Sergey Parkhomenko

Sergey Borisovich Parkhomenko (Серге́й Бори́сович Пархо́менко; born March 13, 1964) is a Russian publisher, journalist, opposition activist and political commentator.

He currently works for the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and resides in Washington DC.

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 (Independent Newspaper) and Segodnia (Today).

In 1994 he was one of the founders of the Moscow Journalists' Charter.

In 1996, Parkhomenko founded Russia's first news magazine Itogi (Summing Up), 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 (Weekly Magazine), and was its editor-in-chief until 2003.

Since 2003, Parkhomenko has hosted the political talk show Sut' Sobytiy (Crux of the Matter), which aired on the radio station Echo of Moscow.

From 2004 to 2009, Parkhomenko successively headed several publishing houses (Inostranka, CoLibri, Atticus and Corpus).

In 2004 he became a member of Committee 2008 which tried to find a "democratic alternative" facing the upcoming presidential elections of 2008.

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.

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 (except for firefighters, police and ambulance); Parkhomenko was an organizer of the society's first public events in spring 2010.

During Russian protests in 2011–2013, Parkhomenko was one of the leading figures of the movement.

Parkhomenko was instrumental in organizing mass rallies in Moscow in Winter 2011 – Spring 2012.

In the fall of 2012 he was elected a member of the Russian Opposition Coordination Council.

In the spring of 2012, he co-founded the League of Voters and initiated mass lawsuits against government election fraud.

2012 – the film "Term".

Directors: Alexey Pivovarov, Pavel Kostomarov, Aleksandr Rastorguyev.

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.

Since 2013, Parkhomenko is one of the founders (along with Andrey Rostovtsev, Andrey Zayakin and Mikhail Gelfand) 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 that started in 2014.

This project (based on the similar European project Stolperstein) implies installing a small (about the size of a palm) 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 Kyiv.

In May 2014 S. Parkhomenko was elected a member of the Russian PEN Center, the Russian branch of the PEN International.

Since autumn 2016 Public Policy Fellow and later Senior Advisor at The Kennan Institute of Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington DC.

Parkhomenko is known as an author or participant of various civic initiatives.

In 2016, Parkhomenko became a co-founder and jury member of the independent award in the field of professional journalism Redkollegia (in Russian translates to "Editorial Board"), established by the charitable foundation "Sreda Foundation" to support free professional journalism in Russia.

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 (in Russia) Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov.