequently closed.

In 2019, Shuster came back to Ukraine as the anchor of Svoboda slova Savika Shustera on the Ukraina television channel.