Leonid Shinkarev died Leonid Shinkarev. Photo: from the author's archive Lenya. Leonid Iosifovich. By the last New Year, I called him to Switzerland, where he lived in recent years. An unfamiliar woman picked up the phone, after a long questioning she called her wife, Nelyu. She, too, alas, did not recognize (“We were familiar? ..”), but then she said that Lenya was sick, hard, in the hospital, in Germany ... They didn’t talk. The best journalist in Russia, now it is more obvious than ever.