Radio Svoboda Journalist Viktor Rezunkov
Prominent journalist, publicist, and longtime RFE/RL correspondent Viktor Rezunkov died in St. Petersburg on Tuesday, October 3.
The former St. Petersburg bureau chief had suffered a serious illness, according to his wife, Svetlana Grebenshchikova. He was 60.
In his youth, Rezunkov participated in the Soviet dissident movement. He was an active reader and distributor of self-published, underground “samizdat” material, and published the illegal almanac НЛО (Our Personal Responsibility). He also worked for the human rights magazine Glasnost’.
Rezunkov began his collaboration with Radio Svoboda, as RFE/RL’s Russian Service is locally known, in 1989, and headed its St. Petersburg bureau in the early 2000s, authoring programs on politics, human rights, and social issues.
Colleagues and friends knew him as a deeply intelligent journalist and an exceptionally “bright mind.” He is fondly remembered for several radio programs that were part of the intellectual ferment of the time, including “St. Petersburg of Freedom,” and for remaining loyal to his convictions and his friends.