“It seemed to him that everything would be taken away from him”: Bozena Rynska reported on the circumstances of Malashenko’s death

The wife of the co-founder of the NTV channel Igor Malashenko, who committed suicide in Spain, journalist Bozhena Rynska, spoke on one of her Facebook accounts about the circumstances preceding his death. According to her, Malashenko was afraid of going to court with his former wife Elena Malashenko (Pivovarova) and suffered from a break with their children, and suddenly flew to Spain.

Read more. Malashenko unexpectedly flew to Spain last weekend to sort out the Gibraltar companies to which his house was registered, Rynska claims. According to her, he planned to bequeath these companies to her.

Malashenko was “panicically” afraid of court hearings. “It seemed to him that everything would be taken away from him,” writes Rynska.
He was very worried about the break with his children: “The first shock was that his daughter Lisa, whom he loved most, asked him not to call her, but to write. Then the children began to submit his letters to the court.”
On Sunday, February 24, Malashenko was seen in Spain “in normal condition.”
Rynska and Malashenko were supposed to apply for residence permits in Latvia on February 26.

Divorce proceedings. Malashenko's lawyer Malcolm Taub of Davidoff Hutcher & Citron LLP, who defended him in the trial against his ex-wife Elena in a New York court, told The Bell that now the second party in this case will not be his current wife, but the state. The court is in the process of searching for assets and assessing them, Taub noted. The lawyer refused to assess the value of the assets, citing the fact that the process has not yet been completed.

The next step is for the court to distribute the assets in accordance with the law. In New York, the principle of equitable distribution of jointly acquired property applies: that is, assets are divided not 50:50, but in the proportion that the court chooses, based on the current and future financial situation of the participants in the process. To whom the property is registered does not matter.
The proceedings on the division of assets began about a year ago and took place in the United States on the initiative of Elena Malashenko: “she received American citizenship a long time ago, the case also involves real estate in the United States,” the lawyer said.
Malashenko turned to Taub because he had long defended the interests of “a major art dealer and collector of Russian art,” who introduced Taub to Bozhena Rynskaya, who, in turn, brought the lawyer together with Malashenko. According to Taub, he remembered Malashenko as a very generous person: “he supported his adult daughters, one of whom lives and studies at Oxford, although the law does not oblige him to do this.”

Igor Malashenko , who headed the RGTRK Ostankino in 1992–1993, was at the origins of the “classic” NTV channel, which he created with the money of businessman Vladimir Gusinsky in 1993 with journalists from the first Ostankino channel Oleg Dobrodeev and Evgeny Kiselev.

In 1996, he was the chief adviser to the election campaign of Russian presidential candidate Boris Yeltsin. At the same time, he remained the general director of NTV Television Company (1993–1997).

Kiselyov, in an interview with Slon, said that Malashenko took credit for Yeltsin’s victory in the elections - more precisely, that he was able to teach the first president of Russia to create favorable news feeds for the press. At Yeltsin’s headquarters, Malashenko worked closely with his leader, Anatoly Chubais.

Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana Yumasheva said that after Yeltsin’s victory in the elections, he offered Malashenko to head the presidential administration, but Malashenko refused. Both his partner, NTV owner Vladimir Gusinsky, and Boris Berezovsky tried to convince him, and Malashenko allegedly threatened to expel both of them from the Kremlin, Yumasheva wrote.

As a result, the presidential administration was headed by Chubais, and Gusinsky was expelled from the Kremlin, NTV and the country only under President Putin. “One of the strongest, smartest, toughest, brightest politicians of that time, but, fortunately for him, he remained in the shadows,” Yumasheva characterized Malashenko.

From 1997 to 1998, Malashenko was the general director of NTV Holding. In 1997, he became a co-founder of Gusinsky's Media-Most CJSC and served on the company's board of directors.
From 1998 to 2000, he was First Deputy Chairman of the Board of Directors of Media-Most CJSC. With the beginning of the division of Gusinsky’s media empire, he went abroad, in 2001–2009 he was the general director of the RTVI channel, to which many employees of the NTV channel left.
In 2017, he headed the campaign headquarters of Ksenia Sobchak, who ran for president of Russia in the elections in March 2018.

Igor Malashenko divorced his wife Elena Malashenko (Pivovarova) in Russia in mid-2018. They have three children - two daughters, Elizaveta and Elena, and a son, Vladimir. At the end of 2018, Malashenko and Rynska officially formalized their marriage. Kommersant reported on Monday that Malashenko committed suicide in Spain.

Find out more. Here you can read an interview with Igor Malashenko for the non-profit project “The Rise of Russian Media. Yeltsin era. 1992–1999."

Anastasia Stogney, Sergei Smirnov