The editor who turned Ogonyok into the battering ram of glasnost, publishing what the system suppressed for seventy years
"For seventy years, we were taught that the son who betrayed his father, or a person who burned a church, was a hero. People have been living a comprehensive lie."
A Kyiv-born poet and physician, Korotich was an establishment writer who won the USSR State Prize for an anti-American novel in 1985, but when Alexander Yakovlev secured his appointment as editor of Ogonyok in May 1986, he turned the magazine into the spearhead of glasnost. Ogonyok was the first to publish the truth about the Afghanistan war's casualties, Stalin's purges, and nomenklatura privileges, and was the first to print Pasternak and Nabokov; circulation exploded from 260,000 to 4.6 million. Elected a People's Deputy in 1989, he joined the Interregional Group; after refusing to return from the US during the August 1991 coup, he was dismissed, later taught at Boston University, and in his final years publicly supported Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Career Timeline
- 1959–1966Physician, Kyiv
- 1966–1967Editor-in-chief, Ranok
- 1967–1969Secretary, Writers' Union of Ukraine
- 1978–1986Editor-in-chief, Vsesvit
- 1986–1991Editor-in-chief, Ogonyok
- 1989–1991People's Deputy of the USSR
- 1992–1998Professor, Boston University
- 1999–2014Chairman, editorial board, Bulvar Gordona