NTV co-founder Malashenko committed suicide in Spain

Co-founder of the NTV channel, political scientist Igor Malashenko was found dead in Spain, Kommersant reported . According to the publication, 64-year-old Malashenko committed suicide.

Information about the suicide was confirmed to the Moscow agency by Malashenko’s colleague, journalist Timur Valeev. He said that Malashenko’s death occurred on Monday night in his own home in Spain, where he was on vacation.

“Igor voluntarily passed away. Horror and shock,” Alexey Venediktov, editor-in-chief of Echo of Moscow, wrote on Telegram.

Read more. 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 was married to the famous columnist Bozhena Rynska. However, the divorce proceedings regarding the division of property with the previous wife Elena Pivovarova, which began in 2018, were not completed.

Sergey Smirnov