The Chief of the Past

On March 4, 2003, several hundred people gathered outside the Mosenergo office in Moscow for a rally against the increase in utility rates. The event was organized by United Russia, which itself had voted for the new rates in parliament, recalled Russian opposition politician Ilya Yashin. He attended the rally with Alexei Navalny: they unfurled a poster showing the results of the vote in the State Duma, where United Russia had cast 100% of its votes in favor.

“They ignored us for a long time — recalled Yashin. — But at some point, a man with a twisted face jumped down from the podium, accompanied by security. He tore the poster from our hands, ripped it to shreds, and began stomping it into the mud. “Bitches,” he muttered. “What bitches you are.” Navalny and I exchanged glances — he seemed like a dangerous lunatic.” When they asked who he was, the man proudly declared: “Medinsky is my name. You can write it down!”

They did not write down the “lunatic’s” name, but they remembered it.

Medinsky is often the subject of irony — both in Russia and in the West. Even in the Kremlin, he was called a “clown” (that’s how sources for IStories described him before 2022), and the media constantly recall his scandalous dissertation, which experts deemed “unscientific.” NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte calls him “this historian,” incapable of conducting negotiations; Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the delegation led by Medinsky a sham, questioning whether Medinsky had any mandate at all.

However, Medinsky’s position in the Kremlin has significantly strengthened — especially after the negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in March 2022, according to a European intelligence officer interviewed by the authors of this investigation. According to him, since the summer of 2024, Medinsky has been given control of an entire division of the presidential administration, which oversees issues of cultural and historical-educational policy, the “department for creating ideology,” as the source described it.

Joint investigation by IStories, Delfi Estonia, the Ukrainian Radio Liberty project Schemes, and Sweden’s Expressen tells how Medinsky went from a minor bureaucrat to the chief negotiator and ideologue of “traditional values.”

The PR man and deputy

Vladimir Medinsky was born in the Ukrainian city of Smila in Cherkasy Oblast. His father, Rostislav Medinsky, is a retired colonel who took part in the invasion of Czechoslovakia, served in Afghanistan, and wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. Medinsky himself dreamed from childhood of “commanding a parade,” but failed the selection for military school due to poor eyesight. In one interview, Medinsky also, without elaborating, mentioned that he was an “unsuccessful intelligence officer.”

According to acquaintances of Medinsky, his father actively helped his son’s career from the very beginning. In 1992, Medinsky graduated from the prestigious Faculty of International Journalism at MGIMO, and interned at the Soviet Embassy in Washington. He later worked at the newspaper Rossiya and, as he himself admitted, engaged in “the blackest PR imaginable,” “manufacturing uplifting fakes” — when, in 1991, he sat among the defenders in the ‘White House.’

In 1992, together with Sergey Mikhailov (the future general director of TASS) and several other MGIMO graduates, Medinsky founded the PR agency Corporation Ya. Among the agency’s clients were banks, tobacco companies, and even the financial pyramid MMM, wrote Meduza. Soon the partners split the business: Medinsky and his classmate Yegor Moskvin stayed in Corporation Ya, while the others opened the agency Mikhailov and Partners.

“It was a time when Medinsky used to take cash — dollars — for his work, and then those same people would later talk to him as a minister,” an acquaintance recalls.

Medinsky began his bureaucratic career in 1998 as an adviser on information policy to the Minister of Taxes and Levies, Georgy Boos. He later worked on the election staff of Fatherland – All Russia, in the office of the Deputy Speaker of the State Duma, and in the Moscow branch of United Russia. Everywhere, he was promoted by Boos. “That’s just how it happened,” Medinsky himself told RBC about his transition from PR to politics.

In 2003, at Boos’s suggestion, Medinsky became a State Duma deputy. There, the former PR man lobbied for many important bills, wrote Forbes, for example, on regulating the gambling business, which benefited major market players.

“Not very reflective, not very quick on the uptake, but he sticks to his line, stubborn,” is how a former colleague describes Medinsky at that time. Another IStories source who worked with Medinsky then remembers him as “an insecure person, very self-conscious”:

“We ended up with him several times in informal situations in different regions… And it was clear that he really wanted to keep up the conversation and be part of the group… You’d have deputy governors, some local deputies, local businessmen. They’d be discussing the local situation… <...> And he was very out of place. He’d tell some anecdotes that sounded strange coming from him, insert some phrases… <...> Sometimes a person really wants to fit in, and it catastrophically doesn’t work for him.”

What set Medinsky apart was his obsession with Russian history. “From the very beginning, he deeply impressed me with his very original, at the time seemingly marginal [concept of] Russian history. It boiled down to the idea that England had always been screwing Russia over, for a thousand years, and that we are actually pure as the driven snow. And everything that’s said about us is all myths. I’m simplifying, but this image in his head was absolutely clear. For a liberal like me, it was shocking…” recalls an acquaintance of Medinsky from those days.

As a deputy, Medinsky served two terms, until 2012. He failed to get re-elected for a third term — but that same year, during the presidential election, he became a trusted representative of Vladimir Putin. “Since he worked well, diligently, was always on the go, as they say, Putin noticed him at some point,” recalls a source who worked with the Kremlin at the time.

Soon after, Medinsky unexpectedly received the post of Minister of Culture. “[Vladislav] Surkov suggested making him Minister of Culture,” says the same source. “They (Surkov’s team. — IStories) needed executors…<...> Well, he’s got the gift of gab. He’ll say whatever he’s told, and he’s ready to sit and develop the topic himself, with initiative, as they say. You can assign him a topic and be sure he’ll more or less handle it decently. Such executors (in the Kremlin. — IStories) are worth their weight in gold.”

“The overseer of the sector”

In the sector, Medinsky seemed like an outsider — with no relevant experience, a career as a PR man, and the author of controversial books like “Myths about Russia.” His appointment came as a surprise even to himself. Journalists wrote: Medinsky’s appointment was “a slap in the face to public taste.”

But Medinsky set to work with his usual zeal — especially since he had people behind him who were more important than the critics.

Under Medinsky, the Ministry of Culture became a full-fledged ideological instrument. Thus, immediately after the new minister took office in 2012, the Ministry prepared a list of priority topics for Russian cinema: “Russia — a multinational country,” “Russia’s military glory,” “The people’s war… dramatic pages of the history of the Great Patriotic War.”

“We believe we have the right to say on behalf of the people: yes, we want a film about Borodino. We don’t want a film about your spiritual torments,” said the minister.

After the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Ministry denied the festival of documentary film Artdocfest financial support, stating that the festival would not receive budget funds due to the “anti-state” position of its president, Vitaly Mansky.

“He didn’t want to come off as a Cerberus, so at first the attacks on the festival were disguised as the complaints of a concerned viewer who bought 10 tickets and was offended that the film didn’t have a distribution certificate,” recalls the director.

The persecution of Artdocfest was a personal decision by Medinsky, not an order from the Kremlin, says the director: “He wanted to come in and become needed, the overseer of the sector.”

During Medinsky’s tenure, the Ministry of Culture was involved in numerous high-profile scandals. In 2016, the director of the State Archive, Sergey Mironenko, was fired after a conflict with the minister. Mironenko stated that the Panfilov’s Twenty-Eight Guardsmen feat was a myth, while Medinsky called it a “sacred legend,” and those who doubted it “utter scum”; soon after, the film Panfilov’s 28 Men was released, supported by the Ministry of Culture and the RMHS.

A year later, the Seventh Studio case began, involving the misuse of budget funds. Among the accused was director Kirill Serebrennikov, and the victim was the Ministry of Culture itself.

In 2018, the ministry revoked the distribution certificate for Armando Iannucci’s comedy The Death of Stalin. The ministry banned the film in Russia, citing the opinion of the public and experts who considered the film offensive to Russian history.

“‘Stalin’ was not historically accurate, which infuriated him (Medinsky),” explains an acquaintance familiar with Medinsky’s logic. “As a historian, he was furious that it was just a complete distortion of the facts, he simply couldn’t accept it. And secondly, that everything was shown in such a disgusting way,” the source recalls.

During Vladimir Medinsky’s tenure at the Ministry of Culture, the agency actively interfered in all aspects of the work of its subordinate institutions, IStories sources say. They call Medinsky the most active Minister of Culture in recent history.

According to a person well acquainted with the ministry’s work, Medinsky knew how to take responsibility and clearly understood what was right and who the enemies were. “Now it’s a very complicated structure, it’s not clear where it’s all going. Where is the line we’ll reach, should we already be wearing long skirts, beards or not yet?” explains a source well acquainted with the sector and the work of the Ministry of Culture. “And while they (the new leadership of the Ministry of Culture. — IStories) don’t understand where it will stop, they don’t want to say anything. But he, with a generally liberal background, knew how to take initiative.”

“What’s striking is that it was at this moment that the Minister of Culture turned out to be a historian. It’s a remarkable combination that we didn’t appreciate at the time,” recalls a source who worked with Medinsky while he was Minister of Culture. “Back then, it looked like: Minister of Culture, and he’s also worried about history textbooks.” Now, he explains, everything has come together: “A Minister of Culture who says, we’ll have culture, but not about the present, about traditional values, about the past: ‘Here they are, traditional values, this is what really constitutes our culture.’”

It was Medinsky, according to an acquaintance, who became one of the authors of the presidential decree on traditional spiritual and moral values, signed by Putin in 2022. The document became the foundation of Russia’s new conservative course: with enemies, sacred traditions, and prohibitions. Now it is used as a tool of censorship: the Ministry of Culture requires galleries, theaters and film distributors to work only with works that reflect “traditional values.”

The negotiator

After resigning as Minister of Culture in 2020, Medinsky did not appear upset. “He looked like a man who was about to resurface. Maybe he really wanted to do ideological work… and he went off to entertain himself there,” says an acquaintance of Medinsky.

Indeed, immediately after his resignation, Medinsky moved to the Kremlin as a presidential aide. What was once an absolutely marginal point of view suddenly, under ‘late Putin,’ starting in 2014, became mainstream, says an acquaintance of Medinsky:

“That was Volodya’s shining hour, because his concept, apparently, resonated with what Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin] began to think about Russia. Just as 20 years ago he sincerely believed in this concept — that there are enemies all around, and Russia is ‘as white as snow’ — so he still believes it now. And Putin believes it too. You could say they found each other in this sense.”

“I think he gets it,” says a Kremlin-connected politician about Medinsky. “And he figured it out long ago, and started writing books about all these traditional myths.” Medinsky is in demand, he is a “coherent political figure,” he says.

Medinsky is one of the few members of the presidential administration who, according to IStories sources, can arrange a meeting or a personal conversation with Putin.

In addition to heading the “ideology division” in the Presidential Administration, he participates in closed seminars on the same topic with Katerina Tikhonova — Vladimir Putin’s daughter, says a person who previously worked at the Kremlin. He calls Medinsky a “Tikhonovite” — according to him, Medinsky is part of the inner circle of the president’s daughter.

“Medinsky <...> somehow appealed to Katerina... And <...> as a result, he is in the father’s field of vision, and such an important project as negotiations is entrusted specifically to him. That is, he is considered sufficiently competent, much more competent, it seems, than [Sergey] Lavrov,” says a source familiar with Medinsky. In the last two or three years, it has become more common to refer to the “family” as an explanation for various careers, adds another source close to the presidential administration.

“I think he knows how to find the right wording for Putin,” says a source close to Estonia’s security structures. “Putin has his own ideas — for example, at the Bucharest summit in 2008, he already said that the Ukrainian state does not exist. So these ideas were with Putin before, but now Medinsky helps give them an ideological form.” A European intelligence officer interviewed by the authors of this investigation calls Medinsky the author of Putin’s essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” (journalist Mikhail Zygar wrote about this earlier).

Nevertheless, several IStories sources familiar with Medinsky do not believe in his genuine obsession with history and consider him an opportunist.

They describe him as a pragmatic and cynical person without a firm ideology, but with a sharp instinct. “Yes, Putin likes all this historical nonsense. Medinsky found himself a good niche. He fully understands that history is just a tool for propagandistic manipulation, and he will manipulate it as is advantageous in the current situation. He’s quite open about it,” says a former Russian government official.

Even among employees of the presidential administration, Medinsky is considered an unprincipled person: “It’s pointless to discuss his ideology, because he doesn’t have one, he’s an absolutely opportunistic person, completely unprincipled. If he needs to go right, he’ll go right, if he needs to go left — no questions asked.”

“Medinsky is an unpleasant person,” adds another source close to the Kremlin, explaining that despite political views, there are people in the Kremlin with “human values,” but this does not apply to Medinsky: “But here, you don’t see any at all. He needs to press down and suppress those around him.”

Over time, Medinsky has made many enemies — not only in the cultural sphere. When Vyacheslav Volodin was replaced in the presidential administration by Sergey Kiriyenko, the minister’s relations with the new team did not work out. “It’s competition,” explains a person who worked in the presidential administration. “He’s not their man, he’s from a different camp, and now, you see, he’s risen even higher. So they understand that he’ll come to replace them. That’s why there’s this professional dislike.”

Some Presidential Administration staffers are dismissive of Medinsky as a negotiator and see his appointment as “a way to mock the world.” “If serious negotiations begin, there will simply be a different negotiator,” says a source close to the Kremlin’s domestic policy department.

Medinsky has a similar image in the West, where his participation in negotiations is seen as a mockery of the Ukrainian side, according to a European official. In his words, this is an indicator of the low level of the delegation and shows that even then Russia was not negotiating seriously: “Medinsky is a postman, he makes no decisions.”

Former Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin told the authors of this article that Medinsky, as part of the negotiating team, exerts “psychological pressure” on Ukrainians and plays the role of an “aggressive negotiator,” declaring that Ukraine does not exist: “This appointment is a conscious choice by Putin, because Medinsky plays the role of ideologue… His appointment to the negotiations means that Putin is entering the negotiating process from these ideological positions.”

“We don’t want war, but we are ready to fight for a year, two, three — however long it takes. We fought Sweden for 21 years. How long are you ready to fight?” quoted Medinsky, The Economist journalist Oliver Carroll, at the negotiations in Istanbul in May 2025.

The author

“The funniest thing about him now is that he doesn’t react at all to films, TV series... He’s finally returned to what interests him most — books,” says an acquaintance of Vladimir Medinsky.

One of Medinsky’s main projects as Putin’s advisor and his main sphere of influence is the new line of school history textbooks. Since 2016, Russian schoolchildren have studied history only from approved textbooks that comply with the new “historical and cultural standards.” Among them are textbooks by Medinsky, co-authored with MGIMO rector Anatoly Torkunov and the head of the Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Alexander Chubaryan. Medinsky’s textbooks cover the entire school history curriculum from grades 5 to 11; they are published by Prosveshchenie and bring in good money: regional purchases of the textbook series cost 50–100 million rubles, according to government procurement data.

In Ukraine, textbooks authored by Medinsky became the subject of a criminal case. According to a notice of suspicion issued by the Main Investigative Department of the Security Service of Ukraine (available to the editors), Medinsky is suspected of violating two articles of the Ukrainian Criminal Code: “distribution of materials calling for changing the state border of Ukraine, combined with incitement of national hatred” and “production of materials containing justification of the armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, temporary occupation of part of Ukraine’s territory, as well as glorification of persons who carried out the aggression” (in both cases — by prior conspiracy by a group of persons. Torkunov, the MGIMO rector, is also a co-defendant). In Ukraine, Medinsky has been arrested in absentia and declared wanted.

“Ukraine in them (Medinsky’s textbooks) is presented as an artificial, accidental, or hostile entity to Russia, Russian aggression is justified, and Russia is depicted as a ‘civilizational center,’” says Ukrainian lawyer Darya Sviridova. Not only Russian schoolchildren study from them, but also children in the occupied territories of Ukraine.

As IStories found out, the Kremlin expects to spread its ideology among schoolchildren throughout the entire post-Soviet space, and Medinsky is in charge of this.

We were able to review the minutes of a meeting of the Interdepartmental Commission on Historical Education, created by Putin in 2021 and chaired by Medinsky. In February of this year, the meeting was attended by the head of the SVR Sergey Naryshkin, Education Minister Sergey Kravtsov, senior officials of the presidential administration, FSB and Security Council, as well as the Ministry of Education, Foreign Ministry, and the Russian Academy of Sciences.

According to the minutes, the commission will create a working group to coordinate work in the field of “historical policy in the post-Soviet space.” Its tasks are to monitor school textbooks for “anti-Russian formulations and attitudes,” support loyal researchers in Russia and abroad with grants, monitor the activities of “scientific communities with foreign funding,” and monitor the activities of “Western and Turkish structures influencing historical policy in the countries of the post-Soviet space.” According to the document, the group will be led by the head of the Presidential Administration’s Department for State Policy in the Humanitarian Sphere, the son of former SVR deputy director General Valery Bocharikov, Vladimir Bocharikov.

***

Despite his closeness to Putin, public support for the war, and large-scale propaganda campaigns, Medinsky is still not included in the sanctions lists of either the EU or the U.S.

In the fall of 2023, at the height of the war, his wife and children vacationed on the Côte d’Azur — in Monte Carlo, Cannes, and Nice. Photos from the vacation, which were noticed by the publication Baza, were posted on social media.

A European official working on sanctions decisions told the authors of the article that Medinsky has not come up in any discussion. According to the source, this is because “countries like Hungary would veto such a decision.”

EU spokesperson for foreign and security policy Anitta Hipper told the authors that all sanctions appointments are made by the Council individually by consensus, and she declined to comment on Medinsky’s absence from the list.

Medinsky did not respond to IStories’ request for an interview. Instead, Russian pro-state media Komsomolskaya Pravda published an article with threats against the correspondent. KP announced that “foreign agents have decided to attack Vladimir Medinsky” and are preparing an “exposé” investigation against him, and also reminded that in Russia, passing information and cooperating with organizations recognized as extremist and undesirable can lead to real prison terms.