1936–2025
○ Natural causes
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.
Activities and affiliations
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
Related historical events
Editing Ogonyok and intervening in public life
Appointed editor of Ogonyok in May 1986, Korotich moved from the politically trusted Ukrainian writer and literary editor he had been to a journalist directing the work of reform. He replaced an editorial board made up only of department heads with independent figures, including Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a circus clown, and a prominent eye surgeon. With this board, the magazine addressed institutions once difficult to criticize, including Party officials, the KGB, and the Soviet Army. It printed excerpts from Anatoly Rybakov’s novel Children of the Arbat about Stalinist terror, accounts of the Afghanistan war, and a case of police torture; it also published works by Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Nabokov, and Nikolai Gumilyov. Publishing the poetry of Gumilyov, executed in 1921, joined the recovery of a suppressed literary history with criticism of contemporary authority. During Korotich’s four and a half years at the magazine, circulation rose from 260,000 to 4.6 million, while letters to the editors increased from about 20 a day to about 1,000.
His journalism unfolded amid growing tension with the leadership of reform. In October 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev summoned Korotich and other editors and rebuked them for pushing glasnost too far. Korotich later ignored a summons to the Central Committee; in a meeting with the Party’s ideology official Vadim Medvedev, he answered the concern that Ogonyok readers would cease believing in socialism by saying that shoppers had already lost faith in it. In parliament in 1990 he supported Gorbachev’s election as president, although most members of the Interregional Group to which he belonged opposed the parliamentary selection process. Korotich was in New York during the August 1991 coup and did not return immediately to Moscow; after the coup failed, he left the editorship. Contemporary reporting described his departure as a resignation, while a later account says the editorial staff removed him at a meeting on August 26.